Eugene "Merclangrat" Bolshakoff

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

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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.

TL;DR

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.

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 the 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’s packages.

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

Binutils or if something is wrong

It’s tricky sometimes with binutils (like as, ar and especially ld).
Solaris SPARC has its own peculiar ABI with 32-bit and 64-bit binaries (throw the manual to me to get more information!). pkgsrc has ABI option in mk.conf but sometimes I get an ELFCLASS error. It often helps to specify CFLAGS+=-m64 CXXFLAGS+=-m64.
And I can’t use GNU ld because Solaris /usr/ccs/bin/ld seems to know better about those things. I get errors about incompatible libraries. If I give it a try again, I’ll share the experience.

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

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.

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).

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 some of them will be shared soon). 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. There’s /usr/sfw/bin/python coming with Solaris, its version is 2.3.3. Quite old, eh?

GCC 9

I wasn’t able to build the package (devel/gcc9) using OpenCSW’s gcc5, but I was able to build it from source. 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”.

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!

too many open files - Solaris has ulimit 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!

devel/libuv

patched tcp.c but linking libnbcompat fails, add -fPIC flag https://gnats.netbsd.org/56668

misc/rhash

take newer version (1.4.5) from the next pkgsrc tarball, it builds successfully

devel/glib2

I used libsol10-compat, but it still thrown an error in

[466/1428] Compiling C object glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.so.p/getpwuid-preload.c.o
FAILED: glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.so.p/getpwuid-preload.c.o 

./glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.c:71:22: error: conflicting types for 'getpwnam_r'
 DEFINE_WRAPPER (int, getpwnam_r, (const char     *name,
                      ^
../glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.c:35:15: note: in definition of macro 'DEFINE_WRAPPER'
   return_type func argument_list
               ^
In file included from ../glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.c:24:0:
/usr/include/pwd.h:139:12: note: previous declaration of 'getpwnam_r' was here
 extern int getpwnam_r(const char *, struct passwd *, char *,
            ^
../glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.c:82:22: error: conflicting types for 'getpwuid_r'
 DEFINE_WRAPPER (int, getpwuid_r, (uid_t           uid,
                      ^
../glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.c:35:15: note: in definition of macro 'DEFINE_WRAPPER'
   return_type func argument_list
               ^
In file included from ../glib/tests/getpwuid-preload.c:24:0:
/usr/include/pwd.h:138:12: note: previous declaration of 'getpwuid_r' was here
 extern int getpwuid_r(uid_t, struct passwd *, char *, int, struct passwd **);

This file just has different functions declarations, feel free to adjust them how they’re declared in /usr/include/pwd.h and run bmake again.

devel/cmake

cmake needs -lncurses because it tries to link itself with Solaris curses library + new gcc

I removed two files connected to GHS (they caused error about gbuild from Green Hills software, I guess we don’t need that), also bmake package SSP_SUPPORTED=no (I think it can be solved by another way, for example symlinking /usr/local/lib/sparcv9/libssp.so to /usr/pkg/lib).

How long did it take to build cmake? Here it is:

real    786m29.379s
user    708m1.986s
sys     44m31.926s

it’s built with new gcc and needs libs from the archive (see GCC 9 (gcc5 could’t build it).

databases/shared-mime-info

It has devel/glib2 as a dependency and uses libglib-2.0.so,libgio-2.0.so,libgobject-2.0.so and libgmodule-2.0.so. And the linker doesn’t link correctly with libgmodule-2.0.so, trying to use the system one, which is very old.
I had to change build.ninja after bmake configure - put this library explicitly using the full path.

Also, I had to comment USE_CXX_FEATURES=filesystem in Makefile, or it tries to install gcc10 which is not available for Solaris. gcc9 builds it correctly, it has this feature.

graphics/gdk-pixbuf2

databases/shared-mime-info breaks graphics/gdk-pixbuf2 - it needs mime.cache (it took 3 days for me to figure out where the problem was).
After I fixed it, gdk-pixbuf2 has a small issue with systeminfo.h - just patch the file pixops.c to include it unconditionally. And it builds. And it works!

devel/pango

Building pango was tricky. There were linker problems, and because I was not successful to use gld, I had to replace -z defs to -z nodefs in meson build (also, after initial configure). pango and cairo seem to work well because I could build rxvt-unicode and there’s a nice terminal! Woohoo!

graphics/netpbm

netpbm mysteriously has just cc without paths in config.mk.in, and it doesn’t get changed by configure scripts. Putting cc symlink somewhere to /usr/pkg/bin didn’t help, I had to change the path in the file and run bmake again.

security/gnutls

Oh, that was the trickiest one! I don’t know why building via bmake was failing, because if I used gmake in the source directory, it worked. I had to build it like this, but then use readelf and elfedit to fix binaries because there were relative paths.
I think to try again and figure out what was happening there to make it buildable via bmake properly.

graphics/MesaLib

It uses static_assert which is not available in Solaris, I patched the code and could build it.

x11/gtk3

Solaris linker (/usr/ccs/bin/ld) doesn’t support -Wl,--export-dynamic - actually, there’s a BUILDLINK_TRANSFORM option in Makefile to remove it, but testsuite/gtk/builder still uses it. Isn’t it just a bug? I had to remove it from ninja.build.

And x11/gtk3 has an option -Dgtk-doc=true to build a documentation using xsltproc. On my Sun Blade 100 with 1.5G of RAM, it was working for 36 hours and couldn’t get done.
I had to stop it and set -Dgtk-doc to false - but in this case bmake install fails. The documentation files are specified in PLIST. Of course, there are two options:

www/netsurf

Successfully, the new browser on Solaris! I had to patch some files and add missing libs to LDFLAGS.

textproc/groff

groff is a text processor which can be found in each system. pkgsrc’s build enables groff-docs by default and needs py-pdf.
as it’s said on python website, py-pdf doesn’t need any dependencies in general, but if image extraction is needed, it needs Pillow which needs Rust. Fail.

I disabled groff-docs just running: bmake install PKG_OPTIONS.groff=-groff-docs CFLAGS+=-D__EXTENSIONS__
I guess I will try to build py-pdf without Pillow if another package would need it…

x11/fltk13

pkgsrc has fltk 1.3.9 which I couldn’t build using gcc. If I tried Sun Studio, there was an error about ELFCLASS.
I found a solution. I downloaded fltk 1.3.5 and built it using gcc just by ./configure & gmake with pkgsrc options, then put to the work subdirectory and made a package. Then, the packkage fltk-1.3.9 actually has version 1.3.5, but it seems to work…

net/tigervnc

After bmake configure, add #include <memory.h> to ./work/tigervnc-1.14.0/unix/vncconfig/QueryConnectDialog.cxx and #include <unistd.h> to .work/tigervnc-1.14.0/unix/xserver/os/backtrace.c
If it fails with linking during X.Org server building, just cd ./work/tigervnc-1.14.0/unix/xserver/ and run gmake. Then, bmake will create the package.

But the trickiest part was the font path. TigerVNC builds its own X.Org, and its ./configure has a parameter to set font paths. But in my case it didn’t work. By default, it sets
COMPILEDDEFAULTFONTPATH = ${prefix}/share/fonts/X11/misc/,${prefix}/share/fonts/X11/TTF/,${prefix}/share/fonts/X11/OTF/,${prefix}/share/fonts/X11/Type1/,${prefix}/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/,${prefix}/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/

I guess it would work, but somehow ${prefix} wasn’t resolved to a variable (it may be because /bin/sh is used somewhere which is horribly broken on Solaris).
I had to replace this line in all Makefiles and .h files where I found it, and put COMPILEDDEFAULTFONTPATH = /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/misc/,/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType,/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/,/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/,/usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/ - to use Solaris fonts.

Also, I needed to install x11/xsetroot and wm/twm (oh, I haven’t tried to run CDE yet in VNC!).

TigerVNC has one more trick. Because SPARC is big-endian, when I try to connect from x86-64 (a little-endian machine), it just shows me a white screen. And on the SPARC side, one of Xvnc threads gets crashed. vncviewer on Linux must be run with -encoding hextile.

Also, I used ChatGPT asking questions and copy-pasting errors. Sometimes it provided too much information, but it could help where to look/patch/fix/etc.