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Solaris for x86 Notebooks

by Daniel P. Dern

July 1, 2005

Getting Better, Getting Easier

Solaris-based notebooks have mostly been SPARC-based. For example, Sun's own SPARCbook ran Solaris 2 a decade ago. There were also early portables from Tadpole Computer.

Given the price of SPARC-based notebooks--Tadpole's current SPARC-based notebooks are around $3,000, for example--x86/x64 notebooks make tempting alternatives. Bargain Intel/AMD-based notebooks sometimes edge down to the $500 mark, with desktop-equivalent power in the $1,000 or so range. The x86 notebook market also includes ultralights in the four, three and two pound range, and a handful of shirt-pocket-sized machines--and a lot of Solaris users already have x86 notebooks.

But x86-based notebook computers have historically been mostly creatures of DOS and Windows, especially in terms of pre-installed OSes.

True, there's still information around on installing OS/2 and *BSDs, but, for whatever reason, Solaris hasn't had a visible presence in the x86/x64 notebook world ... so far.

Driver issues and other installation bumps presumably account for much of this. For example, one SunForum posting starts, "I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has struggled to install Sol-10 onto a notebook."

Many dedicated Sun users have succeeded. A customer survey, for example, suggests surprising results, according to Chris Baker, senior product manager for Solaris for x86 and x64. "In the Solaris 8 timeframe, 19 percent of our x86 users reported they were running it on laptops--even though we hadn't been focusing on supporting it at all. I.e., a lot of customers had found ways to run laptops with Solaris."

With Solaris 10 and increased support by Sun, that's changing, and should change more over the coming year. Solaris 10 launched in January 2005; by April, "Sun had over 1.2 million registered users, and about two-thirds of those--like three-quarters of a million systems--are for the x86-type platform," according to Angel Camacho, senior technical project manager at Sun.

Forty-three percent of the x86/x64 systems listed on Sun's Solaris OS: Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCLs) are laptops, so it's possible, says Camacho, that "there could be several hundred thousand Solaris notebooks by now," although, he recognizes that Sun doesn't have a count.

Solaris 10, Coming Moderately Soon to Notebook Vendors Near You

While phone calls made in April didn't turn up any currently selling x86/x64 notebooks with Solaris 10, some are clearly thinking about it, and/or doing more than just thinking.

Linux Certified, for example, expects to offer its 17-inch, Pentium-based LC2500 series notebook with Solaris pre-installed, by the end of June, according to a sales rep.

Similarly, "We are negotiating a contract for Solaris 10," reports Laura Cooper, marketing manager at Next Computing, whose x86/x64 portable offerings include the Dual-Xeon FlexPC Server and the Intel P4-based NextBook.

Tadpole Computer has worked with Sun technology since the early 1980s and has made SPARC Solaris machines since 1992, according to David Miles, director of marketing. Tadpole doesn't currently have any x86 notebooks, says Miles. The company focuses mainly on SPARC-based solutions, and their prime market is the federal government. The company does, Miles says, support Linux on x86 notebooks, and is working with Sun to provide Solaris 10 on x86/x64 notebooks, but there were no specific product plans that he was prepared to talk about.

Meanwhile, Users Are Installing Solaris

Meanwhile, Solaris users are clearly easing installs of Solaris 10 onto their x86/x64 notebooks--with more than a fair amount of success.

Zafar Chowdhry, a IT consultant specializing in trading-floor technology who uses Solaris on SPARC and x86 desktops, gave up trying to install Solaris on his old Compaq Presario. It didn't have an Ethernet jack, Solaris didn't recognize his PCMCIA NIC, and he didn't feel like buying a newer one--but now he has a new Acer Ferrari notebook on order and expects to install Solaris 10 on it. (Meanwhile, he carries around a small HP computer with Solaris 10 for doing installs in server rooms.)

A look at the "Laptops" page of Sun's Hardware Comparability List for Solaris OS shows dozens of notebook entries for Solaris 10 (44 as of April 28, 2005), and another 120 for Solaris 9.

About a dozen appear on the "Test Level Suite 1" tab, with the remainder on "Reported to Work." A quick browse through people's comments on the Solaris 10 installs on x86/x64 notebooks shows a few needed drivers or tweaking for video, sound, or networking, or reported problems with wireless or power management. Around half simply report that Solaris 10 works on their notebooks.

Supporting Notebooks Is Harder

The x86 and notebook challenge has to some extent grown more difficult, points out Baker, who is an 11-year Sun veteran.

Baker recalls when, over a decade ago, "We'd just launched Solaris 2.4 ... back then we had an active engineering team writing and releasing drivers for a variety of platforms, including support, albeit fairly limited, for a number of laptops.

"Back then, pretty much any peripheral device had to be a PCMCIA card, even a network interface or a modem. So the basic laptop was very simple--CPU, memory, storage, and video. Even things like SCSI adapters were add-in cards at the time.

"Solaris could run on the base hardware; the value-added engineering work we had to do was in the PCMCIA cards and drivers for devices added that way. From Sol 2.4 to 2.7, we were doing a pretty good job of tracking the availability of devices, even for laptops.

"But there was growing diversity in the laptop marketplace, Even two apparently similar laptops might not have the same graphics chip, or [would have] other differences, so drivers for one laptop might not work on the other. Tracking this industry diversity was a big problem. That may have been what led us to de-emphasize the laptop space, and put more effort in the server side of the market."

"People have an expectation of getting the same features as they do with a Windows notebook," states Tadpole's Miles, also pointing out some of the current challenges of installing Solaris on a notebook versus a desktop or server--similar, he noted, to the problems Linux has faced. For example, the chipsets and components are different because of design considerations such as size and cooling. Another challenge is the presence of batteries, which means the need--and desire--for more power management.

"When we put Linux onto an x86 notebook," Miles points out, "typical problems--it varies from notebook to notebook--included making wireless work reliably ... eighteen months ago, it was a problem ... and video--basic 2D isn't a problem, but 3D needs new drivers. Sun is doing a great job of trying to make sure that a lot of these features are in the current release of Solaris 10 x86."

One problem is the more dynamic nature of the hardware.

"Laptops, and the devices in them, change pretty often," notes Alan DuBoff, a Solaris x86 evangelist within Sun, hired after working in a group to bring back Solaris x86. His activities for Sun include "helping people with installfests, getting Solaris loaded on their laptops, and working with big Sun customers to set up systems."

"The big mystery piece for people," DuBoff says, is "adding the device IDs, and how. That's the area most people will mostly likely fall on their face on. Or they'll try to edit things, and prevent the system from booting at all; it's very dangerous when you're editing your driver aliases."

"Sun has pretty stringent certification; if they need to add another device for Solaris to recognize, it may work but won't see a driver it can attach to." However, DuBoff points out, "That's rarer nowadays."

New Notebook-Friendly Features Coming

Upcoming releases of Solaris 10 should bring a mix of notebook-specific improvements, in areas like power management and wireless, as well as general features that will make Solaris notebooks more useful.

Coming features for Solaris x86/x64 include a new boot architecture, according to Sun's DuBoff.

"Currently, limits on Solaris x86/x64 require any boot device to have a real mode driver, and boots into that and then protected mode," DuBoff says. "This means that any device you want to boot from, such as a disk, would need a real-mode driver in addition to the protected-mode driver. That's a limitation--and not a good one." (OS/2 did a similar thing, DuBoff notes.)

"The new boot architecture for Solaris will have a big impact on install and on hardware detection, which will ultimately change the whole boot scenario, for all Solaris on x86/x64."

Also on the roadmap for a future update, according to Sun's Angel Camacho, is boot-and-install, comparable to the Knoppix Linux distro, which would allow users to boot from a CD.

Eric Nielsen and Julie Nelson also write that, "Flat-panel mouses and onboard low-power modems result in the need for device drivers that are specific to each machine."

"Getting the X configuration set can be another challenge for laptop Solaris users," DuBoff adds (talking at this point about pre-10 efforts). "By default they don't work with configuration with xorg.conf ... often, on laptops, if it doesn't work, the machine will come up in 480 by 640, and then you have to make your own xorg.conf file." (DuBoff has been collecting and distributing a package of X.org configuration files.)

Solving Video, Audio Concerns

One important positive change, notes Sun's Baker, is that the notebook market is using more desktop technology; in particular, it's a rare laptop these days that isn't network-ready, notes Baker. "The investment we'd done in supporting these drivers for the server space was paying off for laptops as well.

"We're still not making a lot of noise about it, but there's a fairly substantial amount of engineering work in-house looking at laptop-relevant technologies.

"The most significant thing we've done in Solaris 10 is to deliver the Xorg X server in addition to X.Sun, the old traditional Sun X server, all based on X11 technology. With Solaris, it's all built in. The Xorg server is essentially the same code base used by BSD and Linux distros, and brings with it a huge wealth of drivers and other video-related support.

"Xorg brings us on a par with Linux, but also has a burden," Baker notes. "If you want to do things like dual-head, you have to know enough about the system to do that configuration work. But we know have the same driver support as Linux or BSD in Solaris 10."

Audio is another area that's starting to ramp up, in a smaller fashion, reports Baker. "Since we've started shipping the Opteron-based workstation, we've had to put more emphasis on delivering audio drivers. We now have one that supports the embedded audio function in the chipset used in some Opteron workstations."

The other two noticeable areas, reports Baker, are power management and wireless networking. "We have projects running on both those areas, we already have some wireless drivers in-house. You will see elements on this technology rolling out in Solaris 10 updates ... wireless drivers probably sooner than later. Power management for all Solaris on x86 will take longer, since it spans up through enterprise class servers down through laptop devices."

Other areas of likely interest to notebook users in Solaris 10, according to Baker: "We put in support for USB 2.0 and for FireWire. We're in the process of qualifying a range of peripherals, so laptop users will have access to things like removable storage."

As a senior technical project manager at Sun, Angel Camacho oversees all of the tech features of Solaris, regardless of platform. "As part of my role, I spend a lot of time with customers," says Camacho. "The first question I get is, 'How easy is it for me to get Sol running on my laptop?' To answer, I do a 'Let's try it,' preferably with a laptop they may have with them."

And, reports Camacho, the overall response to these ad-hoc installs has been, "It's as easy to install as Linux, and only one more notch more difficult than Windows."

End users may have some learning curve, Camacho concedes. However, "For any sizeable install--in-house, VAR, etc.--laptops can be installed like any x86-type system, using our network-based install tools. Then you can replicate it over the net, a complete Solaris install, using PXE boot technology, which is the standard Intel boot and install.

"Installing Solaris in a multi-boot configuration does require some additional expertise," notes Camacho. "This implies some knowledge in how the disk works, how the devices are addressed. I've seen people learn how to do this in a few minutes."

Browsing through various forums turns up comments like:

  • The only thing I had to fiddle with was the screen resolution. Create your xorg.conf configuration file using /usr/X11/bin/xorgconfig. After that, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the 1600 by 1200 directives.
  • Wireless works.
  • Wireless doesn't work.
  • External USB mouse works out of the box.
  • Didn't see any power management kicking in.
  • The fact that the 1280 by 768 WXGA display works is REALLY COOL!!
  • On-board Ethernet works using standard BGE driver. Had to add bge "pci14e4,16a6" to /etc/driver_aliases to get it working.
  • Suspend/resume doesn't work.
  • Using the Xorg X server without any problems.
  • USB works--tested with USB pen and USB mouse. DVD/CD-RW works.
  • The sound doesn't work after the Solaris installation.

Improvements Since Solaris 9

Solaris x86's notebook-related issues went beyond limits on PCMCIA support, DuBoff acknowledges. Solaris 9 had poor USB support, and no support for FireWire. This has gotten better--Solaris 10 supports both USB 1.1 and 2.0, and FireWire support. For example, I use an external Maxtor One-Touch Drive, and it works fine with either USB 2.0 or FireWire.

In fact, DuBoff says, at the beginning of Solaris 9, they removed laptop support. Now Sun is sort of supporting laptops, but Sun doesn't have an official laptop product. But the plan is that Sun will support laptops--they're doing a lot of x86 development in areas like PCMCIA, wireless drivers, and power management, for Solaris 10 updates.

A technical support person at Next Computing offered some observations based on Solaris x86 experience prior to version 10.

"The x86 version of Solaris should install fairly easily on more common hardware. The problem is, x86 is very picky. A lot of things aren't supported through Solaris x86; e.g., the PCMCIA port. You may need to find third-party drivers for a NIC. Or you may not get full performance on your video card, depending on the card. x86 may not support all the features, like 3D modelling, although it will support the resolution. You're usually stuck with the generic video driver. And audio usually does not work; we may have one model on which it does.

"Solaris 10 may change all that," he adds, "but I haven't tried it yet."

In terms of third-party applications, Eric Nielsen and Julie Nelson point out, "Most of the freeware software that is available for UNIX has been compiled for the Solaris Intel version. Sun distributes a companion CD that contains freeware." Of course, there's always Sunfreeware. "The Linux libraries allow you to run all Linux applications on a Solaris laptop. While we have not tried to do this, we hear that people have been very successful doing this."

Solaris Notebook Installation Resources

Solaris and x86 Notebook Resources

Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer and former editor of Byte.com. His web site is www.dern.com.