4.93 Release Notes for Sun Solaris Computers
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CONTENTS
1. SUPPORTED ARCHITECTURES
2. KERNEL RECONFIGURATION
3. SHARED OBJECTS and RUNTIME DYNAMIC LINKING
4. THORSERVER & MERLINSERVER
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1. SUPPORTED ARCHITECTURES
Begining with version 4.93, there are two Daylight distributions
available for Solaris, the SPARC version and the x86 version.
The SPARC/Solaris distribution is supported on Solaris 7 and
higher and includes 32-bit (SPARC v7) and 64-bit (SPARC v9)
libraries and binaries.
The x86/Solaris distribution is supported on Solaris 10 and higher
and includes 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) libraries and
binaries.
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2. KERNEL RECONFIGURATION
The Problem:
Beginning with Version 4.41, the nearneighbors program uses System V
semaphores for scheduling and process management. In some
environments, the default number of semaphores configured into the
kernel may be too small. This is indicated by problems starting either
of the above applications.
Solution:
Reconfigure the kernel with more semaphores. This is accomplished by
performing the following steps (you must be root):
1. Edit the file /etc/system. Add the following two lines:
set semsys:seminfo_semmns=256
set semsys:seminfo_semmsl=128
2. Save the file.
3. Reboot.
This procedure should increase the number of semaphores sufficiently
for almost all installations.
See the Solaris System Administration manual for more details.
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3. SHARED OBJECTS and RUNTIME DYNAMIC LINKING
With version 4.61, Daylight has converted all of its executables to use
dynamic runtime linking. This feature allows the operating system to
more efficiently use its resources when multiple users are executing
Daylight programs. The operating system only needs to load one copy of
the Daylight libraries into memory to service all program users. This
saves memory, and can significantly improve overall system throughput
for a heavily loaded system.
A secondary benefit of this change is that the binaries of Daylight
programs are smaller by a factor of 5 - 10X. Basically, this is due to
the fact that the core toolkit code is not duplicated in every binary.
There are two issues related to making this switch to dynamic shared
objects. First, there is a slight startup penalty while the operating
system figures out where the dynamic shared libraries are found.
This delay is on the order of 10 milliseconds and should not be
noticed by interactive users. Furthermore, the overall performance
of applications appears to be better, because the system doesn't have
to load a copy of the toolkit for every application.
The second issue is the requirement that an additional environment
variable be set by every Daylight user. The environment variable
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is used by the operating system as a search path to
find dynamic shared objects. If the needed shared objects are not
found, then a program will not execute. The default library search
path is typically set to:
/usr/lib:/usr/openwin/lib
The directory $DY_ROOT/lib must be added to this path.
sh and ksh:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$DY_ROOT/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
csh:
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:${DY_ROOT}/lib/
Once set, Daylight executable programs will run without further
intervention. If this variable is set incorrectly, Daylight programs
will fail with the following messages:
$ thorls
ld.so.1: thorls: fatal: libdt_thor.so: can't open file: errno=2
Killed
This message indicates that the runtime linker can't figure out where
the file 'libdt_thor.so' is located. Correctly setting the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH will fix this problem.
NOTE: The program testlicense is not dynamically linked, since the
license management code must be present in every executable.
Testlicense will run successfully even though the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
variable is not set.
Daylight now supports 32-bit code as well as 64-bit code. Daylight
is using 32-bit as the default format. The 64-bit toolkit libraries
are available in the directory $DY_ROOT/lib64. The binaries are
available in the directory $DY_ROOT/bin64.
XView is not available in 64-bit format in this release. If you
are developing XView programs using the Daylight widgets, they must
be compiled using the 32-bit libraries. In this case, at runtime,
LD_LIBRARY_PATH must include $DY_ROOT/lib in order for the runtime
linker to find the appropriate files.
To compile the contrib code in 32-bit format, in $DY_ROOT/contrib/src
type "make install". To compile the contrib code in 64-bit format,
in $DY_ROOT/contrib/src type "make install64".
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4. THORSERVER & MERLINSERVER
The thorserver uses 34-bit file offsets and has a database file size
limit of 16GB. Writing data beyond the limit will cause database
corruption. As a protective measure, the thorserver will deny I/O
and issue a nonfatal error when a load of a TDT begins within 1MB
of the limit. If you want to load large (>1MB) TDT's, you are
unprotected from writing beyond the limit.
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