Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Bill Lavender <[email protected]> · Wed, 16 Apr 2014 17:05:29 -0500

VirtualBox and VMware both list Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 as supported
guest operating systems for both the x86 and x86_64 versions.  I have
not tried VirtualBox for this, but VMware support of Solaris guests
has worked just fine for me.  Note that I am _not_ volunteering to support
EPICS builds on Solaris, since nobody I work with has used Solaris for
this since sometime early in the 2000s.  I am just pointing out that you
do not need an actual, physical workstation to test with.  Virtualization
works just fine.

As an aside, QEMU actually can run Solaris SPARC guest operating systems.
Unfortunately, it only fully supports the 32-bit version of the SPARC
architecture, so the newest Solaris you can run on it is Solaris 8.  I
suspect that Solaris 8 is probably too old for you to care about it anymore,
but I figured that there was no harm in mentioning it.

Bill Lavender

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 12:09:55PM -0500, Andrew Johnson wrote:
> The APS has been moving away from using Solaris for several years.
> Currently we have about 40 Solaris SPARC workstations left in active
> use, and now just 2 Solaris x86 workstations remain.
> 
> One of those 2 is the workstation that we (Janet Anderson and I) use for
> testing EPICS builds of the solaris-x86 and solaris-x86_64 targets,
> while the other is the workstation belonging to our IT group for
> supporting the first. As a result we are about to lose our ability to
> build, test and support EPICS on Solaris x86 systems.
> 
> If anyone is currently using the EPICS solaris-x86 host architectures
> please let me know; you will have to take on the responsibility for
> building and testing EPICS Base on these architectures in the future. If
> nobody responds we will remove the configuration files for these
> architectures from future releases of EPICS Base and delete them from
> the list of supported targets.
> 
> Our ability to support EPICS on Solaris SPARC will continue for some
> time (my guess is it will be at least a year, probably more) until the
> other technical groups can upgrade or replace those parts of the APS
> Accelerator control system that still rely on Solaris.
> 
> - Andrew
> -- 
> Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human
> intelligence long enough to get money from it. -- Stephen Leacock

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System