My Laptop (sxce or solex)

I never did post this, but last year i installed Solaris 11 express on my laptop (an older dell m4400 with 8 gb of ram and Intel quad core extreme), and missed the look and feel of SXDE (the most productive os out of the box from sun/oracle to this day) and SXCE. You can see the result. Hard to tell it is solaris 11 express (solex).

Solaris Desktop on the move (ipad)

So as seen here in the picture, i'm still using solaris as my desktop. Big deal, right?

But this is on an Apple ipad 2. Using Oracle virtual desktop, served from a solaris 10 sun ray server, and to top it all off, from a vmware server. Oh yeah, and off verizon 3g or public wifi access points and VPN. What the Sun Microsystems sunray laptop could have been, plus relatively inexpensive

Since Apple will be making some announcements in a few hours (and who knows what will they announce- new ios or new iphone or just software ), I thought it might be a good time to mention this, for those that do not know about this solution. Granted, there are so many applications for the ipad / iphone and ipod, that it is easy to never see or hear about them.

Shortly, Solaris 11 fcs should be available, and SRS 5.2 will hopefully function properly on it, giving this a more modern desktop.

And now back to your regular programming... (no pun intended)

Where is the memory gone?

So you just installed Solaris 10 U6. Pretty exciting this zfs boot, no?

But you ran vmstat (or installed top on the system) and noticed you had 200MB free. Worse, you tried starting your Oracle database with a large SGA and it failed because it couldn't allocate the memory. What? This machine has 16GB! and barely anything running, I hear you scream. Where is the memory gone?

# echo "::memstat" | mdb -k
Page Summary Pages MB %Tot
------------ ---------------- ---------------- ----
Kernel 1717128 13415 83%
Anon 238964 1866 12%
Exec and libs 23450 183 1%
Page cache 19039 148 1%
Free (cachelist) 19243 150 1%
Free (freelist) 40453 316 2%

Total 2058277 16080
Physical 2054336 16049

The kernel is using 13GB?? Yes. You are hitting a default setting that's been around since ZFS was introduced to Solaris 10. It is the ZFS ARC. But dont complain too much because it is now easy to fix. When we first hit this issue way back when, we had to use mdb to set values at boot time, you couldn't just set something in the /etc/system file.

So what is ZFS ARC? In simple terms, it is memory that ZFS uses for cache. The default is for the cache to grow up to total memory - 1GB. The problem is that although it is supposed to free up memory when applications in user space request memory, in practice, it doesn't do this fast enough. Plus you end up with fragmented memory which is a huge problem for SHM (part of the SGA under Oracle).

In general, I reserve 2GB for the os and my apps. If I run Oracle and / or Sun App server, i'd also set aside the SGA and / or the java memory. Add it all up. Let's say you need 4GB total you dont want touched by ZFS, and you have 8GB, then you would set the maximum size for the ARC to be 4GB.

What if you dont run Oracle and the like? Still, if you run a graphical desktop or a Sunray server on your machine, leave 2GB untouched, so if you have just 4GB total, set the ARC to 2GB.

How?

edit /etc/system and add:

* Restrict ZFS ARC to 8GB
set zfs:zfs_arc_max = 8000000000


Now this is actually less than 8GB, but it is easier to read 8 followed by 9 zeros than 8 x1024x1024x1024. So for 2GB: 2000000000 and for 4GB: 4000000000

This will require a reboot.

Once rebooted you can verify it took the change by executing:

# kstat -m zfs
module: zfs instance: 0
name: arcstats class: misc
c 8000000000
c_max 8000000000
c_min 1000000000
...

Solaris 10 U6 and ZFS BOOT

This update is really great! Solaris 10 can now boot ZFS.

I wrote an overview of this version here (it is in french and way too long to translate - try babelfish or google translate on it):

http://www.sunquebec.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1643

If you've yet to download U6 (10/08) get it here:

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp

Project Indiana

In the same vein as Belenix which provides a live CD with an OpenSolaris base and XFCE or KDE as desktop environments, Project Indiana leverages the Distro Construction kit that was created for Belenix and provides a live CD with Gnome as the desktop environment.

It also supports a concept similar to pkg-get (as used with sunfreeware and blastwave on Solaris for many years) which is pkg:
pkg documentation

Now showing at a theather near you
It was released last night as a developer preview and you can get the preview ISO of Project Indiana here:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/indiana/resources/getit/

It differs from Belenix in that it does require a strict minimum of 512MB.

Further reading (links):

Project Indiana documentation

Release notes

Belenix freebie

Continuing the discussion on Belenix (see part 1)

“I cant burn the CD from the iso?”

And you used cdrw in Solaris? You probably tried:

bash$ cdrw -i belenix0.6.1.iso

Looking for CD devices...

Initializing device...done.

Size required (728453120 bytes) is greater than available space (681986048 bytes).

instead, try:

bash$ cdrw -C -i belenix0.6.1.iso

Looking for CD devices...

Initializing device...done.

Writing track 1...done.

done.

Finalizing (Can take several minutes)...done.

“What makes Belenix so special?”

The biggest is that it supports UFS (of course, it is opensolaris afterall), ZFS, Fat16, Fat32, NTFS (really!) and EXT2 / EXT3. Wow. One key with Belenix and I can rescue a file from any x86 computer in this building (windows, solaris, linux) With ZFS that also means *bsd with zfs, mac os x with zfs, Linux FUSE ZFS... I dont know of any other solution out there currently that out of the box is capable of the same (well, maybe Indiana, but it is not out).

The other, as illustrated by my picture of the laptop with no hard disk, no cdrom and minimal memory, is that Belenix doesn't abuse of your resources. It will run with 256MB of ram. Of course, a live distro with 256MB with Xorg and XFCE doesn't leave much space. You can open a few terminals, text editor, run top (see ) and the like, but open Firefox and you need to be ultra patient. 320MB would make a big difference, while 512MB would be just right (and with the laptop back to its full 2GB configuration, wow). Or course, in text mode only, 256MB is overkill.

Also, combine my previous blog entry with memtest (replace /boot/... with /media/usbkeyname/boot/...), and you now have Belenix/memtest on USB.

“I want one!”

You can go and buy a 1GB key, download Belenix, burn it on CDROM and install it with usbdump. Or you can leave a comment on my blog and let me know how you have used Belenix on USB or plan on using it, and the best story in two weeks from now gets a free USB key preloaded with Belenix (november 9). I even pay shipping. Not a contest, just me giving personal stuff away for free to the person I choose, like MaryMaryQuiteContrary would say...

How cool is that? Start typing!

Further reading (links)

http://solarisdesktop.blogspot.com/2007/10/where-is-cdrom-belenix-story.html

http://solarisdesktop.blogspot.com/2007/10/fun-with-grub-memtest.html

http://blogs.sun.com/moinakg/

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=home

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=node/51

http://blogs.sun.com/anilg/entry/session_persistance_on_belenix_liveusb

http://blogs.sun.com/josephgeorge/category/BeleniX

Where is the CDROM? Belenix Story

Where is your CDROM? A Belenix story

I have a Dell Lattitude D600 laptop. I've had it for a long while. You can see a picture of it (it is for a presentation for work). From that picture, a few questions might pop up in your mind. The first, I'm sure, might be:

“What OS is that?”

It's obviously not Mac OS or Windows. It is also not Linux. Thanks for playing. So what is it? Well, hint #1, it says XFCE Menu at the bottom of the screen. It also says “ innovating on opensolaris” in the middle. More on that later. Next question, please.

“Why did you call it Theremin?”

You have good eyes! My laptops have always been named Theremin. But it particularly applies to this one. It is a laptop with WIFI and WWAN, so it is really totally wireless. I'm also a big fan (and composer) of electronic music. Theremin is the french spelling of Termen, as in “Lev Sergeyevich Termen”, the Russian inventor more commonly known as Léon Thérémin. One of his invention is the Theremin musical instrument. Think of it as a synthesizer without a keyboard. You control the pitch and volume by moving your hands around antennas, wirelessly. Wireless.

“Why do you have spare components next to it?”

Actually, they are not spare at all. I removed the DVD/CDROM, the hard disk and one of the 2 memory DIMM. I even replaced the DIMM left by a smaller one, 256MB. It is as bare as I can make it.

“So how is it running an OS?”

It is booting off of a USB key. A 2GB Lexar Firefly. This thing is SMALL, but comes in capacity up to 8GB. Truly physically small enough to fit on your key chain.

“And what else?”

Belenix 0.6.1. This has already been out since mid July, but I've only gotten around to using it for the past few weeks. Belenix is an opensolaris distribution. It has KDE and XFCE, all the good stuff from Solaris like ZFS, zones and DTrace. Oh, it also has Gnu Parted. And Compiz. And Koffice. It is a live CD distribution, similar to, say, Knoppix. To use it, you simply download the ISO, burn it on CD and boot that CD.

“Ah, but isn't it hard to get it on a USB key?”

To get on the USB, you log in as root, insert your USB key (1GB or more, I used a 2GB in my case) and from the command line, you type:

usbdump

That is it. No other step. You are done. You can now reboot the machine and if you have boot from USB as the first choice in your boot order, it will boot from the USB key and come up with a GRUB screen.

Yay! See also Moinak Ghosh's blog.