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One of the tools I build on new unix boxes after I get a toolchain of some kind (vendor or GNU) is invariably emacs.

I’ve been working on Solaris 10 more lately, and found that emacs wouldn’t build, and I found that odd… clearly other people had got it to build.

The interesting bit is that it’ll build if you use the right options, but it’ll crash when it exits. I was puzzled by this for awhile, but eventually found the answer on the tubes of the interweb. Unfortunately, I’ve had to recompile it now several times, both at work and home, and I keep having to rediscover this little platform-specific tidbit. Hopefully now that it’s posted here I’ll remember.

I gather than GCC 3.3.x puts some zero-initialized variables in the .bss segment, and that’s a problem with Solaris (at least on SPARC), so the answer is to add “-fno-zero-initialized-in-bss” to $CFLAGS before configure.

I’m still working out how to compile this with Studio 11 from Sun, I’ll update this when I remember the changes necessary.

Knowing Dan-o like I do… I find this hilarious. Article where they interview Dan about storage costs

Just saw a trailer for 300. It’ll be on my list of things to see.

Edit:  Every bit as good as I’d hoped.

I finished a couple of single player games recently… the first of which was Prey. I actually enjoyed it, I thought some of the gameplay ideas were interesting, and I’m sure you’ll see some of these gimmicks showing up in other games. I particular, the idea of a portal has a lot of potential. You can see them in an enhanced form in the upcoming “Portal” game from Valve, to be released with Half-Life 2 Episode 2 I believe.

I finally went looking for a better theme.

This is so much better.

Just got back from Linux World in San Francisco (actually, show ended on Thursday but I hung out until the 19th to visit friends.) Good show, but 6 days is a recent record for me being away from home, and it’s good to be back.

I focused on the HPC and kernel development tracks while I was there. In particular, I have several new things to experiment on that I saw there.

For starters, it became clear that I should probably get an AMD-based system for my OpenSolaris experiments. The demo machine I saw there with OpenSolaris with a Brandz CentOS lx zone on it seemed like a really decent machine, and while I’ve always liked SPARC, maybe it would be good to have both.

For the meantime, I will actually be playing with opensolaris on VMWare. Virtualization has been a pretty big topic lately, and at the conference I talked to SuSE (who’s distributing Xen), XenSource, VMWare (which I’ve been using since it was first available, and am currently using at work and at home), SWSoft (makers of OpenVZ/Virtuozzo) (which I’d managed to never hear about before somehow.)

I’ll have more to say about what I saw there. Next time I may even take pictures.

With a full make clobber that it has to do on the source tree before it can start to compile, the OpenSolaris nightly build takes a long time:

(5) mcclung@dogstar: time nightly ./opensolaris.sh
40724.25u 7185.90s 15:02:27.12 88.4%

This is 5.11 svn_38. It’s faster in an untouched OpenSolaris tree, I think, I will have to test that as well. Even with all the other stuff I compiled for /usr/local during the first build, it only took 11-12 hours.

I’m assuming we’re still somewhat limited by the 650MHz CPU. I don’t think it’s using that much RAM, and I don’t see that we’re swapping (machine has 1GB of RAM.) The real limit is probably disk I/O, but I’ll have to verify that.

Recently, I bought a Sunblade 150 off of Ebay to experiment with OpenSolaris. I considered getting another PC specifically for this project, but eventually my nostalgia for Sun SPARC gear won out and I got it… it wasn’t even that expensive. I did end up replacing the RAM and adding a second IDE drive to it, which all seems to be working fine. I had earlier tried to get OpenSolaris working on a Sun Ultra 10 someone has on semi-permenent loan to me. With only 128MB of RAM it didn’t seem to want to boot SunOS 5.10 or 5.11 svn_16 (although it runs Gentoo just fine, if slowly). Between that and having a couple of 9GB drives in it, that wasn’t an ideal platform.

I’m hoping, as time goes on, to become more familiar with the internals of OpenSolaris. I had some exposure in a couple of classes, mostly the SunOS 5.5.1 device drivers class I took way back in 1996. If nothing else, this will give me more practice on Solaris features that became available in SunOS 5.10, such as Dtrace

My first project is to time the compile of the complete system using the nightly command. I timed it before, but it wasn’t a fair test because I was compiling several things at the same time, as sort of a stress test of the system after I replaced all the memory. I’ll post the results here.

So… this dude sent me a link to this and I thought I’d include a list of all the states I’ve managed to at least drive through:

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