Tribblix SPARC progress

Tribblix is one of the relatively few illumos distributions that runs on both SPARC and x86 hardware.

There are valid reasons for the lack of SPARC support in other distributions. For those backed by commercial entities, it makes no sense to support SPARC as they don't have paying customers to foot the bill. Which leaves SPARC support firmly in the hobbyist realm.

Even in Tribblix, SPARC support has lagged the x86 version somewhat. Again, for entirely predictable reasons. While I do have SPARC hardware, it's relatively slow, noisy, power hungry, and heat-producing compared to my regular x86 boxes. And my day to day use is my x86 workstation, so that drives a lot of the desktop work.

But SPARC development of Tribblix hasn't stopped. Far from it, it's just naturally slower.

The current download ISO image at this time is still Milestone 16. Just to clarify the versioning here - that means it was built from exactly the same illumos commit as the corresponding x86 release. Because it took a little longer to get ready, the userland packages (such as they were) tended to be a bit newer.

There have been 3 more Tribblix release on x86 since then. Over the winter (when it was cold and the heat output from the T5140 I use as a build server was a good thing) I tried building updated illumos versions. The T5140 I'm using to do the builds is running a cobbled-together frankendistro of bits of Tribblix, bits of OpenSXCE, some random bits from other people working on SPARC, and a whole lot of elbow grease. I managed to build illumos at the m17 and m18 release points, but m19 was a step too far (some of the native stuff assumes that the host OS isn't terribly antiquated). What this means is that I need to replace that by a current system, and get a properly self-hosting illumos build.

That modernizes the underlying illumos components a bit. What about the rest of the system? The primary effort there was to replace the old core components that had been been borrowed from OpenSXCE while bootstrapping the distribution in the first place with native packages (and that are then up to date and match the x86 build). Some of the components here are pretty crucial - zlib and libxml2, for instance. At one point I messed up libxml2 slightly - not enough to kill SMF (which would be a big worry) but enough to stop zones working (which, apart from indicating that I had broken it, also left me without an imortant test mechanism). Rebuild everything enough times and the problem eventually cleared.

I also had a go at getting my SunBlade 1500 workstation working. It's not terribly quick, but it's quiet enough and sufficiently low power that I can have it running without negatively impacting the home office. That was a bit of a struggle, the bge network driver currently in illumos doesn't work - I assume I'm seeing bug 7746 here, but the solution - to use an older version of the driver - works well enough. With that box available I not only have more testing available but also a lightweight machine that I can use to keep the package backlog under control.

Graphics on SPARC is an interesting problem. OK, so I don't expect this to be a priority, but it would be nice to have something that worked. The first problem I found (a while ago) was that some of the binary graphics drivers wouldn't work at all. For example, the m64 driver (which is what might drive the graphics in my SunBlade 2000) uses hat_getkpfnum which was removed from illumos courtesy of bug 536. Graphics drivers that load often simply don't work, and getting an X server to start is a bit of a nightmare. After far too much manual fiddling I did manage to get a twm desktop running on the aforementioned SunBlade 1500, but don't expect native graphics support to improve any time soon.

Applications is another matter, there's no reason you couldn't run at least some applications on a SPARC system and display them back on your desktop machine. After all, X11 is a network display protocol (despite all the effort to eradicate that and turn it into a local-only display protocol). Or run a VNC server and access that remotely. So I've started (but not finished) building up the components for useful applications.

I haven't yet got an ISO image. That's likely to be a while, but if you have an existing SPARC system running Tribblix m16 then the upgrade to m18 ought to work. Although I would recommend a couple of changes to the procedure if you're going to try this:

• Refresh and update everything: 'zap refresh ; zap update-overlay -a'
• Download the current upgrade script from github and run that script in place of 'zap upgrade'
• After booting into the newly updated BE, refresh and update everything again, just to make sure you're up to date