Angelo's Soapbox

Using DTrace to change OS version

You may have heard about Solaris' legendary binary compatibility guarantee. Basically we guarantee that any binary that runs on Solaris 7,8 & 9 will run unmodified on Solaris 10.

In spite of this excellent binary compatability we have seen some of our partner's Solaris 9 apps fail to install on Solaris 10 because the installer thinks that "10" is less than "9" (using ASCII compare). I figured that we can use DTrace to fix the version number to allow the installer to work.

So I wrote a simple script that will fix the version of Solaris. Here is the script

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -qws
	
syscall::uname:entry
/progenyof($1)/
{
	self->addr = arg0;
}

syscall::uname:return
/progenyof($1)/
{
	copyoutstr("5.9", self->addr+(257*2), 257);
}

This script takes the pid of the shell that runs the installer. (echo $$ on the terminal to get the pid) While this script is running, uname -a on that shell will return 5.9 as a the Solaris version.

Posted at 09:46AM Oct 03, 2008 by angelo in DTrace  |