Eventually, we got the building environment working. Thanks to Ben and help from #gnusol, the missing piece is sunwbtool. We are going to build the Firefox first, then apply the patch to enable static probes in Javascript.

Using OpenSolaris binutils

Make sure you are using the OpenSolaris toolchain instead of GNU’s, otherwise the ld may crash with objects compiled with cc. Be careful to you $PATH, and check whether /usr/ccs/bin and $SUNWspro/bin is preferred over the generic /usr/bin.

And copy this configuration to your $HOME/.mozconfig, copied from Alex

Building, building, building…

Run the following commands:

If it works, we can apply the patch to add static probes:

If you are in luck, you could get libmozjs.so. Now we need to preload it, using run-firefox.sh

Unfortunately, there is a core dump when loading the libmozjs.so whatever the dtrace support is added. I doubt that the Firefox in NexentaOS is built by GCC, and it is not binary compatible with the SunStudio, I might have to build the whole Firefox. Ooooh, that is painful, I even does not do that in my Gentoo Linux…

Another bad news is SunStudio could not parse glib‘s head file since it does not support GCC extension, even with c99 enabled. I might ask some guru in mozdev mailing list about how to build Firefox with SunStudio 11.

Thanks to Ben Klang’s comments, I eventually make the SunStudio 11 works on NexentaOS!

Stick to the bleeding-edge

I migrated to NexentaOS Alpha-7 test2, since the SUNWhea is maintained in the unstable brach. Edited the /etc/apt/source.list to use unstable instead of testing, then upgraded the SUNWhea package, at the end “emerge” the SPROcc from the OpenSolaris DVD.

Test drive of DTrace probes provider

Copy the simple.c, myserv.d from Ticket #405, build it using SunStudio C Compiler:

Prepare the test.d like this:

Launch the simple with root privilege, execute the test.d with root privilege as well. The terminal would print out the value of counter i. Bravo!

Building the Mozilla Firefox

To build Mozilla Firefox, we need install the C++ compiler environment:

To simplify the installation, –force option is added to emerge.py to install packages regardless the dependencies.

We also need to install libgtk2.0-dev and libidl-dev to meet the dependencies required by Firefox.

Fetch the source code using apt-get source firefox, edit the $HOME/.mozconfig,

then invoke configure, make:

CC reported an error at the linking time: /usr/ccs/bin/ar is not found. It seems that there is still some package missing, not quite sure it is binutils, I would ask for help from #gnusol tomorrow.

Since OpenSolaris Express Developer Edition asks for more than 768M memory, 8G disk, what a demanding monster! I could not fit it into VMWare on my laptop 700m. Therefore, before I order a new powerful desktop, I might stick to the NexentaOS right now.

SunStudio 11 is the native compiler in Solaris so it is supposed to work with DTrace static provider. Unfortunately there is no success story to install SunStudio 11 on NexentaOS so far according to the IRC discussion, I need to find my own way to work around this problem.

SunStudio is packaged in pkgcmd format, to make things even worse, NexentaOS drops the native pkgcmd, and replace it with a wrapper for Debian package. To automation the tedious unzip, copy, chown, chmod, ln and last but not the least, dependency resolving, I develop this python script

To use this script, you need to change your work directory to the packages, then you can list the available packages:

We only care about the SunStudio C compiler, before we emerge it, we might take a look at the dependencies:

There are some packages missing, for example SUNWesu, since we are using APT package system, just ignore them, and install the package, emerge will recursively install all packages available in the current path:

This procedure includes the following steps:

• Calculate the dependencies
• Unpack ${PKG}/archieves/none to the ${BASEDIR}
• chmod, chown if necessary according to ${PKG}/pkgmap

After that, you need to add /opt/SUNWspro/bin to your ${PATH}, and compile the very first application, hello world. Oops, cc could not find stdio.h. It compiles simple C source code without library. It seems that the C Compiler is not well configured, I would figure it out later.

DTrace has aroused a big buzz in the community. This neat tool provides a powerful infrastructure for dynamic tracing. DTrace ships some built-in probes, vminfo, sysinfo, proc, io etc; furthermore, the DTrace facilitates the developers to plugin customized static probes as well. DTrace meets Javascript (screenshot), is the initial effort to embrace DTrace in Javascript community.

Install OpenSolaris

There are a bunch of OpenSolaris distribution projects actively developed. I chose NexentaOS since it is characterized as the synergy of the OpenSolaris and GNU softwares. The installation is quite smooth since I am using the VMWare image, just copy, launch, and you get a Ubuntu-like desktop. The network adapter works out of the box.

Install GCC

It is quite annoying that Ubuntu-derived distribution does not include GCC as the base. But you can install it anyway.

Build the Mozilla Firefox

Download the source code for Mozilla Firefox you are using, in my case, i.e Firefox-1.5.0.7. I manually adapt the modification from Helper Monkey, augment the Makefile.in to add the new files, (patch). After 2 hours struggling, and I googled the web and found Ticket #405. Oops!

Ok, let met ry to install Sun Studio 11 on Nexenta. No luck at all, the installer hides the detailed error message, what I could find is the Java I/O exceptions. If I were more experienced OpenSolaris user, I might find a way to solve this problem.

That is the day one, I would rather try the official OpenSolaris Express Developer Edition tomorrow.