A:
The hardware compatibility list (HCL) shows the specific hardware that is supported.
The Solaris 9 HCL was just recently launched which now allows for users to
submit systems that they have found to work.
Additionally, most of the items in the Solaris 8 HCL continue to
be compatible with the Solaris 9 OS.
A:
The definitions of the different HCL levels can be found here.
The Certified Test Suite level allows anyone to download a test suite and
submit the results back to Sun.
Currently, the test suite is in the early release stages and is not available
for individual components. Look for enhancements to this program in the coming months.
Q: I am attempting to install Solaris 9 12/02 on a SuperMicro 6010H and cannot
get the network to come up. I installed Solaris 8 with no issues. I logged
into the box, touched notrouter, vi'd defaultgateway and all is well. Under 9, I
do a netstat -r and it lists my gateway but when I ping, I get a network
unreachable error. What changed between 8 and 9 to warrant such and error?
A:
Nothing should have changed that would affect this. The cause may be a bit
too complex for me to answer with just this info and a single reply. Take a
look here for one possible answer:
You should verify with 'ifconfig -a' that your netmasks and IP address are
correctly configured, because it sounds like it thinks you are on a different
subnet than your gateway.
You should also try snooping network traffic on that system to see what is
going on. That can help diagnose some problems with NIC configurations.
Q: What is the x86 Solaris 9 replacement for fbconfig?
How do you configure the screen size in x86 Solaris 9?
A:
All of this is done through /usr/sbin/kdmconfig for all the video cards that
we support. We have even ported over some of the XFree86 video card DDX
modules as part of the XFree86 Porting Kit. These are also configured with
kdmconfig, where if you installed the full XFree86 packager from xfree86.org
you would have to use their configuration methods, which frankly are not as
simple as kdmconfig.
The VESA driver from XFree86 4.2.0 is already available in Solaris 9 X86
and in the current Solaris 8 video patch. It will handle many types of video
devices by using BIOS calls. If your particular video device is not directly
supported you should try using the VESA driver as a last resort. It actually
has very decent performance, considering it uses the BIOS.
Some newer DDX modules from the 4.3.1 XFree86 distribution have been added by
a member of the X86 user community. This adds some newer video cards to the
list of supported models. That can be found here:
So now you not only know how to configure video, but where to find all the
latest drivers available for Solaris. Note that USB mice and XFree86 drivers
are not automatically detected for use by your system. You must manually
select them.
Q: Will there be hardware added to the HCL, or will the list stay as is?
If the list does grow with time, in you opinion, what priority does Sun
give to writing drivers for new hardware?
A:
The list will grow with time, although some older devices may be dropped
as well. We have already dropped support for EISA, MCA, and VESA bus
devices. Also, many ISA network and SCSI devices were dropped as they are
no longer manufactured and most X86 systems now often have nothing except
PCI slots in them.
Sun is currently staffing up for internal Solaris X86 driver development.
We are also working with various hardware vendors that do their own driver
development to qualify and incorporate their drivers onto the Solaris media
so that it is available during installation.
Further, we are trying to get IHVs that may have never developed Solaris
drivers to work with us on either developing one on their own with Sun's
help, or helping us write a driver for their hardware.
Right now this is mostly limitted to hardware that is in X86 systems that
Sun is selling or planning to sell. But since we are picking hardware that
has common components used on many systems this will enable many non-Sun
systems to work with Solaris X86.
Two examples you will see are in the Solaris 9 Update 4, which I think it
due out in the July/August timeframe. The V60x and V65x have the Intel Gb
Ethernet and Adaptec Ultra-320 SCSI devices in them. The driver for those
devices will be in that update of Solaris and were written by those
companies, not by Sun. This is a very good example of Sun leveraging the
device-specific expertise of the hardware manufacturer to get a driver out
for Solaris.
Ideally this will give us a quicker time-to-market for needed drivers. As
the IHVs gain Solaris driver expertise the hope is that they will produce
drivers for Solaris the same way they do now for Linux and Windows.
Q: 1. What are all the motherboards and procesors that Solaris can install on?
2. I dont have a bootable CD? In that case how can in install Solaris on x86?
A:
Answer #1:
All that information is in the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) that is
pointed to in question #1 here. The Solaris 8 HCL will have some older
items and devices in it.
The Solaris 9 HCL will have some more current items in it, both Sun
Certified and user submitted items. So it is best to consider both sources.
Everything listed in the Solaris 8 HCL is supported in Solaris 9.
As for CPUs that we support you can use everything from a Pentium to a
Pentium IV Xeon with hyperthreading. We also run on all the AMD and some of
the other X86-style CPUs. Solaris X86 has even been made to run on the new
AMD Opteron (in 32-bit compatible mode). Obviously, consider using a system
known to work unless you are willing to be the first one on the block to try
and get it working on a new motherboard.
Answer #2:
If you do have a CD drive, but it simply is not a bootable device, you
should be booting from the floppy. An image of the floppy is one the
Solaris 1 of 2 CDROM. Look for the d1_image file and copy it to a floppy
using dd or an equivalent utility.
Without a CD or DVD drive your next best option is a network installation.
For this there are two methods.
Use a network device for which Solaris has a realmode driver it can use
for booting from a network image server.
Use a network device that supports PXE booting that Solaris can use for
booting from a network image server.
As you can see these are both pretty similar options. It will require that
you have an existing network install server on your local subnet. This has
to be a Solaris system, but can be either SPARC or X86. Many of our field
engineers have laptops setup to act as installation servers for both SPARC
and X86.
The PXE support is new to Solaris and does have some bugs that are being
addressed in Solaris 9 updates. So if you have an issue with PXE booting
check for bug fixes that might have addressed it and apply them to your
install server. It might also require a newer version of Solaris X86 for
your installation. Some fixes are coming out in the Update 4 version to fix
issues with the V60x & V65x systems, for example.
For doing network installations check http://docs.sun.com for how to set up
an installation server.
Q: I want to buy a v65x because my users want speed machines, but I
hesitate to install Solaris x86 or linux. Can you say if you did some
benches on the same machine, with Solaris x86 or linux?
Can we compare memory management on Solaris x86 and Solaris Sparc?
Actually, I use Solaris x86 on my Dell laptop, but I have no sound
because chipset ess maestro is not supported. What sort of work is
porting linux driver on Solaris x86? Do you have to rewrite it all from scratch?
A:
I have broken up your questions here so I can answer them seperately:
1) Performance:
We have done some internal benchmarking of Linux vs. Solaris. I do not
think any of them have been published, but I can say that for some item we
found that Solaris was faster and for others Linux was faster. It has even
spurred us to test at a much lower level than just an application benchmark.
We are now testing at the level of individual calls into libraries and the
various system calls and internal routines.
The LX50 and the V60x/V65x have made it much easier to compare identical
systems in this way, but we also test SPARC systems in this comparison.
Several areas within Solaris where there was a large gap in performance
have already been addressed and more are with every update.
For example: Earlier versions of the Solaris UFS were much slower than the
EXTFS used by some Linux systems. Part of that was because of the security
features to help prevent data loss and corruption in our UFS, which EXTFS
does not have. I have been told by many sources that our current UFS with
logging enabled that is in Solaris 9 outperforms EXTFS on the same system.
Since file I/O is a major bottleneck in most situations and data integrity
is improved with the use of the logging feature, this is a major benefit of
using Solaris vs. Linux.
2) Memory management
The methods used between SPARC and X86 systems really do not compare too well.
SPARC uses a flat memory model and every device that does DMA uses the same
page tables as the CPU. This allows a large block I/O operation to be done
as a single operation. Also, SPARC is now 64-bit, which allows for a much
larger user space by placing the kernel at the top of the 64-bit address
space.
X86 on the other hand suffers a bit from it's old segmented heritage. The
page tables are more involved, plus they are not available to devices for
doing DMA. This means that X86 drivers must implement what is known as the
scatter-gather method. Say you had to read 128K buffer in from disk. It
could be as many as 32 4k pages that are scattered across all of physical
memory, none of them being consecutive. That means the DMA must be done as
32 different operations to those physical locations, plus the driver had to
translate the logical memory address into a physical memory address just to
set up the DMA operation. This adds considerably to the overhead for doing
I/O operations on X86 vs. SPARC.
Finally, the X86 is a 32-bit address space. This forces us to place the
kernel in the upper part of the 32-bit virtual address space. This greatly
reduces the amount of space available for a user application vs. the 64-bit
address space on SPARC. This may not sound like much of a limitation, but
there are applications out there that need over 4GB of address space just
for the application. Even so, our application space in Solaris is larger
than that for Linux (I am told), because Linux has their kernel even lower
in the virtual address space.
Note that we do support over 4GB of physical RAM on Solaris X86. In theory
we support up to the maximum, which is 64GB of physical memory. In reality
I have never heard of an X86 system that supported that much RAM. But I do
have more than one system in my lab that has 8GB in it.
This company writes sound drivers for both Linux and Solaris. You can't do
a straight port from Linux to Solaris, because the framework needed to handle
audio is too different. This company has gotten around that by writing some
middleware that acts as an interface between their hardware drivers and the
OS audio framework.
I do see ESS Maestro (several versions) listed there. I know them and they
have a very good reputation. If sound is important for you, and since you
are using this as a desktop it probably is, it is probably worth buying
their product. Sun has not done much work with sound devices because we are
primarily concentrated on servers in the X86 market, where sound is not an
issue.
Q: I have a Compaq Presario 5670 and it has an onboard Intel 21143-Based PCI Fast
Ethernet adapter that doesn't agree with Solaris8_x86 10/01. If I include the
device the machine panics. Is there a way to make my Compaq run with network
support? Solaris9_x86?
A:
If our dnet driver does not support it then you might look here:
But if it is being recognized as a dnet device that we support then you have
another problem. There was no fixes done to that driver since Solaris 7, so
no bugs were filed and no new devices were added.
AFAIK there are no currently shipping cards with those chips on them. From
what I heard the rights were sold to Adaptec, who then sold them to Intel.
Since Intel has their own network devices that effectively killed all the
cards that were being made using these Digital chips.
If I knew what the panic looked like I might be able to tell you more. It
could be caused by something else other than the dnet driver. Try booting
with kadb and seeing that the stack trace shows ($c command). That will be
able to tell you if the panic happens in the driver or elsewhere.
Q: How does one manage Solaris x86 in a lights out environment? Can it provide
serial console access as Solaris on Sparc can?
A:
It can provide a serial console in an almost identical manner to SPARC.
You use eeprom to set the input-device and out-device to the serial port, the
same way you do for SPARC.
The one difference is that on most X86 system you do not have a way to set
the BIOS to use the serial port. Some server systems, like our LX50, do have
this capability. Setting that lets you see all the POST messages and even
to configure the BIOS via the serial port.
I have not tried a V60x or V65x yet, but I assume they are the same. You
can not expect this type of functionality at the BIOS level for a non-server
X86 box though. I certainly have never seen it on anything but a system
that was designed to be a server.
Q: What are the benifits of Solaris on x86? Surely the managment issues of PC
hardware negate any cost benifits?
A:
For one thing the cost of the hardware is much lower. This is commodity
hardware in many respects, so it benefits from the scale of manufacturing
that happens for the PC marketplace.
A second benefit is, quite frankly, speed. A single or dual CPU X86 box will
outperform a single or dual SPARC box for most things, providing they are
equipped similarly. So it makes an outstanding desktop system. It also will
be a better number cruncher, both because of raw CPU speed and because the
floating point performance was more highly optimized in the PC market for the
CPUs that are used there.
Where it does not do well is where I/O speed is needed, where large amounts of
RAM are required, or where a lot of CPUs working at nearly full speed can be
used. The X86 systems simply do not compare with SPARC in those areas.
I am not sure what you mean by "hardware management" issues here. You are
not able to do CPU or memory replacement with X86 the way you can on some of
the SPARC systems, such as swapping out bad parts while the system is still
running. Similarly, we do not handle power management on X86 very well at
this time, although I do expect that to change.
I also think the SPARC hardware is more rugged and more reliable than X86.
Sun also has a better parts replacement arrangement (at this time) for SPARC
than they do for X86 from what I hear.
So there are tradeoffs to consider on both sides. Ideally you might want to
consider having SPARC servers for the backend and X86 desktops on the front
for users. That could strike the best balance of price and performance. It
all depends on what you intend to use it for.
Q: What are the performance drawbacks if any running Solaris on an OS with less
processor side caching? For instance the Xeon chip might have 1mb of cache
whereas a RISC has 4-8mb. What types of software would be affected by a change
like this?
A:
First let me say I am not an expert in this, but this is how I understand it
from talking with those that are.
The obvious ones benefits and drawbacks, certainly. A larger cache means
that more memory accesses will hit the cache than miss it. But that is the
simplistic view.
If you are talking about a multi-CPU system you also have issues of cache
consistancy to deal with. For large caches with large numbers of CPUs this
can amount to considerable overhead, depending on the design of the cache
system being used.
Another issue is how is the cache filled? I think it was with the first
Pentiums that they implemented burst reads to fill the cache. This reduced
the time the bus was busy reading from memory and allowed memory designs to
be optimized to read consecutive addresses quickly. SPARC has a similar way
of filling it's cache.
Then there is also the issue of having specialized cache types. Data and
code caches for example. So a different mixture of these types would give
benefits to some code and not to others.
The software that benefits most from a larger cache is precisely what we are
talking about here, a multi-user, multi-threaded operating environment.
Older PCs didn't need large caches, because they (mostly) ran Microsoft OSes
like MS-DOS and Windows. With those systems you typically executed
sequential code segments with occassional branches off to more sequential
code. There was typically only a single task doing any real work.
With Solaris, Linux, or even (cough) Windows NT/2000/XP servers you are now
running many programs and possibly many users simultaneously. This means
the code you are running is scattered throughout memory and you are doing a
lot of context switches between them. This requires a larger cache to
reduce main memory accesses, which are quite slow compared to the CPU
itself, and it can also benefit from a different cache design compared to
the older ones.
The SPARC cache was designed for this type of environment. The X86 CPUs are
now better, but not quite as good. The Xeons probably have a cache design
that handles it better than the non-Xeon versions. I have not verified
that, but I will bet you will find it says so on the Intel web site.
Q: Do you have any idea why Sun charges $20 for downloading Solarisx86 when SPARC is free? Any plans to change this?
A:
As a matter of fact I do. This has to do with the "Secret Six" from the
Solaris X86 community having met with the Sun Executives last year after the
announcement that Solaris X86 development was being put on hold. Because at
the time of the announcement they had also removed the free download of the
CDROM images for Solaris X86, while leaving Solaris SPARC available.
Prior to the meeting it had been brought up that Sun had estimated their
cost for the system and it's maintainence that handled the downloads to be
close to $20. I think somewhere around $17 or so. So the commmunity had
discussed it before the meeting and proposed at the meeting that Sun should
make it $20 to cover their costs.
Remember that Sun had announced previously that there were will over
1,000,000 downloads of Solaris. That is for both SPARC and X86 I think, but
I am certain the majority were for X86 and that was only about halfway into
the period that downloads were available, so let's say that 1,000,000 actual
downloads of Solaris X86 took place.
That represented (at $20 each) $20,000,000 to Sun and was still much less
than the cost of buying a copy of Linux or any other OS media. Of course
many of those might have been retries from failed downloads and others were
from people that just wanted to try it and would not have done so if it cost
anything. But it was still a substantial amount of lost revenue that would
have made providing it self-supporting.
I personally think we should be charging for the SPARC ones as well and for
the very same reasons. Those downloads are from people that already own a
SPARC system, either one we sold them or one they got on the grey market (I
personally own several I bought on eBay).
Now... having said that, there is a change coming. I can't say specifically
what it is yet, since it has not yet been announced. All I can say is that
they will now be the same for both SPARC and X86. One more thing that shows
that Sun is truly making Solaris for SPARC and X86 the same across the
board. The change will happen during a future update release of Solaris 9.
Q: How do I get the Adaptec 39320 card to work under Solaris 9 x86?
Adaptec provides a driver up to Solaris 8.
Sun references a SUNWradpu320 package which I cannot find in my distribution nor online.
Solaris 9 x86 12/02 runs on my box but its whole purpose was to be a file server so we need SCSI.
A:
That driver will be in the next Solaris 9 update, which is due out in July
or August. It is used by the V60x and V65x systems.
Now I have not tried this, but you might be able to make the Solaris 8 one
work in the meantime. The download from Adaptec should be an ITU floppy
image, correct? All you have to do is rename the directory on the ITU under
the DU directory from SOL_28 to SOL_29 and it will treat it as a Solaris 9
ITU. You can also copy it to a SOL_29 directory and have one that will say
it works for Solaris 8 and Solaris 9.
There is no guarantee that the driver will function correctly for Solaris 9,
of course. But if it does this will get you by until the next Update.
Try this at your own risk!
Follow Up:
A followup question: In the meantime, I did install Solaris 8 on that
box and discovered both Solaris 8 and 9 kernel panics when it tries a
device reconfiguration (boot -r). I tried this BEFORE and AFTER
installing the adaptec driver.
Any hope here with this hardware? (SuperMicro motherboard X5DP8-G2)
Well I did warn you it was a risk, although if it panics on Solaris 8 you
are probably seeing something else. So I took a look at the specs for the
motherboard.
First off let me say, I want one for home! #8^)
For the Intel Gb NIC you will need the e1000g driver. That is available for
Solaris 8 from the Intel web site and like the Adaptec Ultra320 driver it
will be in Solaris 9 Update 4 due out this summer. The ATI Rage XL graphics
chip should be supported already, as we have the same chip in the LX50. It
sounds like it is very similar to the V60x and V65x motherboards that are
coming out with Update 4 this summer.
The one thing I did notice is our new system have the E7500 chipset and this
board has the E7501 chipset. A small difference, but it might be a problem
to be considered.
The best thing to do would be to boot with kadb and when it panics get a
stack trace ($c) to determine just where it is having a problem. Be sure to
be in command line mode, not in GUI mode, when using kadb. This should help
you nail down just where the issue lies in your system.
Here are some things to consider trying and they apply to many other install
problems with Solaris on non-certified systems:
Make sure you are on the latest BIOS. I do this for all my systems,
even those I put Windows on. My latest motherboard required it to even
have a chance of being stable due to bugs in the BIOS itself.
Make sure you have Plug-N-Play OS disabled in your BIOS. We support PNP
for identifying devices, but enabling this means we have to fully
configure them and Solaris does not do that (yet).
Are you using USB for your keyboard? (USB support has languished in the
Solaris X86 product since it was introduced in Solaris 8, but it is being
actively worked on to bring it up to date now. In the meantime it can
trigger several known bugs)
Try disabling USB legacy support in the BIOS first.
Try using a PS/2 keyboard and disabling USB altogether.
Disable ACPI (we are improving ACPI support in Solaris, but it can cause
some problems. This can help determine if it is a factor and generally
does not hurt the system if it is disabled)
Disable it in the BIOS, if it has that capability (best option).
Use eeprom to set acpi-user-options to a value of 0x2 and reboot
(second best option).
Note that this may make your hyperthreaded CPUs appear as single
CPUs to Solaris. Improved hyperthreaded CPU support is coming.
Q: What is the primary objective of Solaris for x86? Since it runs on x86 platforms,
do you see Solaris x86 competing against competitive *nix platforms such as Linux?
A:
This white paper might help explain our strategy in that regard:
I have not personally used Linux, but many in the Solaris X86 community have
used both and so has my older son. The best way that Solaris X86 competes
right now is that it scales much better for a multi-CPU system and it is
much more robust than Linux.
The other factor to consider is support. If you buy a Sun box with Solaris
X86 on it, we will fix any problem you come up with. One problem with Linux
is that you may get into a finger pointing contest where one vendor tries to
blame the other, either hardware or software. You often have the same issue
with that other company, you know, the one up in Redmond...
I have also heard of numerous problems with incompatible libraries from one
software package causing problems with an existing one and so on. Open
software is great in some ways, but it is very unorganized and not really
coordinated.
With Solaris we have already done all the integration effort to prevent that
from happening with the various OpenWare items we have included or that are
on our companion CDROM.
We offer regular updates with new features that you can check out and actually
schedule your rollouts in your organization. Linux comes out whenever they
fell like it and you may now have to update all your extra applications and
start testing all over again to see if they break. Solaris is extremely
backwards compatible with previous versions.
All that adds up to something that is more dependable for the long term,
which is what most corporations, or the Navy in your case, desires.
The one thing we lack compared to Linux is the wide range of applications.
That is being addressed through various means. I know many people that use
lxrun to run Linux applications right out of the box. But we hope to make
Solaris, both SPARC and X86 more compatible with Linux so that ISVs can do a
port of their software to Solaris at the same time as their Linux versions.
Q: How is the ISV area growing? Is Sun still working to bring more ISVs into the Solaris x86 area.
A:
Sun is very actively persuing ISVs, both for Solaris in general and for X86
in particular if they already offer a Solaris SPARC product. At a recent
talk where Sun and Oracle announced Oracle porting their 9i product to the
Solaris X86 OE they showed over 300 ISVs working on Solaris X86 products.
I just heard of a special deal that may be offered soon to registered
Solaris devlopers to help encourage development of Solaris X86 software. It
has not been announced yet, so I assume it has not yet been finalized. To
register you can go to:
You can register on there for free and get E-mail newsletters of news items
that are relevant to the development community and I am sure when this offer
is made available it will be in there as well. They are always having some
sort of announcement in there, whether it is for a new version of software
or a special offer to purchase something. It is well worth the bandwidth.
Q: What are Sun's plans for the mobile/desktop Solaris x86 area?
A:
At the moment we have obviously been concentrating on the server arena, as
you can tell by the hardware Sun is selling.
There are several reasons why that is the case, not the least of which is
that the group bringing out our Linux offerring was bringing out such
products. So doing so allowed us to leverage their work in that area.
If you look at the Solaris 9 HCL pages you will see that we have already
certified a laptop:
We are working on supporting much newer laptops now. I just saw a new one
based on the Centrino design that looks very cool today that they will be
working on getting supported in a future Update.
As a desktop platform Solaris X86 needs to get more ISVs to provide support
for their applications, which was discussed in another posting. The next
Solaris 9 Update, due in the July/August period will make Gnome 2.0 part of
the standard Solaris distribution. This brings a wealth of desktop
functionality to Solaris, as well as some of the pieces that ISVs that write
for Linux need.
I think after that version is out we will start to see the desktop for
Solaris X86 take on a more important place in the scheme of things. It will
take time for momentum to build up, of course.
Check with me at this time next year and I'll bet you will find a much wider
and diverse software offering for Solaris X86 and probably for Solaris SPARC
as well because of Gnome being available for it.
Q:
When will we eventually see a new version of GNOME that will include Evolution 1.4?
Also, StarOffice 6.1 beta isn't available for x86, has SUN dropped support for it?
A:
Gnome 2.0 will be in the next update of Solaris 9, due out in July/August.
I think Evolution will be part of that, but I do not know if it is on the
Companion CD or one of the standard Solaris packages. I also am not sure
what version it will be. But you will be seeing Evolution for Solaris at
some point in the near future. I haven't been following it closely enough
to know for certain. I am still using dtmail myself, but looking forward
to comparing Evolution, Mozilla, and Netscape for my future E-mail client.
The problem with Star Office 6.1 was the (relatively) quick way we changed
our position with Solaris X86. Development for the other versions was being
done when Solaris X86 was turned back on, so naturally the Solaris X86 one
is not in the same state. They needed to add staff for development and
testing, as well as for supporting it.
Probably, and I am just guessing here, you will see an OpenOffice version
for Solaris X86 and the 6.1 version will come later. The other possibility
is that they might skip 6.1 for Solaris X86 and come out with 6.2 for it at
the same time as the other platforms. Depending on what works out best with
the workforce and schedules they have to meet.
You can see something similar with our Forte compilers. We have skipped
version 7 and gone on to version 8. That is how the compiler group chose to
handle doing support for Solaris X86 and still maintain their project goals.
We will have to wait and see exactly how the StarOffice group does it.
Q: Many more people I've talked to are interested in this same set or O/S's.
Wouldn't it be great to 'package' a solution for this request?
I want to load solaris first, then Linux Red Hat 9.0, then 2000 Server, then XP Professional. How difficult would this be?
Does the Solaris x86 solution allow me to have other O/S's on my home system?
A:
There is an excellent web site that covers this:
The biggest issue comes with Linux and Solaris, because the ID used by
Solaris is also the ID used by Linux for it's swap partition. This web
site tells you how to avoid that problem.
Personally, I like to put Solaris on it's own disk (I buy my system with an
eye towards having lots of disk - isn't SCSI grand?) and keep Windows, if I
have it on the system, on the primary disk. Unlike Linux or Solaris,
Windows insists on booting from the Primary disk.
Solaris has it's own boot manager and it is enough to boot another OS if you
don't want to bother with multiple disks. But Solaris is always the default
and you can't change that like you can with other boot managers. Having
Solaris on a disk by itself means you don't see that boot manager. It only
comes up if there are other fdisk paritions on the same disk as Solaris.
Just as an example I have a test system I use that has Windows 98 on it, to
host System Commander, the boot manager I use. It then has versions of
Solaris from 2.5.1 up to early builds of 10. This way I can test a fix I do
for all versions of Solaris that it applies to without changing my hardware.
I have also had Linux on there, but it was deleted when I needed space for
Solaris 10. So yes, they can co-exist quite nicely.
My laptop has Solaris 8 and Windows 98 on it in a dual boot setup, also.
Q:
I want to write a driver for Solaris x86, but I need hardware specifications
from the vendor. Is there any way Sun can facilitate things for people looking
to write drivers, to get in contact with "the right people" in various
corporations?
A:
Well Sun is trying to get IHVs to write drivers for Solaris and I am certain
some of them are limitted in either (or both) manpower and experience in
doing so. This is especially true right now when many companies have been
cutting back to save on costs.
It might be worthwhile to consider having registered developers that are
interested in do that available that Sun can put an IHV in contact with. It
sounds like a great way to leverage our Solaris development community for
the benefit of all.
If they are going to consider doing that you will probably hear of it first
if you are a registered developer. So be sure you have done so at:
