Building Sage on Solaris 10 (SPARC)
Sage has been reliably on Solaris 10 on the SPARC architecture since around the start of 2010. This Wiki page describes building Sage on SPARC hardware. For building Sage on Solaris x86, see http://wiki.sagemath.org/Solaris86
Sage has been built on several Solaris 10 SPARC systems, ranging from old machines to current models and from the first release of Solaris 10 (03/2005 edition) to (05/2009 edition). It should build on latest Solaris 10 too. Unlike Linux, Solaris has excellent backwards compatibility, so if a version build on one release of Solaris, it is almost guaranteed to build on a more recent version. Specific hardware/software combinations on which Sage has been built are
Sun T5240 CoolThreads server with:
- 2 x 1167 MHz T2+ Coolthreads processors
- 16 cores
- 128 threads
- 32 GB RAM
- Solaris 10 update 6 (05/2009 edition).
- A Sun Blade 2000 workstation with:
- 2 x 1200 MHz UltraSPARC III+ processors.
- 8 GB RAM
- Solaris 10 update 7 (05/2009 release)
- Sun Netra T1 server with:
- 1 x 500 MHz UltraSPARC-IIe processor
- 1536 MB RAM
- Solaris 10 03/2005 (the very first Solaris 10 release).
- A Sun Blade 1000 workstation with:
- 2 x 900 MHz UltraSPARC III+ processors.
- 2 GB RAM
- Solaris 10 03/2005 (the very first Solaris 10 release).
Sage will run in a Solaris zone, so if you want to make a public access server like http://t2nb.math.washington.edu:8080/, with negligible security risks, then you can do so.
There are a couple of problems with the build on Solaris 10 SPARC, all of which we hope to resolve.
Only GCC >= 4.0.1 can be used to build Sage. Supporting Sun Studio is an aim, but it's unlikely to happen soon.
- Sage builds perfectly as a 32-bit application, but as a 64-bit application it is not working well. You can perform some calculations, but it is very unstable and crashes too often to make it a usable system. This should be fixed in 2011.