[OpenIndiana-discuss] Desktop Painpoints

[Peter Tribble]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 1:41 PM Rolf M. Dietze <rmd at orbit.in-berlin.de>
wrote:

>
> Hi Till,
>
> srm/projects use case, you asked:)
>
> I run courses on shell scripting for beginners at a university. I did
> this with an old sunray environment on oracle solaris, which minimizes
> the workload of setting up a course full of desktop systems.
> For a change I setup a box with OI, netbooted some cheap thinclients with
> NetBSD off the OI machine up to starting a local x-server and xdmcp
> requesting a x-session from that same OI machine. thought a quarter terra
> of ram and sufficient #cpus are just fine.
> Students are encouraged to experiment, and some went to try fork bombs.
> To minimize the effect on other users on the same machine I implemented
> per user projects. On the solaris 11.3/sunray box, the users environment
> who started the fork bomb, gets killed. Ok for that.
> On the OI box with 30 xdmcp called x-sessions, if one user runs over the
> max-lwps boundary, all x-sessions of all 30 users get killed in that
> case.
>

That's not right. Are you running xdm as an SMF service?

Looking at the SMF manifest is oi-userland, it doesn't have any ignore_error
properties set, so if that's being used then SMF will spot the error (any
error)
and restart xdm and all its children. Fixing the manifest ought to be easy
enough.


> On the oracle solaris 11.3 and the OI box, I had entries per user as of
> user.student01:100::student::project.max-lwps=(privileged,500,deny)
> This happened to be on a 5.11 illumos-f1cd2b6cd0 i86pc i386 i86pc OI box.
> The rather high number of lwp is casued by firefox usage, which spreads
> in to many lwp for each and every tab and action.
>
> This term it will be solaris 11.3/sunray again for that course, it is
> simpler and saves a lot of time...
> By the way, even in this oracle-solaris/sunray setup, we don't use gnome
> or mate. Too ressource consuming, too slow.
>
> In another course on administration I have a T4-4 with ldoms, so that each
> student sets up and administers his own partition. They are doing
> zfs-training
> on that box. And I use a sparc-T-class because of its simplicity and
> robust-
> ness. Sadly no OpenIndiana on sparc hardware. So for the OI-Part it's only
> a virtualized environment, not as robust as the sparc box...
> But, you asked for desktop, not for backend:)
>
> so, adding to the wishlist:)
>   - please put back the libraries needed for sunray on OI
>   - sparc port of OI (why was sparc removed anyway?)
>

SPARC was removed from illumos because it didn't work, wasn't tested, kept
being broken unintentionally, and was generally getting in the way. But
that's not
relevant, as there are still active ports of both OpenIndiana and Tribblix
for
SPARC (and I'm using xdm on my T4).

https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/sparc

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/