Vmware running solaris 8

[Kelvin]

Is there anyone who had tried installing solaris 8 in vmware? Since there is
no official vmware install tools that support x86 solaris, I wonder if there
will be any problem invoking the CDE. Any advice? Thank you.

Kelvin

[Per Espen Hagen]

Post by Kelvin
Is there anyone who had tried installing solaris 8 in vmware? Since there is
no official vmware install tools that support x86 solaris, I wonder if there
will be any problem invoking the CDE. Any advice? Thank you.

I had some problems with 8, but I managed to get Solaris 9 up and running in
VMware. Using an XFree86 VMware video driver from somewhere on the net, it
works (more or less). The lack of VMware Tools support makes it a somewhat
painful experience though, compared to the supported OSes.

[Paul Day]

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[Phil Brown]

Post by Paul Day
Performance is pretty damn poor though. I'd expect it'd run much better
under vmware - if you can get the drivers working? (Haven't played with
vmware for many years)

How does, lets say, windows98 fare, under vmware, speed-wise?

[Andy McMullin]

Post by Kelvin
Is there anyone who had tried installing solaris 8 in vmware? Since
there is no official vmware install tools that support x86 solaris, I
wonder if there will be any problem invoking the CDE. Any advice? Thank
you.

Kelvin,

I've not used 8 with the current version; but Solaris 9 installs OK with
VMWare 4. As you say, there are no vmware tools (so you can't share bits
of drives etc); but otherwise it's fine. To install, remember to boot from
Volume 1 (not the install disk).

Once running, it's slooooow unless you make sure you have tons of memory.
There's also the 4 GByte disk limit to live with. Otherwise fine; Gnome,
CDE and KDE all seem to work once you've sorted out the screen that it's
emulating.

Hope this helps.

[Steve Thompson]

Post by Kelvin
Is there anyone who had tried installing solaris 8 in vmware? Since there is
no official vmware install tools that support x86 solaris, I wonder if there
will be any problem invoking the CDE. Any advice? Thank you.

Yes, I have installed Solaris 8 in vmware without any problems. It works,
but is veeeery slow. Also, the vmware process uses 100% of the host CPU
even when the virtual machine is idle.

-s

[Ian Northeast]

Post by Steve Thompson

Post by Kelvin
Is there anyone who had tried installing solaris 8 in vmware? Since there is
no official vmware install tools that support x86 solaris, I wonder if there
will be any problem invoking the CDE. Any advice? Thank you.

Yes, I have installed Solaris 8 in vmware without any problems. It works,
but is veeeery slow. Also, the vmware process uses 100% of the host CPU
even when the virtual machine is idle.

Then you have a fairly early version of Solaris 8, this was fixed about
halfway through its lifetime.

There was also a script published unofficially by VMware which uses adb
to insert the required HLT for earlier versions:


cat > /tmp/sol-idle << eof
idle+0x34/"Inserting a temporary jmp 0x04"
idle+0x34/w 0x04e8
idle+0x36/"Smashing the final NOP; NOP; NOP; NOP"
idle+0x36/W 0x90909090
idle+0x34/"Smashing the HLT ; NOP"
idle+0x34/w 0x90f4
idle+0x34/"Final result: call [idle_cpu] --> HLT;NOP;NOP;NOP;NOP;NOP"
eof

/usr/bin/adb -w -k /dev/ksyms /dev/mem < /tmp/sol-idle
rm /tmp/sol-idle


Solaris 9 does not have this problem.

Another point is that you have to use an IDE virtual disk (at least in
VMware 3) - Solaris may appear to support the Buslogic controller but it
doesn't support VMware's version.

Regards, Ian

[Ton van Vliet]

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