VB on Solaris 10 SPARC Installation: Cannot determine system

[scummings]

Hi,

I'm new to the Solaris environment and I'm attempting to install Virtual Box on the following:

#

Code: Select all

uname -a 
SunOS unknown 5.10 Generic_142909-17 sun4u sparc SUNW,Netra-240 

#isainfo
sparcv9 sparc

I have managed to install the pre-req packages as listed on: http://www.softagalleria.net/virtualbox.php

I have now got to the stage when I'm attempting to install VirtualBox-3.2.10-OSE but everytime I run the following command I get an error.

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# ./configure --build-libxml2 --build-libxslt --disable-hardening
Checking for environment:
  ** Cannot determine system!
#

Then it stops.

Can anyone help???

Thanks,

Simon.

[sej7278]

virtualbox only works on x86 chipsets, not sparc.

[scummings]

Thanks for the reply...

Shame, I've just wasted best part of a day trying to make it work

You'd have thought, Sun based products would work all Sun architectures - obviously not!

Thanks for putting me out of my misery...

[sej7278]

You'd have thought, Sun based products would work all Sun architectures - obviously not!

well oracle already has zones/containers or whatever they're called today for sparc. virtualbox would have to become an emulator (like qemu) rather than a hypervisor if it were to allow x86 to run on sparc.

virtualbox will run on solaris if you're running on x86_64 hardware.

[jimklimov]

(ontopic)

I think it may be regarded as a bug in the package installation scripts. They should report that the architecture doesn't match the expected one, instead of bailing with a weird error.

(offtopic)

Well, for certain SPARC servers you can have hypervisors too.

There are LDOMs (Logical domains) or now Oracle VM for SPARC on Niagara CPUs (UltraSPARC-T1, -T2 and -T3) which allow you to build a separate SPARC VM with a whole number of dedicated CPU threads (i.e. on an US-T1 with 8 cores and 4 threads you could theoretically have about 30 VMs, 1 hypervisor and maybe around 1 I/O domain). Guest domains can be Solaris 10, FreeBSD or Linux, as is reported...

On some larger Enterprise-series servers there are hardware domains with the motherboard(s) and RSC card somewhat sharing the role of hypervisor.

Alas, that's not an option for your Netra-240...

There were some CPU emulator projects allowing to run programs and OSes on non-native CPUs. One is QEMU suggested before me, another well-known commercial system of the past was "Transitive". It was since bought by IBM to become PowerVM, apparently.

Also Sun used to make "PCi" boards which were essentially PCI boards with an x86 CPU and a little RAM that could be plugged into a SPARC server and use a dedicated disk slice or volume for the x86 OS filesystem. AFAIK they were most often used to implement NT Domain controllers or administrative RDP servers for Windows-only apps which were required by admins or the enterprise, but did not warrant a separate machine. We found one recently in the closet, but never got to actually plug and run it yet...

(/ offtopic )