Illumos on RaspberryPi

Starting point

I have now dedicated two Raspberry Pi to work on some bare metal (C, assembler, no operating system) code. I'm hoping that publishing some of this work will help to start somekind of an effort to get the OpenSolaris ARM code out of the mothballs.

IllumOS

Obviously, long term will be to get the IllumOS kernel booting, but there is a lot of work between now and then.

On this blog

So, usually I post all the Raspberry Pi stuff on the Raspberry Pi Python Adventures blog, but I want to keep it mostly Python, with the occasional C code (swig etc). Since we are going bare metal, I think it'll be better if I track this stuff here.


@f_dion

OpenSXCE

Mystery solved

The new open sourced solaris / illumos distribution is called OpenSXCE (as in Open Solaris Express Community Edition - a clin d'oeil to the original open sourcing done by Sun and the Express program)

OpenSXCE

brought to you by Martin Bochnig 30 January 2013
Here is the first release of OpenSXCE for SPARC.
OpenSXCE 2013.01 Live for SPARC (1.2GB) -- 30 January 2013

The site is www.opensxce.org

Note the md5sum : 330a82654405c77c8cea903ed18117f2


@f_dion

Mysterious post

Hint

It has to do with illumos, solaris and sparc

What he said

Martin Bochnig via jeeves.archives.listbox.com
to discuss, developer Hi Garrett,   Release tomorrow. Status: http://twitter.com/MartinBochnig

Till then.

Martin

Git error setting certificate verify location

Problem

Under OpenIndiana, you might have  tried a git clone https://github.com/something....

and got this:

Cloning into something...
error: error setting certificate verify locations:
  CAfile: /etc/curl/curlCA
  CApath: none
 while accessing https://github.com/something....

fatal: HTTP request failed

Solution

The  fix is easy:

su
Password:

mkdir -p /etc/curl && cat /etc/certs/CA/*.pem > /etc/curl/curlCA

LZ4 for ZFS

IllumOS update

Look what just happened last night:

https://www.illumos.org/issues/3035

Description

LZ4 is a new high-speed BSD-licensed compression algorithm written by Yann Collet that delivers very high compression and decompression performance compared to lzjb (>50% faster on compression, >80% faster on decompression and around 3x faster on compression of incompressible data), while giving better compression ratio. For detailed benchmark numbers see the attached spreadsheet.

Updated by Christopher Siden about 16 hours ago

• Status changed from New to Closed

What does it mean?

In plain english, the latest IllumOS kernel has LZ4 compression available for the ZFS filesystem.

Bonjour / avahi / zeroconf

I use a few Raspberry Pi on my network. I gave them proper hostnames. I could map the DNS and all that, but I simply have avahi running on them, so I can access them with hostname.local.

Multicast

For OpenIndiana to support zeronconf, all that is needed is this:

fdion@p490s:~$ su
Password:
fdion@p490s:~# vi /etc/nsswitch.conf

[here, I just added mdns:

hosts:      files mdns dns
ipnodes:    files mdns dns

]
fdion@p490s:~# svcadm enable svc:/network/dns/multicast:default
fdion@p490s:~# exit

From that point on, I can simply use:

fdion@p490s:~$ ssh -X rpi01.local

And of course, I had to configure Avahi on the Raspberry Pi.

This also works with my Macs, I can use ssh mac01.local for example.

Virtual Box with SMF control

SMF

The Service Management Facility (SMF), first introduced in Solaris Nevada, as project Greeline, and then later in the commercial Sun Solaris, is the modern way to manage system and application services in a self healing, fault tolerant way. It replaces the old init mechanism.

Some historical background information (including all the PSARCs) on SMF is still available at opensolaris.org.

Another good read is the Joyent wiki.

VirtualBox

Alexandre Dumont published some scripts for Virtual Box, to integrate with SMF. That was in 2009. Not too long ago, I was trying to find his blog and it was down.

I just stumbled upon:
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=33249

And there is a sourceforge project for it, here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vboxsvc/

Installation

From the README, using the pkgadd in a global zone:

    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G

You probably want the -G flag. It doesn't block you from manually installing
the same package in a certain local zone where you'd use VirtualBox, but
it blocks automatic package propagation to those local zones which are
not expected to use and run VirtualBox. For us these zones are rare,
zero or one per machine (there is no definite/hardcoded limit though). YMMV.

To update the package you can simply remove the old version and install
anew, i.e.:
    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgrm COSvboxsvc
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G

A cleaner way is to use an admin file to overwrite an existing package,
i.e. one from LiveUpgrade:
    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G -a /etc/lu/zones_pkgadd_admin

Also note that this package "depends" on SUNWvbox, so that should be
installed beforehand.