So, I have spent some time during last 2-3 weeks working with portage on solaris. First I emerged my fav KDE and its deps into my /usr straightaway to get me a good desktop to work with(sorry JDS folks). This created the first problem for me. libxml2 got updated by portage and pkgadd didn't know about. So, when I created a zone for portage, I got a non-existent link to libxml2.so.2.16 and the zone won't boot because svcs depends on XML.
Once I was past that it was a breeze to emerge freely in the new zone without the fear of breaking the system. Now the state of the zone is that its almost a gentoo system(/usr/sfw and partial xorg are out of the window and so is openwin) in there, with solaris kernel and some core solaris libraries. This is all good. I see two major roadblocks ahead of me and I need help from you folks in understanding where we are with respect to these: 1. opening up pkgadd so I can inject portage emerged packages into package database so that zones work properly. Is there a reason why zones are tied so closely with pkg database? with a whole-root zone creation, wouldn't it be simpler and faster if whole damn thing was just copied, instead of install-copied? I understand that when a global zone is updated, we need to perculate the changes to all non-global zones. But that's no reason for not copying all during create. This doesn't apply to non-whole-root zone creation, so we are cool there. But I still want to keep pkg database and emerge database in sync and its very easy to do if I can get hold of pkg source. Injecting into portage database is very simple and a well documented API exists for that(in fact thats what I did for many deps because I didn't want to overwrite existing binaries in "/"). 2. closed bins are a pain. Are they ever going to go away? When are we getting at least the non-debug version of those? I get terrible performance problems some of the times(reported here in a separate thread but didn't get much response from people, so assuming that everyone is a getting a jittery USB mouse and skipping in xmms during IO loads) and I just wanted to see if the non-debug version performs any better. And of course I am dying to compare the zone with the gentoo install I have on the other disk. I have very favourable (to the OS) performance comparisons so far, but I am waiting for the punch the non-debug kernel can deliver. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
