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Asked: 2009-10-18 18:33:03 +0800 CST

Application compatability across different flavours of Solaris

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Does anyone have an answer for the following?

  1. Can an app supported for Solaris Sparc be reasonably expected to work on Solaris x86?
  2. Can an app supported for Solaris 10 be reasonably expected to work on OpenSolaris?

  3. (This is the important one) Can an app supported for Solaris Sparc be reasonably expected to work on OpenSolaris x86?


Some background:

I'm in the middle of setting up some fresh VMs on my x86 dev box and was looking at the system requirements for an application I'll be using. It stated that the app was supported for Solaris 10 on Sparc.

It's also supported on several flavours of Linux so I've got a fallback but this seems like an opportunity to get hands on with Solaris (OpenSolaris specifically).

I understand that I'll be unsupported but for the purposes of what I'm doing for now that's not a particularly big issue.

Also, I understand that my mileage may vary but what concerns me is whether it is worth trying in the first place.

solaris

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If it's a binary only application compiled for SPARC it will not work on x86. As far as I know OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 are source compatible across architectures, so if you have the source you shouldn't have any problems build it for x86.

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  2. 1. Can an app supported for Solaris Sparc be reasonably expected to work on Solaris x86?

    If it's a platform-independent format (script in perl/python/shell/etc. or a Java application), then most likely yes. If it's compiled code, then if you have the source code and can recompile for the x86 instruction set, then most likely yes. There are always exceptions and corner cases, but Solaris is designed to be source code compatible across platforms. Solaris does not include any sort of ISA binary translation/emulation layer though for compiled binaries. (Transitive, who made the Rosetta software Apple uses for PowerPC ISA emulation on x86, did sell a SPARC-to-x86 translator for Solaris for a while, but then IBM bought them.)

    2. Can an app supported for Solaris 10 be reasonably expected to work on OpenSolaris?

    Unless it uses interfaces/libraries that were declared obsolete and removed, or those that were declared as uncommitted/unstable and happened to change incompatibility, then yes. OpenSolaris is designed to be binary compatible with Solaris 10 and previous Solaris releases.

    3. (This is the important one) Can an app supported for Solaris Sparc be reasonably expected to work on OpenSolaris x86?

    That pretty much goes back to question #1 about what sort of app it is & if you need to recompile it.

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