[oi-dev] Hipster and custom illumos-gate

[Jim Klimov]

Hi all,

   I have a new laptop now running Hipster (in a VBox 4.3.10 over a
Windows 7 host, not in the least due to better hardware support,
and also due to this box being a corporate workhorse).

   I'm trying to test and/or use David Mackay's lx brand revival,
pulling the code from his illumos-gate fork over the vanilla code.
As of yesterday, it merges and builds cleanly by the way, and only
takes 3 hours to do so on this laptop (VM on 2 cores with just 2Gb
RAM, but with a Samsung 840 Pro as the OS drive).

   After completing a build I am suddenly stuck trying to install
the newer illumos-gate packages into a new BE: their versioning
(0.151.1.100 per my arbitrarily big choice) is less than Hipster's
(2014.*, without even a leading zero which is auto-prepended to the
values I provide in illumos.sh)... Should I have to somehow enforce
larger 2014.* version numbers, or is there a way (onu?) to override
existing packages and force installation of their "namesakes" from
the on-nightly repository regardless of the version numbers?

   Also, leaping a bit ahead: would/should KVM work in Hipster out
of the box, including the case when Hipster itself is virtualized
by a hypervisor, or would I need to compile some other patches
into my illumos-gate? Specifically, I am interested in software
emulation for the VM anyway (ARM Linux via QEMU)?.. And also, did
anyone try (and succeed) to set up cross-compilation of Linux ARM
programs running the process under illumos/OI/Hipster, whether in
native illumos zones or in lx-branded ones, or should I look forward
to necessarily running a Linux VM as well for that task?

Thanks for any hints,
//Jim Klimov