solaris

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Running Sage on Sun's Solaris operating system.

This page, which is primarily maintained by David Kirkby, describes the current status of Sage on the various versions of Solaris and on various hardware (SPARC and x86).

A Solaris server running a recent version of Sage 4.5.1 can be found at http://t2nb.math.washington.edu:8000/ That's a Sun T5240 kindly donated by Sun, but installed in a Solaris zone. The situation with Sage on Solaris is now:

• 32-bit SPARC - works 100%, and has done for some time.

• 32-bit OpenSolaris on x86. Works, and passes all tests.

• 32-bit Solaris 10 on x86 - Works, and passes all tests.

• 64-bit OpenSolaris on x64. Not all parts of Sage build. The R and ECL libraries have text relocation issues. This stops R building at all, and the ECL problems stop Maxuna building.

• 64-bit SPARC. Builds fully, but very unstable, and not really usable yet. Probably are most likely due to ECL and R though there might be other issues too.

Let's now look at this in more detail.

Solaris 10 on SPARC hardware.

Sage has been reliably on Solaris 10 on the SPARC architecture since around the start of 2010. There are some web pages which say the latest version of Sage to build on Solaris is 4.3.0.1. These are outdated. I will get them corrected asap

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 the latest (05/2009 edition). So Sage should build on your Solaris 10 SPARC machine. 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) which at the time of writing (December 2009) is the latest release of Solaris 10.
• 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, with negligible security risks, then you can do so.

There are a problems with the build on Solaris 10, 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.

• Open Solaris x64 in 64-bit mode is expected to be supported some time during 2010. Sage does build on this hardware, but crashes on startup.
• Solaris 10 SPARC on 64-bit hardware. Sage builds on this, and can perform some calculations, but it is very unstable and crashes too often.

Solaris 10 on x86 hardware (32-bit)

Builds fine.

Open Solaris (also known as Solaris 11) on SPARC hardware

This has not been tested and will almost certainly not work. We are afraid to say nobody currently developing Sage uses Open Solaris on SPARC hardware. Given the number of users of Open Solaris on SPARC hardware is so small, it is doubtful much effort will be put into a port. But if others wish to submit patches, they can do.

Open Solaris (also known as Solaris 11) on x86 hardware

Sage has built fine since version 4.5.3.alpha 3.

How to build a 32-bit Sage on Solaris 10 with SPARC hardware

As stated above, this should work and Sage will pass all its self-tests. The process is not as simple as one might like it to be.