Re: [Condor-users] Condor for Solaris 10?

["Erik Paulson" <epaulson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 1:35 AM, Steffen Grunewald
<steffen.grunewald@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  But the situation appears to have changed a bit now, and Sol 10 (on
>  whichever hardware platform) seems to be a real competitor again.
>  My ideal system though would go along the lines of what Nexenta has
>  started (but they're slow... their distro is still based on Ubuntu
>  Dapper from the first half of 2006):
>  use the -- admittedly quite stable -- [Open]Solaris kernel, and put a
>  GNU/Linux userspace (based on Debian) on top of it.
>  This would allow for _native_ ZFS support, and would save the admin the
>  hassle of switching back and forth between syntactical approaches (ever
>  did "hostname -f" on a Solaris box as root? tried to understand why there
>  is /etc/init.d/ *and* svcadm?)...
>  Since Debian is prepared to provide userspace (or already doing that)
>  for other kernels (Hurd, KFreeBSD) there's some potential in having
>  full Debian/Ubuntu support by Condor, but I'm sending coal to Newcastle :)
>
>

The Solaris distributions are maddeningly slow to get anything usable
put together, and horribly confusing.
Go to sun.com and count the number of Solaris x86 distributions - and
then tell me which one you should use, or which one doesn't sound like
its a beta test for developers. Then go to opensolaris.org and do the
same thing, except the naming is even worse (Seriously, "Indiana" and
"Nevada"? Which version is which? Do I order them lexicographically?
Geographically?)

The variety of different userspaces makes things even worse for
Condor, since now there are as many different user spaces as Linux
(which is often the bigger challenge than the kernel) but there is
even less of a guide as for what is what, and there's a tiny fraction
of the interested users.

Honestly, I expect ZFS to be ported and stable on another operating
system before Solaris gets its act together, and then why bother with
Solaris?

>  To get back to the original issue, do you see a chance to dig out the last
>  Solaris/X86 Condor version? (I had asked for a page in the past, allowing
>  for downloads of abandoned ports like Linux/Alpha [since I missed the last
>  version and am stuck with 6.7.8 here] ... perhaps it's time to revive that
>  idea? "It'd be nice" indeed.) May I assume that the interface to the ckpt
>  server hasn't changed so much that an earlier version might cooperate with
>  a recent Condor installation?
>
>

Digging back through my email, it looks like we dropped support for
Solaris x86 in 2002, back in Condor 6.3. The oldest binaries I see
still available are 6.2.3 for Solaris/x86 2.7. I doubt they'd run on
anything modern, and I would not trust any checkpoints to it even if
it did work.

With the caveat that I don't work for Condor anymore, my suggestion
would be for interested Solaris x86 users to coordinate. A grassroots
"Users Solaris x86 Council" could figure out which version of Solaris
they'd like to see supported, and advise the Condor team (who by and
large don't know what's going on in the Solaris/x86 land anymore).
This group will either realize that it knows everything it needs to
know about how to do the port itself (there's plenty of help on
condor-devel) or could help move Solaris from the "it'd be nice" stage
to actual progress. I'll help in the fall :)

-Erik