Eugene "Merclangrat" Bolshakoff

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. (William Gibson)

View on GitHub

Using pkgsrc on Solaris 10 SPARC in 2024/25

I am trying to collect all ideas/hacks I used to build software using pkgsrc on Solaris 10 SPARC. The process is in progress. I am happy to get comments, ideas and exchange the experience: mercurius(@)elming.org

This page will be updated when I get new results. The packages are here.

TL;DR

The idea was to try and learn pkgsrc (not only on NetBSD, but on another system) and have modern software on Solaris.
It’s quite old - Solaris 10 was initially released in 2005, and the latest update (U11) was released in January 2013.

More or less, it’s successful. I am pleasantly surprised.
There’s Python 3.12, OpenSSL 3.3.1, Ruby 3.x and a lot of modern software working on Solaris 10 SPARC!

I use gcc 5.5 from OpenCSW. I installed Sun Studio 12.3 but I wasn’t successful in building anything in the pkgsrc tree, and most of the packages need gcc. Also, I built gcc 9.5 from source, see GCC 9.

Those packages are 64-bit. pkgsrc suggests to use ABI=64 in its manual (see below). I think I will try to build 32-bit ones too, or you can try if you want.

I tried to collect particular issues/hacks I faced per package - here is the list, and there are some patches.
Of course this list isn’t full, feel free to ask me if you have a specific issue. Sometimes I didn’t document thoroughly what happened, sorry for that!

Coming soon: Emulators on Solaris 10 SPARC!

Why Solaris 10?

I have Sun Ultra 60 and Sun Blade 100, Solaris 11 cannot be installed on them.
OpenIndiana can, but it needs zfs. I purchased RAM for the Blade and it now has 1.5G… would be enough? I’ll give it a try. Later.
There’s also another illumos-based system called Tribblix, it looks nice but I decided to try on the original Sun Solaris 10 (01/13, the latest one).

I don’t have access to original Oracle repositories for patches and updates. Then I have the system how it comes from Solaris 10 U11 DVD.

The process

pkgsrc HOWTO is here: https://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/how_to_use_pkgsrc_on_solaris/
The official Solaris README: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/bootstrap/README.Solaris - there’s more information about Sun Studio, etc.
There’s a wiki page from 2007, it’s old but can be useful: https://wtf.hijacked.us/wiki/index.php/Pkgsrc_on_solaris

I took pkgsrc 2024Q3. The newer version has Perl 5.40, which I couldn’t build on Solaris 10.
(There was an issue in Github https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/22728 – it’s closed, then maybe I’ll give it a try again later.)

sunfreeware.com is not available anymore (at least, for free), then I am using gcc5 and other utilities (mentioned in the HOWTO) from https://www.opencsw.org/ Also, I had to install sqlite3 from OpenCSW. Then, bootstrap and let’s go!

(Just FYI, this is the full list of packages I installed using OpenCSW’s pkgutil: http://lizaurus.com/solaris10/pkgutil_list. I think, not all of them are necessary anymore, when I have many pkgsrc packages.

My mk.conf is here: http://lizaurus.com/solaris10/pkgsrc-solaris10/bootstrap/mk.conf

pkgsrc uses buildlink methodology https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/buildlink.html and symlinks necessary headers, libraries and pkgconfig .pc files into work/.buildlink subdirectory. It took some time for me to understand how that works!
But yes, even if the library is installed but there’s no direct dependency in pkgsrc (.mk file isn’t included), it isn’t visible in the build process of the package.

Solaris ABI

UltraSPARC CPUs are 64-bit processors, but SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) has traditionally been designed to support both 32-bit and 64-bit modes. The UltraSPARC I (which is 64-bit) is backward compatible with the earlier 32-bit SPARC V8 architecture, which means that it could run both 32-bit and 64-bit code.

While UltraSPARC processors are 64-bit and support both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, the Solaris ABI is more complex because it needs to manage compatibility between 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. This dual-mode operation and backward compatibility with older software and hardware meant that Solaris had to support different ABIs (for 32-bit and 64-bit applications) and manage their interaction. This is more complicated than on x86_64, where the system was designed from the start with dual-mode operation in mind, making it simpler to run both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries on the same system.

The Solaris ABI is a result of the need to maintain compatibility across many generations of hardware and software, from older 32-bit SPARC systems to the 64-bit UltraSPARC systems that came later.

The best-practices say it’s better to build 32-bit applications, but pkgsrc suggests to use ABI=64. But sometimes it’s not passing proper options, and Solaris linker fails with ELFCLASS error. It often helps to specify CFLAGS+=-m64 CXXFLAGS+=-m64.

Binutils and versioned symbols

Actually, all packages are built quite well with Solaris binutils, located in /usr/ccs/bin.

While building Qt6 (really, Qt6 on Solaris 10 SPARC!) I found out that its plugins don’t have a specific Qt-related metadata, and Solaris ld didn’t link them correctly, then I needed GNU ld.

How to make GNU ld working:

A part of Solaris ABI is versioned symbols. Solaris uses them to guarantee binary compatibility across system upgrades — critical for enterprise environments where software couldn’t always be rebuilt. And I got a problem here. Solaris ld adds versioned symbols to libraries built by pkgsrc, like this:

libz.so.1 =>     /usr/pkg/lib/libz.so.1
libz.so.1 (SUNW_1.1) =>  (version not found)

This is not an error during runtime, but GNU ld tries to resolve all symbols in all libraries it’s linking, why it can cause an error. Especially for libz.so, I had to symlink Solaris’ libz.so to /usr/pkg/lib and made GNU ld happy, then I removed the symlink and everything works well.

too many open files

Some packages (especially glib2 as I remember) try to have a lot of files open and hit Solaris’ limit. Solaris has ulimit command as usual, but it cannot be more than set in /etc/system. And if it’s not set, the default is 256.

My settings are:

set rlim_fd_max=166384
set rlim_fd_cur=32768

after changing this file, you need to reboot!

If something is wrong

But, often packages are successfully built with binutils which the process catches (usually, Solaris /usr/ccs/bin ones), but sometimes something is failing. Then:

And if everything goes well but fails on the linking phase, then

cd work/sourcename-x.y.z
gmake

Just run gmake inside the source folder. In some cases, it just run remaining commands and may get done successfully. Or, there will be a visible error which must be fixed. Often these are:

During this “manual” phase, the linker may put wrong (relative to buildlink) paths to libraries (bmake install informs about it), they must be fixed by elfedit.

Solaris 10 compat library

Something is failing because Solaris is specific and doesn’t have something which is available in other UNIX systems (constant definitions, header files, etc.). And there’s Solaris 10 compat library, big thanks to Pekdon for this: https://github.com/pekdon/libsol10-compat/

It has pkgsrc-compatible stuff to make a package… let’s use it

export TMPDIR=/stuff/tmp # or another tmpdir/homedir/...
export PKGSRC=/stuff/pkgsrc # pkgsrc root directory, usually /usr/pkgsrc
cd $TMPDIR
git clone https://github.com/pekdon/libsol10-compat.git
cd libsol10-compat/pkgsrc
gcp -pruv libsol10-compat/ ${PKGSRC}/devel/ # I use GNU cp, Solaris cp -r will also work
cd ../..

then, the repo directory must to be renamed to libsol10-compat-0.1.0 and packed to the archive:

(we are in $TMPDIR)

mv libsol10-compat libsol10-compat-0.1.0
bsdtar cvzf ${PKGSRC}/distfiles/libsol10-compat-0.1.0.tar.gz libsol10-compat-0.1.0
cd ${PKGSRC}/devel/libsol10-compat/
bmake NO_CHECKSUM=yes

…bmake unpacks our archive, but then fails because we need to run autoreconf -i to have configure

cd ${PKGSRC}/devel/libsol10-compat/work/libsol10-compat-0.1.0
autoreconf -i
cd ../..
bmake NO_CHECKSUM=yes
bmake install

And yes! there’s a package! Thank you again Pekdon!

Newer version 0.2.x: I had to add implementation of open_memstream to it, then there’s a fork: https://github.com/merclangrat/libsol10-compat. I guess there will be more functions/definitions added (static_assert is the first candidate).
This is not completely my code! ChatGPT helped me to create it.

TODO There will be more, because I find more and more things which are not in Solaris 10 and necessary for newer software. Small things, but they cause errors!

How to use it

It installs libsol10_compat_patch_pkgsrc which patches original pkgsrc files and takes two arguments:

There’s a blog post about trying Solaris 10 as a desktop: https://pekdon.pekwm.se/posts/solaris_desktop/ - very useful!

Getting new certificates

Even if security/openssl is installed, it cannot check certificates. There are older ones by OpenCSW in /etc/opt/csw/ssl/certs. I guess they can be used but we can install them using pkgsrc, too

I reminded that I had ca-certificates in Linux, but the package from pkgsrc needs py-cryptography which needs Rust for building, and Rust isn’t available for Solaris-SPARC (yet). I couldn’t build the older version of it because it uses older OpenSSL (1.0 or 1.1) functions and definitions. But I guess it’s possible to patch it…

But it’s just necessary to install security/mozilla-rootcerts-openssl to get newer certificates. They will be stored in /usr/pkg/etc/openssl/certs, and then everything works well!

Adding Solaris fonts

When I built www/netsurf and started it, there were no letters, only squares. Solaris has its own fonts and we just need to add them to pkgsrc’s fontconfig, creating /usr/pkg/etc/fontconfig/local.conf:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <dir>/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
</fontconfig>

The result

The packages I have already built are here: http://lizaurus.com/solaris10/pkgsrc-solaris10/

Almost all of them have been built by gcc5 from OpenCSW and some tools need its libgcc_s. Packages built by gcc9 (see below) are in a subfolder.

After the bootstrap, there’re pkg_* utilities and those packages can be just installed without rebuilding. My bootstrap is also there: http://lizaurus.com/solaris10/pkgsrc-solaris10/bootstrap

To make life simpler, I configure my PATH to look in /usr/pkg first: PATH=/usr/pkg/bin:/opt/csw/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/bin:

and for root: PATH=/usr/pkg/sbin:/opt/csw/sbin:/usr/sfw/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/pkg/bin:/opt/csw/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/bin:

Unfortunately, I didn’t put all my changes into patches, but I hope my explanations are useful if anyone needs to use pkgsrc on Solaris 10 SPARC in future.

The system python

I think it’s a good way to have python3 and python symlinked to /usr/pkg/bin/python3.12. Solaris has only Python 2.6.
And there are a lot of Python stuff can be installed using pkgsrc (only except modules depending on Rust).

GCC 9

When I started, I wasn’t able to build the package (devel/gcc9) using OpenCSW’s gcc5 - I guess I didn’t have enough knowledge about pkgsrc and all its stuff. But I built it from source as usual, it took ca. 2 days on my Sun Blade 100.

-bash-3.2# /usr/local/bin/gcc9.5 -v
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=/usr/local/bin/gcc9.5
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/local/libexec/gcc/sparcv9-sun-solaris2.10/9.5.0/lto-wrapper
Target: sparcv9-sun-solaris2.10
Configured with: /stuff/tmp/gcc-9.5.0/configure --program-suffix=9.5 --enable-languages=c,c++ -v --enable-obsolete --enable-ld=yes
Thread model: posix
gcc version 9.5.0 (GCC)

gcc 9.5 to be installed in /usr/local : http://lizaurus.com/solaris10/gcc - just unpack the archive!

I used Solaris as (/usr/ccs/bin/as) and ld (/usr/ccs/bin/ld), also –enable-obsolete because gcc 9.5 is the last version supporting Solaris 10.

The next step is to try to build gcc9 in the pkgsrc using this gcc9! Then, we’ll have a package which can be installed without any hacks, and re-build those packages which need newer gcc “by a proper way”.