OpenSolaris

The simplest set of requirements applies to a development environment: you need only have sufficient space to store the source tree and enough CPU and memory to run text editors and tools such as cscope. The current source tree occupies approximately 550MB without source code management metadata, so you should budget at least that amount of space for each tree you wish to store. About 800MB is required for a Mercurial repository (source plus metadata). Note that if you plan to build the tree on the same system, you will need additional space; see Section 2.1.2 below.

In general, any computer which will run Solaris 10, Solaris Express, or another OpenSolaris-based distribution is adequate for this purpose. As of this writing, all SPARC systems with UltraSPARC-II or newer CPUs (that is, all CPUs which have faster clock rates than 200 MHz) are supported; the specific list of supported SPARC platforms for Solaris 10 can be found at http://docs.sun.com/source/817-6337-06/install-solaris.html. For i386 and amd64 systems, hardware support is somewhat more complex; you can find out more about x86 hardware compatibility at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/. Be sure to check the latest release notes for Solaris for information about current and future hardware support; these notes can be found at http://docs.sun.com/.

Note that other OpenSolaris-based distributions may at times support a somewhat different set of hardware from the latest Solaris release or update; the latest information about hardware support can always be found in your vendor's release notes.

Table: Development system requirements

----------------------------------------------------------------
CPU		Any supported CPU
----------------------------------------------------------------
Memory		1GB recommended
----------------------------------------------------------------
Swap		No requirement
----------------------------------------------------------------
Storage	550MB to 800MB per copy of the source tree (*)
----------------------------------------------------------------

(*) The total size will vary depending on whether you are using source tarballs or Mercurial. A built tree requires approximately 4.5GB.

Building a large, complex piece of software such as ON or any other OpenSolaris consolidation is a memory-, compute-, and space-intensive process. Although it is possible to build OpenSolaris on almost any computer, it may take prohibitively long to do so on small configurations. It is especially important to have enough swap space if you will be using dmake to perform highly parallel builds. Inadequate swap will cause your build to fail. Following are the hardware requirements for a system on which you intend to build ON:

Table: Build system requirements

----------------------------------------------------------------
CPU		UltraSPARC or x86 CPU
		UltraSPARC-III (or better) recommended
		AMD Opteron or Intel Core 2 Duo recommended
----------------------------------------------------------------
Memory		512MB minimum, 2-4GB recommended (+)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Swap		1GB minimum, 2GB recommended (+)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Storage		4.5GB per copy of the source tree (*)
----------------------------------------------------------------

(+) If you use dmake(1) in parallel mode and run more than 4 jobs on the same machine, you may need additional memory and/or swap space.

(*) Compilers and tools are installed in /opt and will require an additional 890MB on x86 or 1.4GB on SPARC.

Expect a full build to run anywhere from a couple hours to overnight, depending on the CPU and memory in the build system. Incremental builds will take somewhat less time; a good rule of thumb is one-third of the full build time.

The build system can take advantage of multiple CPUs or even distribute the work of compiling across multiple machines. See 4 Building OpenSolaris for more information about configuring parallel and distributed builds.

The requirements for testing your changes will vary greatly. Some changes do not affect architecture-specific code at all and can simply be tested by building and running a test suite on any supported system of each architecture. For example, if you have added a new STREAMS module to the network stack, it is probably sufficient to build and test on one x86 system (test 32- and 64-bit kernels and user programs), and one SPARC system. In other cases, for example modifications to the x86 boot code, it will be necessary to test on the widest possible array of hardware to ensure you have not broken some obscure piece of functionality.

Some hardware variables you should consider testing include:

- Architecture: i386, amd64, SPARC
- Memory size: does your change work with 32MB?  With 32GB?
- Multiprocessor versus uniprocessor
- Graphical console versus serial console versus system LOM console
- Diskless versus "normal" systems

Not all these variables will be applicable to your particular change, so you will need to consider, being as conservative as possible, what effects your changes could cause. In general, changes to core kernel code such as the VM subsystem or filesystem support require the broadest testing. Changes to add-on drivers or machine-specific code need only be tested on the relevant hardware in most cases. See Chapter 5 for more details.

Quite often you may want to make a change which you cannot completely test on the hardware available to you. If you find yourself in this situation, start by taking a look at the Testing Community. In addition, other OpenSolaris communities may be able to help provide you with access to hardware to test your changes.

We strongly recommend installing the "Entire" package cluster (SUNWCall) on all development, build, and test systems. Although systems with the Developer (SUNWCdev) package cluster installed may work, this configuration has not been tested and will not be evaluated or recommended. Additionally, you should obtain and install the SUNWonbld package, which contains prebuilt versions of the tools in usr/src/tools needed to build OpenSolaris components. If you prefer, you can instead use nightly(1) with the '-t' option to build these tools (see 4.2 Using nightly and bldenv) when building ON, but installing the package is recommended to avoid dependency problems and is required for other consolidations. SUNWonbld can be downloaded from http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on/. Finally, you will need to obtain and install the Sun Studio compilers, dmake, and other tools. You can obtain these tools from http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/sun_studio_tools/.

If you install and use a full installation (for example, Solaris or Solaris Express CDs or DVDs), you will have a complete matching set of programs, libraries, and kernel components. However, if you later upgrade the ON bits using a method such as BFU (see 5.3 Using BFU to Install ON) or Install (see 5.2 Using Cap-Eye-Install to Install Kernels), or want to build and copy in your own updated versions of a few files, you may need to install newer versions of one or more system packages first. When this happens, it is known as a Flag Day. You can find more information about Flag Days in 5.1.3 Flag Days and Other Hazards.

$ su
Password:
# cd /
# bzip2 -dc /var/tmp/sunstudio10-sparc.tar.bz2 | tar xf -

The complete product install has its own installer and a complete manual that includes installation instructions. See http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-0485 for detailed installation instructions, including how to use the graphical and text installation methods. You will need to install the required patches before you can build OpenSolaris components if you use the full product; normally these are included with the product download. See http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/sun_studio_tools/ for more information on required patches. By default, the Studio 10 product installs into /opt/SUNWspro. You should not change this unless you have an existing installation of Sun Workshop/Forte/Studio that you need to preserve.

$ mkdir /var/tmp/studioinstall
$ cd /var/tmp/studioinstall
$ tar xf /var/tmp/sunstudio10-x86.tar
$ su
Password:
# ./batch_installer -s ABC123
...
# cd patches
# patchadd -M . patchlist
...

The version of gcc needed is installed by default as part of Solaris Express builds 22 and later. If using a different distribution, consult your vendor's documentation to determine whether your version of gcc is sufficient.