Our organization is currently in the middle of a multi-year project involving multiple associate-organizations migrating a large software project from Solaris 9 on SPARC to Solaris 10 on x86. I also have to admit that I am somewhat biased as I believe that Solaris is one of, if not the best, Operating System currently available. That said, while I would agree with the suggestion of contacting your Oracle Sales Rep for assistance, with malice toward no one, I would also recommend that you not actually expect much from them. About the best they will be able to suggest is that you purchase Solaris OS support contracts for your each of your systems. While that has been a difficult process for us to accomplish due to the glacial like response of Oracle Sales and the significant cost of Oracle Solaris support on non Sun branded hardware, it will be useful to you in the long run.
You don’t really describe your project so I can only give you generalities we have seen with our effort. We have not really had any issues specifically related to the move from SPARC to x86. First, you will have to recompile/relink all of your code. Solaris binary executable compatibility does not apply when going from SPARC to x86, or vice-versa. Yes, there is an endian difference, but surprising to us, it has not been the big deal we thought it would be. In fact one of our associates rewrote a large section of code to handle what they thought would be an endianess issue with reading some binary data and found they had to remove all the changes as the Solaris OS and file systems handled all the issues with the binary data without requiring changes to our code. We have found that build and other scripts, whether bourne, bash, csh, or tcsh based, have translated across with no need for any changes at all. Our biggest area of impact has been compiler implementation specific issues. Although, we were using the same software languages on both platforms, for various reasons we had to switch compiler/development environment vendors when we changed from SPARC to x86. Where we had issues were in the implementation specific choices the compiler vendors made in developing their tool sets. We found many areas where we had to make minor, and sometimes major, code changes because our software developers had relied on an implementation specific feature of the compiler. We have found that the use of Oracle VirtualBox for virtualization of developer test systems has been extremely valuable to our project. With regard to hardware: You don’t say whether your project is based on servers or on workstations. If possible I would suggest that you purchase Sun/Oracle branded hardware. It is, in my opinion way over-priced and the Oracle sales organizations apparently has some issues, but in the long run it will save you significantly in two areas: 1) Oracle Solaris OS support contracts are significantly cheaper for Sun/Oracle branded hardware and 2) you won’t have issues with hardware drivers. If you are going to be using workstations and you don’t want to purchase used equipment, you won’t be able to get Sun/Oracle branded hardware as Oracle has discontinued all SPARC and x86 workstation product lines. If that is your position I would say the two hardware areas you are likely to have issues with third party hardware are video drivers and network interface drivers. You can save yourself trouble with the video drivers by simply sticking with Nvidia based video adapters. I’m not saying Nvidia is better, it’s just they actually have Solaris drivers that are supported by an active development and support team. As to network interfaces chipsets, support for Solaris can be problematic. This is an area where you will simply have to do some research and trial and error work. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
