FrankC's Blog: Things happened around me

HCTS is a test suite that could be used to test hardware systems and components to verify its compatibility with Solaris OS. It runs on all kinds of x86 systems with Solaris OS installed, including virtual hardware systems.

It's generally easy to run HCTS on virtual systems that emulate some kind of virtual network chips. Examples, VMware workstation emulates Intel Gigabit network chip; Parallel workstations emulates AMD network chip. However virtual systems managed by Xen hypervisor are different. Xen use back-end driver and front-end driver technology, no network chip is emulated. So HCTS could not see any network chip on these virtual systems.

In this case, to run HCTS 4.0 system test in a Solaris domU, user need to manually configure the network environment with the following procedures:

1. If the Test Manager is a normal x86 system, not virtual machine, then set it up normally as described by HCTS user manual. If another Solaris domU servers as the Test Manager, it should be set up in this way.

a) Set up the network interface:
# ifconfig xnf0 plumb
# ifconfig xnf0 10.10.10.11 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
b) Initialize HCTS:
# hctscli init
c) Set up current system as an HCTS Test Manager:
# hctscli setup-tm --manual

2. On the Solaris domU to be tested,

a). Set up the network interface
# ifconfig xnf0 plumb
# ifconfig xnf0 10.10.10.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
b) Initialize HCTS:
# hctscli init
c) Start HCTS system test:
# hctscli certify system

If user want to use IP addresses other than 10.10.10.11 and 10.10.10.10, they need to read HCTS online help or man page document on manual network configuration topic for instructions.

Recently, I was asked to do a demo about Sun Device Detection Tool on Sun Techday Beijing. I remember it used to be difficult to connect a laptop running Solaris OS to a projector properly. So I prepared 2 laptops, borrowed 1 projector to do the rehearsal in the office. After some experiments, I found it's actually quite easy to do that with latest release of Solaris.

I have Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 installed on both laptops. Here are steps needed to show contents on both laptop LCD and the projector:

* For Thinkpad X60, in the BIOS, change the setting of 'config->video' from 'LCD' to 'Both'. Then start Solaris as normal and login . Next, connect the laptop with the projector, log out and log in again, you should be able to see the contents on both LCD and projector. An alternative way is to press 'Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace', it restarts the Xorg server, automatically log out and prompt for login.

* For Dell D610, just logout and login is enough. No BIOS change needed. Later, I tested a Dell Latitude X1, that laptop behaves the same as this D610.

Earlier release of Solaris OS, such as Solaris Express Developer 5/07, doesn't work well on the Thinkpad X60 with scenarios described above. Xserver complains something like 'no enough memmory' and wouldn't come up.

The web link solution was revisited when another brilliant engineer joined the team. Java web start technology was evaluated and found it's a perfect fit to this product. Then we put together the old prototypes developed for Windows and Linux platform, part of the code from installation check tool, we got the first working prototype of the web link solution.

A prototype is only a prototype. It's still far from being a product. Then several other brilliant engineers joined to help enhance the GUI look and feel, review the code, test the product, write the document and go through legal processes. Finally on Oct, 26 2006, the first release of Sun Device Detection Tool was out. The download number is more than 3000 in one month. We are really encouraged by that number. We also received many good feedbacks from community users and Sun internal users.

With a good starting point, we continue to improve this product to deliver more functions to users. A local version was developed and integrated into Solaris Express Developer Edition DVD. So user could run this software on systems that have no internet access. In 1.1 release, user could check driver availability again multiple Solaris versions. In 1.2 release, this tool is connected with Sun HCL. If this tool is started in an official release of Solaris OS, user could submit the system information collected by this tool to Sun for auditing. If approved, this system could be listed on the HCL in the 'Reported to Work' category. In 2.0 release, more Windows and Linux platforms are supported. With that release, all major Windows, Linux and Solaris distributions are supported by the Sun Device Detection Tool. We are really proud of that.

Several years ago, I was doing Solaris OS hardware compatibility testing job. At that time, my team had access to many different kind of x86 systems: laptops, desktops, workstations and servers; Systems from Dell, IBM , HP, Sony, Toshiba, Acer etc. We install Solaris on them, test whether each hardware component works in Solaris OS. We did it so many times, finally we even can predict whether a new system is likely to install Solaris OS successfully just by reading its chipset information. We built a small database in our mind.

Then someone came up with the idea: could we develop a small software to help others do this? We sure all supports this proposal since we'd like to share our experience with others and help people do this kind of task easily. We then did the brain storm about the use case of this software. We all thought the perfect solution is to provide a web link, when user click this link, they can know whether their hardware is supported by Solaris. While how to achieve that, we don't know. Then what's the next best solution? If we can do it through a live CD, it seems also acceptable. User boot from this CD and get a report about whether their systems are supported, with all data on the hard disk unchanged. Then we decided to start with this CD solution. We make the live CD by customizing Solaris installation CD. When the first prototype is available, we know this solution works, we can do it. Just, the size of the CD is too big, more than 500M. It seems not reasonable to ask users download a 500M ISO file to achieve this small function.

Things got changed when Solaris 10 1/06 was available. The introduction of grub and miniroot in this Solaris release makes it more easy for customization. We can reduce the size of the live CD to about 50M now. That is more acceptable than before. We then released the 1.0 version of Solaris for x86 Installation Check Tool. More than 300 users tried this product during the first month of it's release.