OpenSolaris Test Farm

Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:10:00 GMT

I decided long ago that I didn’t want to run machines at home 24x7 and I didn’t want to spend money chasing performance. In fact, my main machine at home has an 800MHz VIA C3 CPU and just 512MB of RAM, and every other machine that I could be running OpenSolaris on is just as bad. I have access to much better hardware at work but it’s work hardware and not for that job.

Watching my attempts to build ONNV fail after 7 hours has always been slightly disheartening, especially when I’ve had to LiveUpgrade to a recent build first. Needless to say, the lack of good hardware with up-to-date tools has been somewhat of a barrier to my involvement. However, as of earlier this month, Sun has been providing the OpenSolaris project with a hosted farm of test machines that contributors can use to build and test software. There are two kinds of accounts, one for building software and the other for testing it.

The first, a Build Server account, gives you 15GB of disk space on a variety of machines of different processor types, which you can then use for compilation. These machines run builds of Nevada and the compilers that are recent enough to be able to build ONNV and they do it quickly; building ONNV on a 16-core x4600 in the Test Farm takes under one hour[1], which is massive boon to me if nobody else. Setting up an account is a simple matter of clicking “Add Account” on the test farm interface and waiting a few minutes.

The second kind of account reserves you an entire machine with console and SP access to splat your software over so that you can see if the machine still boots. There’s a bit more of a queue for one of these systems as obviously they can’t be used in parallel by more than one user but, again, all you need to do is click the relevant button in the interface and wait for a mail telling you that your server is ready.

If you have signed the Sun Contributor Agreement for OpenSolaris then you’re already set up on the Test Farm so go and grab an account now!

[1] And would probably take a lot less time if I could set DMAKE_MAX_JOBS higher than 4 :)

Posted in , ,  | no comments | no trackbacks

Converting SVR4 packages to datastream format and back

Posted by Ceri Davies Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:54:00 GMT

OK, so SVR4 packages on Solaris are not the future, but for those of us with existing Solaris installations, we’ll be using pkgadd for some time.

While vendors seem to vary in their preference for datastream format (i.e. a single file) packages and what the Solaris documentation calls “file system format” packages (a directory), it’s pretty certain that a download of a package from the Internet will come in datastream format.

The datastream format is useful for distribution, but it’s slightly annoying for scripting and I personally hate not knowing what’s in a datastream package before I “run” it (preinstall scripts could do anything to your system, while the package itself could overwrite anything too). Therefore, I like to explode them to file system format and check them out first. This can be done easily with the pkgtrans tool.

To convert a datastream package to a file system package:

pkgtrans package-0.4.2.pkg /tmp all

The command above will explode all packages contained in the package-0.4.2.pkg file to directories in /tmp.

To convert a directory of file system format packages to datastream format, assemble them in the same directory, say /tmp, and run:

pkgtrans -s /tmp /tmp/foo.pkg all

This will create a single file, foo.pkg, containing all of the packages available in /tmp.

Invocations of the form pkgtrans -s Solaris_11/Product /tmp/nv97_sparc.pkg all are a slightly tidier way of keeping installation archives around.

Posted in ,  | no comments | no trackbacks