CHARON-SPK/SS20

The SYBIL project was an application of Stromasys' CHARON cross-platform virtualization technology to the SUN SPARC architecture. It resulted in a Proof-of-Concept of a virtual SUN SPARCstation 20. Stromasys has provided a PoC version of SYBIL/SS20 to several of our customers for functional tests.

The result of the Sybil project made us decide to develop a product quality virtual SPARCstation20 for Oracle and RHEL6 Linux under the product name CHARON-SPK/SS20.

When installed, CHARON-SPK/SS20 provides a SPARCstation 20 ‘hardware abstraction layer’ on an industry standard x86 computer system. The hardware abstraction layer appears to any software running on it (typically a Solaris OS) as SPARCstation 20 hardware. This ‘virtual hardware’ will typically execute older version of SUN Solaris and its applications, for which no modern hardware is available. No code conversion or souce code is needed. CHARON-SPK/SS20 is fully binary compatible with SPARCstation 20 hardware, including storage, Ethernet and serial line I/O.

The CHARON-SPK/SS20 compatibility is not limited to the execution of legacy Solaris applications, although that is the intended purpose. As there is no functional difference between the virtual SPARC hardware and the original system, you can install the Solaris OS, compile, edit, test and run programs on the original hardware. The abstraction layer adapts the individual host components (Ethernet adapter, CD, etc) to the SPARCsystem 20 functionality. CHARON-SPK/SS20 runs equally well on a server as on a laptop.

The current version of CHARON-SPK/SS20 supports SunOS4.1 and Solaris 2.5-8. Note that Solaris 9 and above are not supported. 

A fully functional demo version of Personal CHARON-SPK/SS20 is now freely available for download and installation.

If you are interested in a commercial production version of CHARON-SPK/SS20, please contact us at: charon-spk.interest[a]stromasys.com