Sunny FATE
May 6th, 2008 by 
Multimedia Mike
Sun recently released a live CD for their OpenSolaris operating system. What’s one more platform for testing FATE? They’re all virtual anyway. Live CDs make us so spoiled these days.
I got the OS installed in a VMware [Fusion] session. But the operating system wouldn’t boot after the boot loader told it to. I have not had a chance to troubleshoot the issue further.
I wonder what development tools are available under OpenSolaris? Does it just provide gcc? Or is there a proprietary Sun compiler for x86_64? I know Sun invests heavily in compiler optimization, but for their own Sparc hardware; I can’t imagine they would pour any money into making code run well on other CPU architectures.
Posted in FATE Server | 
9 Comments »
May 6th, 2008 at 9:52 am
What about MinGW32 tests on FATE? Cross-compiling from Linux and testing on Wine is not the real deal… Too bad Windows doesn’t release LiveCDs for free…
And soon there’ll be MinGW64 to test too.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:00 am
You could also imagine FATE tests for other cpu (arm, mips) using cross-compilation with gcc and qemu-user for running the binaries.
I manage to run ffmpeg regression test for arm with that, but it is quite slow (and need some qemu patch).
May 6th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
The mingw-hosted FATE builds are probably plausible. But I have to read up on how mingw works in the first place. Does mingw offer a full, standard Python installation? That can interface with local MySQL libraries?
I have some other ideas about how to do ARM builds. It would be nice to perform the tests on proper hardware and I think I could set that up.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
That OpenSolaris version only offers gcc, and installing Sun’s compiler (/SunStudio) still does not seem possible via the package management system.
And the live CD runs fine under VirtualBox for me, though it is very when doing any kind of I/O (I think it took 20 minutes to boot).
May 7th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Solaris express developer edition includes both the SUN and GNU c compilers. Have you given any thought to supporting externally submitted test results.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:34 am
I have 3 spare Windows licenses. I can give you one of those if you need a license for Fate.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:24 am
@Peter: As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind external results for FATE. I need to refactor some code in FATE first, though. Someone already tried running my FATE script on Solaris but it doesn’t support all the libraries I presently need.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
@Multimedia Mike: Of course you can get Sun Studio compilers from the package repository. And speaking of optimizing for other architectures such as x86 and x64 we do a pretty good job there (in
fact we kick Intel compiler’s ass on a couple of benchmarks running
on their own silicon). Why? The answer is simple: because we sell
a whole range of boxes based on AMD64 and Intel’s silicon. We have
to make them look good. And the only way we can beat companies like
Dell and HP is to provide best performing OS and best performing
compilers. GCC simply doesn’t cut it for FP and a couple of other
areas. That’s at least what our customers are telling us.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:09 pm
[…] Open/Solaris on all its various platforms, even PlayStation 3 and whatever else. I actually did get that OpenSolaris VMware session to boot after I waited long enough but I had no idea how to do anything useful with it. […]