Tuesday August 23, 2005
Tuesday August 23, 2005
More baby steps
I've been kind of busy lately what with flying to Canada and such so that I haven't done much more on my new home server ( wiz
) running Solaris 10 which I aim to someday replace my old
decrepit linux server. I was going to talk about the problem with
drivers which I'm sure is the biggest impediment anyone attempting the
switch encounters but first a paragraph or two on a different problem.
When I first got wiz running I
needed to download some patches and some new packages as the first
order of business. So I fired up firefox where the display should pop
up on my powerbook. Unfortunately it died almost immediately with an
error from X (BadWindow). So I
tried mozilla, same thing. Well that is disappointing. So then I fired
up a vnc server on the Solaris machine and connected to it with Chicken of the VNC
from my laptop. From there I tried firefox again. Worked fine. Well
that is kind of disappointing but at least I have a workaround. Sure
wanted to fix it though because vnc performance just isn't that good.
Eventually I went about debugging it and I discovered that the error
occurred while querying the Xinerama extension for screen parameters.
So my next workaround was to turn of Xinerama on the macintosh side.
This let me skip using vnc but was still kind of klunky because I had
to start X by hand instead of with the gui. So I investigated further.
In orger to do that I wanted to examine the packets being sent back and
forth from the X server and client. I got a copy of ethereal
and snooped the packets. I couldn't really tell what was going wrong
but at least I expected I could ask someone here at Sun that worked on
the X server if they could tell me if the problem was on the Solaris
side or the mac side.
Working outside of California and being in the Java VM group I didn't
really know anyone in the group supporting X. By a little bit of
investigation I identified someone and sent a long detailed email along
with an attachment that held the decoded packets. In about 1 minute I
get a reply back. "This is:
Bug 6216985 Xsun & Xorg Xinerama protocols are incompatible with each other
Install patch 119060-04 to fix it."
By dumb luck I picked the developer that worked on the bug! How
is that for service. (BTW the patch for sparc is 119059-04).
I installed the patch on wiz and it worked perfectly. Yeah! No need for a workaround.
Aug 23 2005, 01:26:44 PM EDT
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Who is this FatCatAir anyway?
My name is Steve Goldman. I'm a Sr. Staff Engineer here at Sun
Microsytems. I work on the Hotspot Java Virtual Machine (tm). I
currently work in the JIT compiler group. Previously I worked in
the VM runtime group. I've been working on the VM for something over
six years. I came to Sun as part of the acquisition of the storage
products component of Encore Computer.
I worked for Encore from nearly the beginning in 1984 until the Sun
acquistion in November of 1997. At Encore I worked in the compiler
group that produced the C/C++/Fortran/Pascal compilers that Encore
sold. I have a long time experience with compilers dating back to the
first compiler I wrote as part of an NSF grant while I was an EE
undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon in
1973. At Encore, circa 1987, I designed the parallelizing loop
optimizer for the Fortran and C compilers. I've worked on compilers,
operating systems and device drivers for almost my entire career.
The FatCatAir psuedonym is derived from a party my wife and I threw in 2001. I live on a private airstrip in Pittsboro NC.
When I built my hangar we had a party to celebrate its opening. My wife
and I have been having big yearly theme parties for 20 years or so. For
the hangar warming party the theme was airline flying and airports. The
party invitations were all individualized airline tickets (remember
those?) from our airline "FatCat Air" { motto "Better Late than Never".
Our promise "If we don't get you there alive, your money cheerfully
refunded. } . Everyone was to dress appropriately to destination
on their invitation. Since then FatCatAir has taken on a life of its
own.
Aug 23 2005, 01:30:26 AM EDT
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