Schillix Tech Talk notes OSDevCon
Schillix Distribution: Joerg Schilling
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First community distribution of OpenSolaris, LiveCD with a simple GUI. It doesn't compile on OpenSolaris because OpenSolaris is still incomplete. Joerg has wanted LiveCD of Solaris since 2003. In September of 2004, CDDL was authored because OpenSolaris combines code that is open and code that is not open. March 2005, Jeorg achieved first pure OpenSolaris boot after much work on the missing parts, libm, the math library being the biggest amount of work. He did this by porting from FreeBSD, most of which code, ironically originated from Sun. But, it was an older version from 1992. Other missing pieces he worked on to get LiveCD of OpenSolaris operational:
-libXML2
-libz
-Netscape portable runtime
-bzip2/gzip
-Make
-ksh
-Parts of SMF
-NIC drivers
So, Schillix boots only on x86 using GRUB. How does it work?
1) Load RAMdisk image (compressed ISO or UFS) and start kernel
This is a chicken-egg problem to solve because you are trying to load RAMdisk before you have it and start kernel before you have it. So, you must put drivers and basic kernel modules into the BIOS.
2) Mount /usr from CD
3) Re-mount only read/write
4) Plumb network devices/DHCP
5) Enter normal multi-user startup
There is a kit provided by Schilling, so you can do this yourself, roll your own:
ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schillix/README-kit
Issues:
To compile OpenSolaris on OpenSolaris, we need redistributable Java and some jar files the Sun compiler uses. Schillix needs your help! If you read German, Jeorg has co-written a document of 1,200 pages about OpenSolaris administration and internals all in German.
Questions:
Is there an update mechanism? No, must copy to hard drive, and is still difficult. Need free partition, then diff. What we need is stable S11, so we can develop upgrade.
