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This chapter describes the hardware and software requirements for developing, building, and testing OpenSolaris. Most of these requirements can easily be met on any Solaris Express installation (other distributions may work as well). Depending on your interests, you may need to test your work with hardware or software which is not readily available to you. If this is the case, please ask your project leader for assistance. Sun and other companies and organizations sponsor various facilities which may be available to OpenSolaris community developers. If you are a project leader, please contact mailto:[email protected] for information about resources your project can use.
This section details hardware requirements for developing and building OpenSolaris. Because some projects may have additional requirements (for example, driver development obviously requires the device in question), this information is intended to be a guide rather than a definitive set of rules. It is possible, for example, to develop on a system which cannot run any OpenSolaris-based distribution, transferring diffs or other work to a remote environment for building and testing. For purposes of this section, however, we will assume that your development and build systems will run Solaris or some other fully compatible OpenSolaris-based distribution.
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 300MB without source code management metadata, so you should budget at least that amount of space for each tree you wish to store (about 1.9GB is required for a tree with a full set of SCCS 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 128MB recommended ---------------------------------------------------------------- Swap No requirement ---------------------------------------------------------------- Storage 300MB to 1.9GB per copy of the source tree (*) ----------------------------------------------------------------
(*) The total size will vary depending on the type of source management you use. With no source management data, a built tree requires approximately 3.5GB; CVS and SCCS add 50MB or more, depending on the amount of revision history.
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 300 MHz UltraSPARC or x86 CPU AMD Opteron or UltraSPARC-III recommended ---------------------------------------------------------------- Memory 256MB minimum, 1GB recommended (+) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Swap 1GB minimum, 2GB recommended (+) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Storage 3.5 to 5GB per copy of the source tree (*) (**) ----------------------------------------------------------------
On a minimal build system as described above, expect a full build to take at least 14 hours. Incremental builds will take somewhat less time; a good rule of thumb is one-third of the full build time.
This table shows some approximate full build times for several representative systems. These are current as of 5 April 2006; as more code as added and the number of closed components decreases, build times will increase. Of course, the actual time to build will vary from system to system as well.
System CPU Memory Time ---------------------------------------------------------------- Ultra 2 2x300MHz UltraSPARC-II 512M 5h9m ---------------------------------------------------------------- Generic AMD Athlon64 3200 1GB 1h23m ----------------------------------------------------------------
The build system can take advantage of multiple CPUs or even distribute the work of compiling across multiple machines. See Building OpenSolaris for more information about configuring parallel and distributed builds.
(*) The total size will vary depending on the type of source management you use. With no source management data, a built tree requires approximately 3.5GB; CVS and SCCS add 50MB or more, depending on the amount of revision history.
(+) 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 300MB on x86 or 800MB on SPARC.
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, please contact us via http://opensolaris.org/. The OpenSolaris community includes several organizations, including Sun, who may be able to provide you with access to additional hardware for the purpose of testing your changes.