Fore!

OpenSolaris build 106 - now with SPARC support!

Tuesday Feb 03, 2009

Today we released the latest OpenSolaris development build, number 106 (106a is used in the labeling of the various ISO images since it took a couple of spins to get it right).  As usual, see the announcement email for links and so on.  Although I note that we neglected to mention the availability of images via our friends at genunix.org.  We apologize, Al, and thank you for your continued service.  I'll proofread better next time!

The big news today is that this marks the first build with SPARC support.  At this time, the only installation option for SPARC is to use the Automated Installer (AI), which means you'll need to set up an AI server first.  Initial instructions are posted for this piece, questions and discussion should be directed to the caiman-discuss project mailing list.  The interesting IPS development that goes along with this is the release of fat (or phat) package support; there aren't separate repositories for x86 and SPARC, but instead a single repository with unified package instances.  Perusing a package manifest such as that of SUNWcs should give you some clues on how this works, but I'll let someone on the IPS team provide a more complete discussion of this feature.

Many thanks to all of the team who worked very hard since the 2008.11 release to get to this milestone!

[4] Comments
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Posted at 03:59PM Feb 03, 2009 by dminer in OpenSolaris_Releases
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And of course, I just finished installing a 105 build! BTW it all works great; I am using it for a first cut at providing Xen/xVM virtual machines to customers.

Posted by patrick giagnocavo on February 03, 2009 at 10:07 PM EST #

I am confused about how to get Opensolaris running on sparc; according to the build instructions here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/auto_install/AI_install_server_setup.html : "If the server is SPARC, install OpenSolaris January 2009 milestone release on your system. You need to use Automated Installer to install OpenSolaris January 2009 milestone release." So, I need an AI installer in order to install opensolaris on sparc, and the only way to get an AI installer on sparc is to install opensolaris, which requires an AI installer... Is the moral of this that I *MUST* start the whole process with an x86 AI installer?
Thanks very much.

Posted by Katherine Hosch on February 19, 2009 at 02:29 PM EST #

Katherine: Yes, for now you must have an OpenSolaris server (and thus x86, given the chicken/egg nature of the process) to bootstrap into SPARC. But the x86 version can be installed from the live CD. You'd then set up the AI service on it, and install SPARC. Using a VM such as VirtualBox or VMware to run the OpenSolaris x86 server is possible, if that helps.

Posted by Dave Miner on February 19, 2009 at 02:55 PM EST #

Thanks Dave! That is what I figured, and I will be installing x86 OpenSolaris on VMWare to get around this problem. I appreciate your response.

Posted by Katherine Hosch on February 20, 2009 at 09:55 AM EST #

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