[OpenIndiana-discuss] New system planning comments

[Reginald Beardsley]

I'm about to set up  an HP Z840 with 1x 14 core E5-2690 V4,  a 4x 4 TB RAIDZ2 array and 4x 16 GB ECC DIMMs.

The dbx implementation in the Oracle/Sun/Forte compiler suite is the only debugger I've encountered which will evaluate F77 intrinsics on the command line.  This is immensely valuable to a scientific programmer.  Without that one must use temporary variables when debugging.  While the optimization process will remove the overhead, it makes the code quite long winded and ugly.

I currently have Studio 12.1 on Hipster 2017.10 and have not seen any issues, though more serious work has been done on my S10 u8 system.  I tend to prefer mixed F77 and C89 for reasons of portability and the vast number of high quality scientific libraries available.

It seems to me that 14 cores and 64 GB of DRAM should be sufficient to run S11.4 in a VM if I *really* need the latest Studio version. The Z840 will take 12 more DIMMs so I can easily expand memory and add a 2nd 14 core E5-2690 V4 if needed. 

This inclines me to use Hipster as the base OS and use VirtualBox to run S11.4, Win 7, Debian and an OI build system in VMs when needed with a fall back of a Z400 and swappable disks if MMU limitations constrain performance too much.

Ten years ago a VM was not viable for building OI, but 14 cores and 64 GB of DRAM seems to me likely to handle it.  Is an OI VM running on top of OI viable for building and testing?  In particular, how good is VBox for that?  it's become very Windows host oriented.  I'm also aware the Solaris USB support is not very good.  I'll have Win 7 and Debian available  running native on a Z400 if USB proves an issue for working with microcontrollers which is my primary use case for both of those.

Thanks.

Have Fun!
Reg