OpenSolaris discussions.

As everyone knows, public mailing lists can be the heart of the open-source community. OpenSolaris is no exception.

The OpenSolaris discussions page lists all the mailing lists - some of them were just added today.

OpenSolaris-discuss is the big mailing list. Send an email to opensolaris-discuss-subscribe@opensolaris.org to subscribe. The Jive archive is also available for this list.

Feel free to subscribe and join in.

And, here's the thread about un-BFUing your system I alluded to in my earlier post.

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OpenSolaris graduates.

Finally. OpenSolaris is now public. No more NDA. Halleujah.

The upside of the NDA process is that Sun has been able to get some preliminary feedback before showing it off to the world. So, in concert with the legal vetting that was going on, roughly 145 developers got a 'sneak peek.'

IMHO, this is pretty much akin to the Incubation process that Apache enforces all incoming projects to go through. Sun just didn't know what code they could release and what they couldn't. So, showing it to everyone wasn't a real possibility.

As I mentioned on OSNews, four Apache infrastructure folks have been sitting in on this pilot program. I hope our input has helped.

OpenSolaris starts out with releasing Build 17.5 - you have to start with the Build 16 available in the Solaris Express (SX) linked to on the OpenSolaris website. The most notable change from Solaris 10 is that grub is now the bootloader on Intel machines. Yay! That by itself is cause to upgrade to Build 16 at least.

However, that comes at a cost: you can't upgrade your Solaris 10 GA box to Build 17.5 - you have to upgrade to Build 12 or higher first. So, the easiest way to do this is to jump from GA to SX, BFU to 16, and then BFU to 17.5.

If you upgrade via BFU, you can not ever return and do a traditional upgrade: you must from that point forward always BFU your system. Caveat emptor. Some Sun folks have posted that they've been sort of able to un-BFU a system - but it's not for the faint of heart, nor will they support it. LiveUpgrade may be helpful too; but I haven't had a chance to play with it either.

I was able to compile Build 16 in about 2 hours and 7 minutes on my Pentium 4 desktop - that seems about par for the course.

As a bit of technical appetizer, here's some additional steps that aren't in the release notes (but are in the developer reference) that might be helpful if you do decide to BFU your system. You do this after nightly completes. ('unset CC' is your friend if you happen to set your CC variables; otherwise the build will fail in odd ways.)

First off, set your environment (yes, as root):

# export FASTFS=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/fastfs
# export BFULD=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/bfuld
# export GZIPBIN=/usr/bin/gzip

Then, you run:

# /opt/onbld/bin/bfu <build_dir>/archives/i386/nightly

I got the following harmless errors (which is known and should be fixed soon):

cp: cannot access /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/sysidtool.xml
bfu: could not copy /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/sysidtool.xml
cp: cannot access /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/kdmconfig.xml
bfu: could not copy /net/greenline.eng/meta0/smf/post-5090532/kdmconfig.xml

After I got the BFU prompt, I did:

bfu# /opt/onbld/bin/acr
bfu# reboot

Voila. uname now reports:

SunOS blahblah 5.11 build i86pc i386 i86pc

Now, the hard part begins. Come and join the effort:

http://www.opensolaris.org/

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Firewire and Solaris HOWTO

I have a Belkin Firewire PCI card in a Solaris 10/Intel box with an external enclosure containing a 120GB IDE disk in it. Solaris recognizes the device automatically via the scsa1394 driver, but it doesn't do anything with it out of the box.

A grep for 'scsa' in dmesg output shows:

genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] scsa13940 is /pci@0,0/....snip
genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@0,0/...snip... (scsa13940) online
scsi: [ID 193665 kern.info] sd1 at scsa13940: target 0 lun 0

After a bunch of perusing at useless documentation and finding nothing useful (like iPod on Solaris 10), I fell into the following strategy.

Comment out the following line vold.conf:

#use rmdisk drive /dev/rdsk/c*s2 dev_rmdisk.so rmdisk%d

(The man page for scsa1394 has a typo as it says to comment out rmscsi.)

Restart vold to pick up that change:

/etc/init.d/volmgt stop
/etc/init.d/volmgt start

Ensure that it still sees it via rmformat:

# rmformat
Looking for devices...
   1. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0
      Physical Node: /pci@0,0/...snip.../disk@0,0
      Connected Device: WDC WD12 00JB-00GVA0          
      Device Type: Removable

Run fdisk on the partition to ensure that there is a 'Solaris' partition there. (Note the logical node displayed in rmformat.)

fdisk /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0

Then, run fmthard to dump the disk characteristics (format doesn't work):

fmthard -i -n "" /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2 > /tmp/label.dat

I then copied the line for the '2' slice to '0' with the following changes:

0           3       00              0               185566815

(The value in last column should be the same as the last number in slice 2.)

Then, I reloaded the format tabel as follows:

fmthard -s /tmp/label.dat -n "disk" /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2

Then, I ran newfs:

newfs /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0

Mount:

mount /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0 /mnt/sda

Voila. I think. Haven't rebooted to see if it busted the rest of the partitions on that drive yet. (Don't really care if it does.)

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The boot architecture and partitioning of Solaris/x86 stink.

It's been a long time (Solaris 7, I think) since I've tried to get Solaris/x86 working in parallel in a multi-boot Intel system. On my main server, Solaris/x86 is the only OS; so these problems don't appear.

FWIW, the hardware is on the Dell OptiPlex GX240. I'm holding out hope that true to the word of the other blogs that Firewire is actually supported in Solaris 10 now. I don't have enough hard drive space internally to perform a build of the OpenSolaris system, but should have just enough for the install. But, I do have a Firewire enclosure, spare 120GB hard drive, and a Belkin Firewire PCI card. (It works just fine with Linux!)

So, I started this process on Monday. I've been doing this in my spare time as I wait for other tasks to complete that I need to get done. It's only today that I've actually gotten it to pass the initial CD install. Groan.

First off, the Solaris 10/x86 installer hangs when trying to do a graphical install. Only 'Option 4' (Console) mode worked. Very odd. I don't know if it doesn't like the ATI graphics card in these machines or not.

After figuring this out, it then barfed at the partition layout that I had. Solaris requires installation into the primary partition: i.e. 1-3. Well, on the Dell boxes, they have a 'System Utility' partition in #1. #2 was Ubuntu, and #3 was FreeBSD.

for a new primary partition. Something needs to move.

Since Ubuntu is way cooler and probably the most resilient to being moved around in such a horrific fashion, I decided that I would copy it's / partition (i.e. #2) to a space in the extended partiton scheme via

rsync -axHSD / /mnt/hda7

That's archive, one file system, preserve hard links, devices, and spare files. Tweaking /etc/fstab of course! Other than the fact that I didn't reboot Ubuntu after creating that 7th partition (which meant that I did the first rsync into /dev/null essentially; which meant that I had to do the rsync twice), it worked out okay. There were also some problems getting grub comfy as the Ubuntu partition housed the boot loader. Remember:

root (hd0)
setup (hd0,6)  # Grub is N-1 from Linux's partition space!  Mine was hda7

You can do this via the 'grub' binary on a Linux rescue CD or whatnot (see Knoppix and Ubuntu's Live CD. At that point, I could reuse partition #2. Not done with it yet...

So, I go through the Solaris Installer for about the ninth or tenth time (I lost track, seriously). I made it through the section where it asks me to create the fdisk partition. However, the deletion of partitions was buggy: it never would commit the change to disk, so it always thought the partition was still there, so I had to go to Linux and clear out the #2 partition manually. Reboot and go through the installer again. Sigh

On this time, I go through and do the layout again creating a new Solaris partition. Am I done? No way.

I finish the layout, but it then complains that the extended partition exceeded the whole disk and that it would not let me proceed. Never mind that Solaris doesn't even reside on that partition!! As I grumbled on IRC, Solaris needs a 'shut the f*c* up, I know what I'm doing option' to avoid this being a fatal error.

There's nothing obviously wrong with the partition table as far as I can tell in Solaris's fdisk CUI system. Exit to a shell. Solaris's fdisk on the raw disk doesn't show anything either. Grr. Reboot back into Linux: perhaps Linux's fdisk would be more helpful.

Nothing wrong at first glance, either. However, in going to expert mode of fdisk, I see that the extended partition (#4) overlaps with (#3) by two sectors. However, none of the partitions inside the extended partition overlap (so there isn't any overlap in the real data partitions). The only way to fix that was to delete the extended partitions and recreate the data partitions manually. (Pencil and paper to record the start/end sectors and the partition ID.) Shouldn't have to modify the data in those partitions since the data partition boundaries are correct.

Cross fingers. Offerings to Cthulhu (who obviously wrote this boot and partitioning system).

Reboot. Go through the install steps for the fifteenth time at least.

It then proceeds to install the Solaris #1 CD. (No DVD drive on this Dell machine, alas.)

After it was done with that, I needed to reuse my rescue CD to overwrite Solaris's lame boot manager (circa 1995) to reactivate GRUB.

Instructions for Solaris and GRUB is very helpful as it gives the incantations for using GRUB to invoke Solaris.

It's currently going through and finishing up the #2 & #3 CDs. Interesting note that it doesn't recognize the CDs on the first time I put them in: I have had to retry them each time to get it to read the CDs successfully.

I am definitely looking forward to 'newboot' available soon. The boot and partitioning system in Solaris 10 stinks on Intel boxes.

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CDDL isn't that wonderful from this side of the fence, either.

Simon Phipps comes to the defense of the CDDL. So does Claire.

It seems that the GPL folks are screaming that CDDL stinks because it allows bundling with non-CDDL licensed works. Yawn. As a BSD-style license advocate, it's not that wonderful either.

My first problem with the CDDL is that it enforces derivative works of a CDDL file to go back to Sun. It's essentially (and mostly functionally equivalent to) the LGPL in that sense. Yet, as we've seen, that only forces developers to implement all sorts of goopy hacks to try to not have their custom changes be encumbered by CDDL.

Furthermore, what exactly is Sun going to do with these changes that third parties make? Why force it back in to the commons? Why do they think those changes are going to be any good?

I'm also willing to bet that Sun themselves won't honor the CDDL on the source either: they will use their position as copyright holder to 'close source' their Solaris modifications. If they need to make any changes to the Solaris tree, which they currently claim will be derived from the OpenSolaris trees (much like Mozilla and Netscape's odd marriage at one point), that the modifications will be kept private and, hence, not under CDDL.

See the CDDL grants an uneven playing field by allowing the copyright holder more rights than rest of the community. At least, the BSD-style license allows everyone on the same playing field by allowing third-parties the same rights as the copyright holder (i.e. to make private modifications and distribute them). This disparity is even more acute with GPL than with CDDL: see MySQL and their licensing nightmare.

The BSD-style licenses are the truest forms of 'open source' - you do what you want, just don't use our service or trade marks. If you want to contribute it back, brilliant. If not, have fun.

At least Sun is making a real effort and can talk intelligently about it. Props for that. But, welcome to joys of open-source licensing: no one is ever happy no matter what you do.

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