Tuesday October 26, 2004 I'll call your CDA and raise you 32-bits!
Anybody in the mood for a game of poker?
I'm heading to Los Angeles this Thurs., Oct. 28th for both an internal as well as external Installfest. Those attending will be able to get the most recent Solaris Express which is due on October 29th. This will be build 69.
Since I'm in the mood for for a game of poker, I'll call your CDA and raise you 32-bits for all willing to play a hand with me.;-)
I refer to this as a game of California Stud!
( Oct 26 2004, 02:41:43 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [5]
Wednesday October 20, 2004 Solaris 10 to create a BIG splash!
Yeah, I really mean just that. One of my astoned colleagues, Alan Coopersmith, of the X server team has integrated a new splash screen for dtlogin as of build 69. It might not look very impressive here, but it has really gotten some great comments from the users. It's these small details that will make Solaris a more modern looking OS.
As Solaris continues to get better on commodity hardware and the small details like this get polished out, Solaris will be the best ever.
( Oct 20 2004, 01:00:55 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [8]
Sunday October 17, 2004 Solaris x86 PXE Servers
Many people have been asking about PXE servers for Solaris x86, and it's been possible to create a PXE server on Solaris for quite some time, from Solaris 9 and on Solaris 10 now. One problem is that it's not so easy to get things configured and I have heard that Sun will be providing documentation and possible scripts to automate this process.
I recently installed a PXE server for one of Sun's partners, with the help of one of my colleagues, Andrei Dorofeev. I consider Andrei to be one of the gurus for PXE servers, his scripts automate the process and once installed, you can easily enter the MAC address of the NIC for the system you want to install, and away you go.
Andrei has been threatening to make his scripts available, so if you have an interest in creating an "easy-to-use" PXE server, don't hesitate provide your comments here and I'll pass them along to him so he'll consider doing so in a timely mannor.
I currently have Andrei's scripts setup on my laptop and I can plug it into a network switch, along with another system to PXE install, add the MAC address and run a script, and PXE boot the system to perform the install. It's fast, convenient, and is reliable to install most all systems with a NIC that incorporates a PXE client.
( Oct 17 2004, 01:41:51 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [19]
Sunday October 10, 2004 Solaris x86 Audio to open up customer ears
I received an enquire about the audio on my system which I use and I thought this will be of interest to many folks, so I'll give a rundown on what support you can expect to see in the Solaris x86 10 release. You can see I'm running XMMS to play a CD which I've ripped into MP3s, and at the same time I'm playing a Quicktime movie using mplayer. Yes, the kernel mixer is supported by the audio driver so you can play audio from more than one applications at at time.
I use the audio driver on various system, including Tyan 2885 motherboards with the AMD8111 controller on it, the Dell PowerEdge 650, and a Toshiba M2 laptop. It was such a thrill when my Tyan 2885 brought the speakers to life after installing Solaris 10 x86 build 66. The VIA VT823x support does work on the Acer Ferrari 3200 in 64-bit mode. What a sweet laptop to run the AMD64 port on.
There will be support for the AMD8111 and Intel ICHx. Sun hasn't been able to test all the flavors of the Intel ICHx devices as we don't have all of them, but the ones we've tested all work. The initial support was for the AMD8111 controller and the Realtek AlC655 as the codec. There is also support for VIA VT823x (VT8233, VT8235 and VT8237) controller(s) and any AC'97 compliant codec.
There are various chipsets that are compatible with the AMD8111 core controller, such as the Intel, and the ones I've been told are the Intel ICHx (Intel 8x0) and Nvidia MCPx.
I can say that the device driver team was able to come through with an incredible victory in being able to support the Sony Vaio laptops with the Intel ICHx chipset. These laptops suffer a very odd problem where many of the devices are tied into the same interrupt, and don't seem to get servicable interrupts for the audio device unless another device on the same interrupt is triggered. At least this is how I understand it, but I could certainly be wrong. The bottom line is that you could get audio working by copying a large file across the net, since the NIC was tied into the same interrupt, but once the file was done transfering the audio wouldn't work properly. Sun's device driver team overcame this limitation somehow and their driver does in fact work on Sony Vaio laptops which have the Intel ICHx chipset. This is the first audio driver that I know of that will work on these laptops. Do I hear a big round of applause coming out of my speakers as I type?;-)
I have also used Juergen Keil's hack to get the Unixware 7 version of the Realplayer 8 working on Solaris x86 10, and it works well. Many kudos to Juergen Keil, one of the long, long, Solaris x86 community members that has helped and written so much code to solve problems for our community over the past that I really couldn't even begin to list it here. He is truely one of the remarkable developers that the Solaris x86 community is blessed to have as a member. My hat is off to him! When I think of people that we owe a great deal of thanks to, Juergen is right up at the top of the list, just as Masa Murayama, yet another great asset to our community.
Juergen Keil also has Solaris x86 audio drivers which our community has relied upon for several years. This work pre-dated the work at Sun to provide audio drivers on the most recent release of Solaris x86.
Sun has also been looking at providing a richer API that would support surround sound and other nice features, but it's not clear when that might happen, AFAIK. The audio support provided in Solaris 10 x86 will work on a great deal of computers and provide basic audio functionality along with the ability to use the kernel mixer.
( Oct 10 2004, 10:30:10 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Atheros G wireless driver completes my laptop functionality
Wow, I finally have all devices working on my Toshiba M2 laptop
This is really something that people have not expected on Solaris x86, since many of the devices have not been supported in the past. Sun had also pulled laptop support from Solaris 9.
However, Solaris x86 Engineering is working on delivering the needed functionality that has been missing. This will allow our customers to use their laptops and similar systems in a Solaris, as well as a mixed, environment.
There is still work to do on wireless and this will delay the delivery until after Solaris 10 hits the street, but we should see wireless support in S10U1 or S10U2.
It really rocks to have wireless g working on my laptop (I have internal Atheros g).
( Oct 10 2004, 02:23:34 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]
Saturday October 02, 2004 Taking my first AMD 64-bit baby steps
Well, the time has come to take my first 64-bit baby steps on AMD64 (this is old news on 64-bit SPARC processors;-)...so after talking to the architect for the AMD64 port for Solaris on AMD64 Opteron, along with one of the performance gurus, I set out to build squid for 64-bit.
It was actually easier than I thought it would be, but it was still exciting to build a 64-bit binary from sources I had for 32-bit.
Here was my results:
$ ldd ./squid
libm.so.2 => /lib/64/libm.so.2
libresolv.so.2 => /lib/64/libresolv.so.2
libsocket.so.1 => /lib/64/libsocket.so.1
libnsl.so.1 => /lib/64/libnsl.so.1
libc.so.1 => /lib/64/libc.so.1
libmp.so.2 => /lib/64/libmp.so.2
libmd5.so.1 => /lib/64/libmd5.so.1
libscf.so.1 => /lib/64/libscf.so.1
libdoor.so.1 => /lib/64/libdoor.so.1
libuutil.so.1 => /lib/64/libuutil.so.1
$ file ./squid
./squid: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped
I'll try and produce something more worthy this weekend. Not that squid is not worthy, because I think it certainly is where a large company with many web servers would want to use a large cache which traditionally couldn't use > 4gig of cache on x86 based architecture due to the 32-bit limitation we've been faced with. squid could turn out to be a very useful program in that regard.
( Oct 02 2004, 12:22:13 AM PDT ) Permalink