kernel compilation problem

The first hint I have that something is wrong in my setup is this post by user pwzhangz. Apparently there is a difference between Solaris Express and Solaris 10. I had been presuming all along that they were one and the same. No wonder that I was left scratching my head when people were talking about grub while booting open solaris. GRUB looks to be the default boot loader for solaris now.

prtconf

I came this very useful tool for solaris the other day. It can be used to print hardware device information of the system. The tool is invoked as

/usr/sbin/prtconf

This gives very basic info about the system. Using the -v option makes it print more verbose information. To get the amount of memory on the system

/usr/sbin/prtconf | grep Memory
Memory size: 320 Megabytes

To get CPU info like vendor id and speed

/usr/sbin/prtconf -v

looking under the cpu, instance #x tree ( x = 0 for single cpu ) we see that there is a leaf by the name cpu-mhz as shown below.

name='cpu-mhz' type=int items=1
value=00000226

I'm guessing that that value(0000226, in hex, which is 550 in decimal) gives the CPU speed in MHz. Processor info can also be got using the command

/usr/sbin/psrinfo -v

solaris kernel compilation

I've been trying to compile the solaris kernel but it is always giving me a panic during boot. I thought it was because of the change I had made to /usr/src/uts/intel/sys/vmparam.h but even after reverting the file to its original form and recompiling I am getting the same problem. I'm going to try reinstalling the sources.

Open solaris

Sun finally release an open source version of solaris today. There was a giveaway of 1000 t-shirts for the first 1000 people who clicked that link on that website. It looks like I am one of the lucky ones. Pending t-shirt size availability I should see a t-shirt in my mailbox soon !!!! You can find more info about OpenSolaris by clicking on the widget below.