Tucker's Tech

OpenSolaris, Virtualized

I've been asked a few times by various folks about the availability of OpenSolaris-based virtual machine images that can be played in VMware Player, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, etc..  I'm happy that I now have an answer - the Nexenta folks have made a preinstalled VM image available with their latest release (Alpha 4).  This is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to try out OpenSolaris but doesn't have a spare machine to dedicate to it - you can use an existing Linux or Windows box, download VMware Player or Server and the VM image, and quickly be up and running with a nice slick distro based on the latest bleeding-edge OpenSolaris code.  The VM image is available from the Nexenta site here (scroll down to the bottom) as well as the Genunix mirror here.

More on VMware and Solaris

Nice step-by-step writeup on installing Solaris 10 in a VM. Most of it also applies to Solaris Express.

A couple of things to add to my earlier notes on VMware/Solaris issues. The latest kernel patches for Solaris 10 (118844-19 and 118844-20) cause a panic on boot on some systems, including in a VMware virtual machine. Some limited details are available here. The workaround is to boot under the kernel debugger (kmdb) - type "b kmdb" when you get the "(b)oot or (i)nterpreter" prompt. You can make this persistent with "eeprom boot-file=kmdb" once you're booted (or by messing around with the boot configuration menus, but I don't recommend that for the easily frustrated).

The latest version of Solaris Express (build 27a, the one with ZFS) won't install in a VM if you use the graphical install and the default guest memory size (256MB). It hangs trying to load the X server and window system into memory. Either increase the memory (I suggest at least 512MB), or select the text install by hitting "4" when you get the question about install type. This should be fixed in a later build (to automatically fall back to the text install if there isn't enough room for the graphical install).

A new source browser is born

Back when I was at Sun working on OpenSolaris, I decided that we needed a good web-based source browser to help show off the "product" (which was, essentially, the source code itself).  At the time, we had a pilot site using CVSweb, which was easy to set up but (IMO) incredibly painful to use.  In particular, it didn't have any support for cross-reference links (the ability to jump to the definition of a function or variable by clicking on the name in the source code), and the search capabilities were pretty minimal.  I wanted something more usable for studying the source and general development activities; i.e., something that I (a diehard cscope user) would actually find useful in my own development work.

At the time, the state of the art was LXR, the Linux Cross-Reference system.  LXR provides cross-reference support, as well as freetext searches (via Glimpse), but the setup was somewhat cumbersome, support for revision history seemed awkward, and there were licensing issues with Glimpse.  Fortunately, it turned out that a Sun engineer was already playing around with web-based source browsers.  We talked with Chandan about our requirements, and he agreed to work on a new source browser.  The result was OpenGrok.

OpenGrok has actually been usable for a while as the source browser for OpenSolaris, but the source code was just released a couple of days ago.  This means people can now download it and use it for whatever source tree they're interested in (including proprietary code).  I did this recently with some internal VMware code, and (aside from a few minor issues that Chandan's working on fixing) it was remarkably easy.  OpenGrok is all Java based and runs on top of Tomcat, so once you have a recent version of Java (1.5) and Tomcat set up, it's pretty simple (even for a Tomcat novice like me).

The result is a source browser that not only has the cross-reference links and freetext search capabilities of LXR, but supports syntax highlighting and has a nice clean look and feel.  It's also completely free (in both senses) - released under the CDDL license.  (I suppose some people may have problems with the Java dependency, but at least that's free-as-in-beer for everyone.)  And, somewhat surprisingly given the fact that it's all Java, it's fast.  I admit I was skeptical when I first heard that Chandan was planning to use a Java search engine (Apache Lucene), but the results are impressive.  I'd suggest that anyone who spends much time looking at complex source trees check this out.

VMware and OpenSolaris

As a former Solaris engineer, I'm interested in helping people use Solaris and OpenSolaris with VMware.  VMware and Sun have announced that full support for Solaris will be added in future versions of VMware products.  In the meantime, the existing products can be made to work, but there are a few issues.  Here's some of the ones I know of (with workarounds).  Note: these aren't official recommendations from VMware (except where I've linked to vmware.com docs); they've worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

There are a couple of issues with virtual LSI Logic SCSI disks. Solaris 8 and 9 (GA) didn't come with a driver for the LSI Logic disk; if you try to install you'll get an error message saying something about "divide by zero error".  The fix is to either download the driver from the LSI website and install it as an ITU (details available with the driver), or upgrade to a recent update of Solaris 9 (which includes the driver) or to Solaris 10 or later.  More details are available here.

In addition, the LSI (actually "mpt") driver in versions of Solaris later than Solaris 10 (i.e., Solaris Express or OpenSolaris) contains some changes that don't work with Workstation 5.0.  You can either install on a virtual IDE drive (select the "custom" option when creating the VM), or use the beta of Workstation 5.5 (or the new VMware Player) instead. Setting up the X server can be a bit of a challenge.

The Xsun server available in Solaris 9 is actually pretty straightforward: kdmconfig will autoselect the VMware driver and a 1024x768 screen.  To change the screen size, run kdmconfig (as root) and pick a new size.  The Xorg server used by default in Solaris 10 and later is a bit more of a problem - it comes up OK, but the default screen size is pretty small (800x600). To change that, you can either switch back to the Xsun server by running kdmconfig, or run /usr/X11/bin/xorgconfig to reconfigure the Xorg server.  Some tips from other folks who have gone the xorgconfig route are available here and here.