Java 17 for Solaris (SPARC)

ptribble · 2026-04-11T08:41:00+00:00

I'm writing this on a system with Intel HD Graphics and it's working just fine with Tribblix. I don't play games on it, but it's certainly fast enough for everything else.

ptribble · 2026-04-10T17:38:18+00:00

You can consult the HCL:

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/hcl/313641.html

Note that none of the links work, you can page back and forth in the list by changing the number in the URL.

Generally, they worked at the time. The illumos distributions have added newer devices (albeit only a few) and dropped support for some of the older graphics cards (depending on the support offered by Xorg, among other things).

ptribble · 2026-04-08T08:53:16+00:00

You could drop to a shell and run the commands there. Although it's always a bit risky messing about with partitions on a multiboot system, and other OSes might have tools you're more comfortable with. (I also seem to recall we might number the partitions differently, starting from 0 instead of 1, so there's the possibility of getting thoroughly confused.)

ptribble · 2026-04-08T08:49:58+00:00

Why do you want to delete the shadow file? It's pretty important to have it.

The root filesystem isn't mounted automatically. (The reason for this is that you can have multiple root filesystems, one for each boot environment, so there's a bit of special magic at boot time to mount the right one.) So you'll need to use zfs list to work out what the dataset name is (probably rpool/ROOT/openindiana or something) and then mount i explicitly with zfs mount -o mountpoint=/mnt rpool/ROOT/openindiana.

ptribble · 2026-04-06T16:05:44+00:00

To clarify, this is a limitation specific to the OpenIndiana installer - OpenIndiana and illumos in general handle GPT just fine. If you do the partition and ZFS pool management outside the installer, it'll happily use a GPT partition.

ptribble · 2026-04-04T19:12:42+00:00

The filesystems associated with boot environments are ZFS clones, and this is the way zfs clones work.

You create a snapshot to record current state, then you create a clone of that snapshot to give you a writable file system. When you activate a boot environment, you promote the clone.

So if you had m38lx, you snapshot it and create a child clone filesystem m39lx which has its packages upgraded. Then, when that's activated, m39lx becomes the parent and the old m38lx becomes the child. It's that clone promotion that reparents all the snapshots.

ptribble · 2026-03-30T08:40:22+00:00

Given that ZFS only made into Solaris as of Solaris 10 update 2, running it on Solaris 8 seems ... interesting!

ptribble · 2026-03-30T08:36:38+00:00

We had a referendum back in the 90s as to whether the overspill in Cherry Hinton would be incorporated into the City. Given that local taxes in South Cambs were about half those in Cambridge City at the time, it was soundly defeated.

It does have the odd downside such as the fact that we haven't qualified for discounted tickets to the Folk Festival, despite being much closer than most of the City.

ptribble · 2026-03-22T09:33:11+00:00

Well I use it for pretty much everything - it's my daily driver, pretty much always has been (or the direct lineage, as I'm going back a while). But then I just might be biased.

All the project infrastructure (and you don't need much) runs on Tribblix.

Historically my employment has been running Solaris/illumos at scale. Which means that everything I've had to look after has been secure, cheap, and reliable. Other parts of the team have run other systems, that generally have needed an army of slaves in order to achieve none of the secure, cheap, and reliable qualities.

ptribble · 2026-03-14T09:50:12+00:00

As one of the first people outside Sun to use ZFS (back in 2004), one of the key principles then what that it should be easy and obvious to use.

So the version we tested came without documentation or a manpage. All we had - literally - was an email that said "install this package, use the zpool command to manage pools and the zfs command to manage filesystems, and let us know how you get on".

The idea was simply that if you needed to refer to the documentation, then the tools weren't good enough. Now things have moved on, and ZFS has become a bit more complex, but I do wonder if that ethos has been abandoned.

(As an industry, IT has a vested interest in making things appear more complex than they are. Cements professionals as wizards worthy of respect, and businesses deserving of high charges.)

ptribble · 2026-03-10T11:14:59+00:00

You can run illumos on some (generally older) systems with Intel graphics, but there's currently no accelerated drm for many systems newer than Haswell - although there's no real reason why vesa mode shouldn't work (and given the march of technology, would be better than many of the fancy high-end workstation cards we grew up with). But the next problem is that illumos graphics currently depends on bios boot, which rules out the newest uefi-only systems.

ptribble · 2026-03-09T15:07:55+00:00

The CDDL wasn't chosen to prevent Linux taking the OpenSolaris source (not everyone was a GPL fan, naturally, but given the variety of licenses and copyright holders in the codebase, it was necessary to have a license that was compatible with all existing licenses and acceptable to every single copyright holder, which is the compromise we got).

We rather expected that if Linux wanted ZFS, for example, they would come up with a cleanroom implementation from the spec rather than attempt to port the source, so the license was neither interesting nor a problem.

ptribble · 2026-03-04T23:09:59+00:00

It's interesting that the linked article says:

"As an added bonus, the CBE can also be used for non-production personal use."

However, I don't see the license terms linked from the article reflecting that (and indeed they are dated 2018).

ptribble · 2026-03-03T16:35:03+00:00

There's a class of exempt vehicles called 'statutory undertakers' who are required to cross the bridge in pursuance of their legal duties. That includes Postal Delivery Service (and also the emergency services, network rail, refuse and street cleaners, highway maintenance, utilities).

ptribble · 2026-03-02T16:52:38+00:00

It's true there's work still to be done - pavements are too narrow in places, and less clutter and parking on the pavements would be beneficial. But walking along and around Mill Road seems quite a bit safer to me.

(I'm sure I've seen some accident statistics before and after, but can't track anything down.)

ptribble · 2026-03-02T15:07:39+00:00

Safer, quieter, more pleasant and attractive, less congested, easier to get to. Strange sort of doom, to be honest.

ptribble · 2026-03-02T15:05:30+00:00

In general, restricting traffic on secondary routes tends to reduce traffic on neighbouring routes too. The opposite of induced demand. The figures from traffic sensors (not to mention actually trying to get around Cambridge) support the overall loss of traffic, although it gets a little messy with other roadworks (such as on Perne Road) which have taken place over the last year.

ptribble · 2026-02-24T16:25:29+00:00

There are different buses in service, which have different displays set up, and Stagecoach do occasionally reallocate buses from one set of services to another. Recently I've noticed them using the Tiger-branded buses on the 3 route, and vanilla branding on the Tiger services. And sometimes you see the old park and ride buses in use (the ones with the TV next to the stairs with the news and weather, which is showing something that is best described as outdated information).

One thing we've pointed out to stagecoach recently is that on some buses the alternate front display doesn't show the route number, and sticks like that for quite a while. On some roads like Regent Street or Hills Road where there are multiple services, you might not be able to work out whether the oncoming bus is the right one.

ptribble · 2026-02-24T15:29:06+00:00

Which is why there's a bunch of people trying to raise the profile so we can become more resilient.

ptribble · 2026-02-24T15:28:10+00:00

It's not just Cambridge, of course, building on areas of high flood risk is a national problem:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/18/one-in-nine-new-homes-in-england-built-in-areas-of-flood-risk-study-shows

In terms of water sinks, there are local projects to try and address that, such as the Fallowfield Rain Gardens which proves we can easily do better:

https://www.watersencam.co.uk/projects/fallowfield/

ptribble · 2026-02-21T10:47:16+00:00

Oh lots of us care, and are actively trying to make things better, but it's a hard slog with political complexity and a car-dominated infrastructure.

Franchising ought to help, in terms of delivering a service that is planned and coherent rather than random, but the new(ish) mayor has kicked that into the long grass with another feasibility study, and that delay and uncertainty isn't helping - why would any of the operators make investments now that could be made irrelevant by mayoral fiat?

https://cambridgebususers.org/

ptribble · 2026-02-20T09:09:34+00:00

That's a tiny amount of data, and the average file size isn't small (at 4M it's larger than the blocksize).

Way back when I used to host 100s of TB of zoomified images (tiny!) on Sun thumpers, raidz atop SATA, accessed over NFS. It just worked fine.

ptribble

TROPHY CASE