Ice on Solaris 2.6/Sparc ?

[Garric]

Good day. I was wondering if anyone had successfully built Ice on Solaris 2.6/Sparc ? If so, can you give some notes on how this was accomplished ?

I read the thread further down regarding Ice on non-Intel architectures, but it didn't seem conclusive.

Thank you,
James

[bernard]

Hi James,

We recently ported Ice to SPARC/Solaris, using Solaris 9 and Sun C++ 5.4 (aka Forte 7 or ONE Studio 7), but it should also work with Solaris 8 and Sun C++ 5.3 (or 5.5). If you like, I can e-mail you a snapshot ... just send an e-mail to support@zeroc.com with your e-mail address.

For Solaris 2.6 support, one issue (most likely the only issue) is UUID generation: we now use /dev/urandom on Unix and /dev/urandom is only available on Solaris 8 and 9. A work-around is to use E2FSPROGS's libuuid, like in Ice 1.0.1.

Best regards,
Bernard

[Garric]

Thank you for your response Bernard. I contacted the SA for the development machine that I work on, it looks like a move to Solaris 2.8 is possible. When this happens (hopefully within a month or so), I will email you.

I am interested in moving from the Visibroker 3.3/GateKeeper architecture that we are currently using to Ice. Do you see any problems with this ? In particular, does Ice have a component that is similar in functionality to GateKeeper?

Garric

[bernard]

Hi James,

I expect the transition to Ice to be reasonably easy. The Ice component equivalent to Visibroker's Gatekeeper is called Glacier; it's described in detail in the Ice Book. Please let us know if you think some additional features would be useful!

Cheers,
Bernard

[marlowa]

Originally posted by Garric
Thank you for your response Bernard. I contacted the SA for the development machine that I work on, it looks like a move to Solaris 2.8 is possible. When this happens (hopefully within a month or so), I will email you.
Garric

Why not tell the forum then we can all benefit.

I hope this goes well for you but using Ice on Solaris/Forte has not gone well for me. I took Bernard's snapshot and found that although the build does proceed somewhat better than before, a compiler patch is required. For various reasons that I won't go into here, the compiler will not be patched where I work. So that is the end of Ice for me. Pity.

Regards,

Andrew M.

[marc]

Originally posted by marlowa
Why not tell the forum then we can all benefit.

I hope this goes well for you but using Ice on Solaris/Forte has not gone well for me. I took Bernard's snapshot and found that although the build does proceed somewhat better than before, a compiler patch is required. For various reasons that I won't go into here, the compiler will not be patched where I work. So that is the end of Ice for me. Pity.

Regards,

Andrew M.

I'm sorry to hear that you will not be able to use Ice.

Unfortunately, there are known bugs in the Sun compiler version you are using, which are fixed by a patch available from Sun. It simply doesn't make sense for us to find work-arounds for compiler problems for which an official patch exists.

Cheers,
Marc

[zfod]

Originally posted by bernard

For Solaris 2.6 support, one issue (most likely the only issue) is UUID generation: we now use /dev/urandom on Unix and /dev/urandom is only available on Solaris 8 and 9. A work-around is to use E2FSPROGS's libuuid, like in Ice 1.0.1.

Hmm,

There are plenty of solutions for Solaris 2.6 for /dev/{u,r}andom:

* Download ANDIrand, which runs in kernel space as a loadable module and provides both /dev/random and /dev/urandom. This has worked wonderfully for me for years, and I've never experienced a problem with it. It isn't supported by Sun, but neither are 99% of the things you need to install to make Solaris useful and functional. You can download the Solaris packages here: http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~andi/

* Install PRNGD, which is a user space daemon that provides entropy via a UNIX domain socket interface to /dev/random and /dev/urandom. This has been a very solid solution for me as well where it wasn't too important to leverage kernel space over user space for entropy gathering. You can download the source for PRNGD here: http://www.aet.tu-cottbus.de/persone...tls/prngd.html

* You can also install the SUNWski package to provide /dev/random, but I don't recommend this solution because you have two other far superior solutions instead. SUNWski was included with the Easy Access CDs and another Intranet CD depending on which Solaris CD set you have ( and version ).

Even with Solaris 8 you have to install the 112438-01 patch to get /dev/random.

Lots of solutions for using the non-blocking entropy gathering via /dev/urandom, as you can see.


.zfod

[bernard]

Thanks for the information! Now it looks like Ice should be very easy to port to Solaris 2.6 ... a simple build may be enough.
Since we don't have any Solaris 2.6 installation (or even hardware capable of running Solaris 2.6), I won't be able to try. But if anybody does, please share you experience.

Cheers,
Bernard

[mobilezht]

please give me you config file.
3Q

[bernard]

Welcome to the forums! Please refer to this thread for our support policy.

Best regards,
Bernard