Monday January 21, 2008 Alan Perry's Blog
Monday January 21, 2008 Last Thursday, I presented an OpenSolaris talk at a meeting of the Palouse section of the IEEE at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. The topics of my talk were an Intro to OpenSolaris, DTrace and ZFS.
I didn't select the topics. Sun's campus coordinator, who made the arrangements for the talk, did.
The talk was interesting to prepare, because I had 60 minutes to present on three topics that each could have easily taken up a full hour (or more). I have done presentations on Solaris and OpenSolaris before, so that part was pretty easy. I use DTrace all of the time, so that part was easy to prepare as well. However, the ZFS part ... well ...
I didn't know a lot about ZFS. When I tried to set-up some Firewire disks to get familiar with ZFS, the scsa1394 driver panicked and I didn't get much beyond that. I researching ZFS and started to write a presentation, but I ran out of time and used Eric Kustarz' ZFS presentation.
As might be expected, the introduction to Solaris and OpenSolaris and DTrace portions of the talk went off well. The DTrace part would have been a little better with some demos, but time was short. However, the ZFS portion of a bit of a mess. I had gone through the slides and thought that I understood everything and could explain things, but realized that I couldn't as I was making the presentation and trying to answer questions. At least I got the key points about ZFS out there for the people who were unfamiliar with it.
Fortunately, I get a chance to make up for the botched ZFS presentation. I will be back in Pullman on February 7th to make a 40 minute presentation just on ZFS.
( Jan 21 2008, 02:20:07 PM PST ) Permalink
Sunday January 06, 2008 In the immortal words of David Hobbs (SpeedTV F1 commentator - sorry can't find a good link), Solaris on the MacBook went kablamo not once but twice this past week.
The first time was when I tried to add_drv(1M) the ndis wrappered version of driver for the Broadcom BCM4328, the wifi hardware in the newer MacBooks. Followed the instructions to build the new binaries based on the Windows driver. Installed the binaries in their proper location. Ran add_drv as directed by the instructions. And panic.
The stack track showed cominttrap, trap, die. Very repeatable.
Just what I need - another panic to figure out!
The second time was when I tried to mount a IEEE-1394 HD containing a Solaris Nevada workspace and the build environment. I tried to use format(1M) to figure out what controller number the IEEE-1394 HD was assigned and, in the process, the system panicked. I work on the IEEE-1394 drivers and had seen that panic for the first time a couple of says earlier on the same drive when trying to configure it for ZFS.
I was able to successfully write about 10G of Nevada source and object code as well as build tools to the drive on one system and read them off onto the MacBook, so the crash is odd. Something to figure out in the coming week. At least figuring this one out is part of my day job.
Things weren't all bad. I was able to get the build environment set-up and the workspace copied over. A Solaris build is running at the moment and no problems so far.
I have noticed one dumb thing about the MacBook. The edge of the outer shell of the notebook is rather sharp. The base of my palms rest one either side of the touchpad and my wrist hangs over that sharp edge. After using the MacBook for a while, it looks like I have been trying to cut my wrists (no jokes from the anti-Mac crowd, please).
That's it for now.
I hope to get some time to work on MythTV this week. One of the toys that I got for Christmas is a Hauppauge HVR-950 NTSC/ATSC USB tuner. It would be fun to make that work with OpenSolaris!
( Jan 06 2008, 11:52:26 PM PST ) Permalink
Wednesday January 02, 2008 Updates on the MacBook and MythTV fronts
Well, the end of the holiday break is almost here and I figured that I would give an update to the ongoing OpenSolaris on MacBook and MythTV on OpenSolaris sagas.
OpenSolaris on MacBook
Well, it is mostly up and running.
I got the wired networking problem figured out. Added yet another PCI ID to postinstall script for the Yukon ethernet driver from Marvell (and patched up the checksums in the package so pkgadd wouldn't puke) and it worked. Having working networking makes installation of a lot of other things go much easier.
Don't have wifi working. Since they made my Mac Mini, Apple has switched to a Broadcom part, which is even harder to get a driver for than the Atheros wifi part in the Mac Mini. I don't need wifi working on the MacBook in the lab, but it would be nice to have when I give an OpenSolaris talk at WSU in a couple of weeks (A couple of weeks? Yikes!)
Audio is also not working. I installed OSS and it didn't even recognize that the system had audio hardware, even though the hdaudio driver was attached to it. After I removed the OSS package, the audio apps go through the motions of playing, but no sound comes from the speakers (or headphone jack). I guess I don't need audio for now.
One weird thing that happened after I installed build 80 was that the hald service was not enabled out of the box. After I enabled the service, everyone associated with it worked fine. Maybe as I start installing build 80 on the other systems in my lab, I might find that OpenSolaris has some new defaults as far as what services are enabled.
Tomorrow, I am gonna copy over an OpenSolaris build environment and workspace and trying building the system.
Just have to get used to only one mouse button!
MythTV on OpenSolaris
I am almost back to where I was months ago when I had all of the code compiled and was just starting to run and test it.
However, I really didn't want to be the guy responsible for a MythTV on OpenSolaris port. I just wanted to make a set-top box out of my Mac Mini. So, I kept putting the porting work off, hoping that someone would step forward to take my initial work and run with it. The problem was, no longer how long I waited, trying to convince myself that there was someone else out who really want to work on the port, no one else stepped forward. Since I had a bunch of people asking how the work was going, I decided to go ahead and finish the myself.
So, getting back to that "almost back to where I was" remark? Well, after meeting one of the Sun guys who works on the compilers and tools last spring, I decided to switch from building the code with GCC to using Sun Studio instead. Unfortunately, the MythTV codebase is full of gcc-isms.
After spending the last couple of weeks, making small changes in the code for the Sun Studio compiler (for example, unlike GCC, it doesn't like use of the ?: operator without the second argument). The big problem right now is that I am trying to resolve a conflict between a compiler setting that I think may correct a bunch of warnings that I am seeing and an incompatible setting in the version of the QT3 package that I got from blastwave. I am also trying to figure out how to convince the MythTV configure script mechanism to let the program building Makefiles that I want to link them with the Sun mlib library. If one enables mlib, the libraries get built presuming that mlib will be linked in, but the program Makefiles don't get the -lmlib linker argument.
So, that's where things are at. I'll posted another update in a week or so. I promise.
And I promise to keep this blog more up-to-date. Honest. It will happen this time.
( Jan 02 2008, 12:45:48 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]
