Sunday January 06, 2008 Alan Perry's Blog
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
