Wednesday September 26, 2007
The whole Etude engineering team (except, unfortunately, for Penny) gathered in the Bay Area last week. We made a ton of progress and we're on our final round of bug fixes. It has been fun (if a bit nerve wracking) to watch the bug counts drop day by day.
One problem which has been challenging with this project is that we have a number of differently delivered software parts, all of which must undergo some change:
- The solaris8 brand itself is a piece of software which bridges the gap between Solaris 8 and Solaris 10. This is something you must add to an Solaris 10 8/07 (also called S10U4) system. When it is finished, it will be delivered as two packages, SUNWs8brandu and SUNWs8brandr, plus an optional "demo" package.
- We've got a very few Solaris 8 patches which we require (currently I think there are 6 of them). Some of these (for example, a fix to the linker, and a fix to ptree(1)) we had to engineer ourselves. And some have been available for a long time and are probably already patched onto most S8 systems out there. All of these are (or will be) available via the normal patch mechanisms.
- We needed to add some enhancements to Solaris 10 in order for BrandZ to work solidly on SPARC systems. While these changes will be automatically included in the next update of Solaris 10, for Solaris 10 8/07 you need to add a patch-- the kernel jumbo patch, in fact (as I mentioned before, this patch is not out just yet).
For our Beta release, we were able to supply workarounds for some of these issues, but for our official release, we need every 't' crossed, and every 'i' dotted. So last week we finally had all of those pieces available (internally) in at least a preliminary form. Everyone has been busy testing the whole works. For example, I've done a dry run on a T1000, which looks like this:
- Install S10 8/07 onto the system (or into an LDOM (logical domain) on the system)
- Bring system to single user mode
- Add kernel patch using patchadd
- Reboot system (or LDOM)
- Add SUNWs8brandr and SUNWs8brandu packages to the system
- Configure a Solaris 8 container and install it from an existing system archive
- This will auto-apply any required Solaris 8 patches to the system
- Boot S8 zone, and enjoy!
It's nice to see the pieces coming together...
(2007-09-26 11:27:39.0) Permalink Comments [7]
Tags: brandz etude solaris solaris10
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/dp/entry/etude_progress_update
Can I stall S10 U4 on a Sun V240 to run Etude ? Does it has to be a T-1000/2000 machine ?
Posted by T.J. Yang on September 26, 2007 at 02:35 PM PDT #
Very nice, Dan.
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on September 27, 2007 at 02:22 AM PDT #
Very nice work guys, I especially like the P2V part and there is a lot of interest out there.
Posted by George on September 27, 2007 at 04:55 AM PDT #
Will it be possible to boot 32-bit Solaris 8 kernels ?
Posted by Pablo Méndez Hernández on September 27, 2007 at 05:04 AM PDT #
@TJ: You can run solaris8 containers on any SPARC system which Solaris 10 supports. Good question, though.
@Paulo: This kind of emulation doesn't actually run the Solaris 8 kernel at all. It is a form of virtualization in which we teach Solaris 10 to mimic the Solaris 8 kernel's responses to various system calls. But you're still running the Solaris 10 kernel. You can, of course, run both 32- and 64-bit applications.
Posted by Dan Price on September 27, 2007 at 02:00 PM PDT #
Dan,
Thanks for the reply.
I am happy Sun really listen to customers. I posted the need of Etude and now looks like we are going to have VMWare for Sparc CPU ;) which VMWare denied to port.
I am hoping to move all my build and test machines of Solars 2.6,2.7,2.8 and 2.9,2.10 into one box running Etude. ie 10 down to 1 machine.
It is just a matter of time Etude (2.8) for other Solaris version be ready, right ;)
Posted by T.J. Yang on September 27, 2007 at 03:30 PM PDT #
Any chance that there will be Solaris 10 branded zones?
It seems there are far less dependencies between the global and non-global zones using branded zones. Not being plagued by having to patch everything at the same time would be a big win.
Posted by Moritz Willers on October 08, 2007 at 04:11 PM PDT #