X Window System on Solaris™

David Holland

XFree86 Project

Marc Aurele La France

XFree86 Project

Alan Coopersmith

Oracle Corp.

X Version 11, Release 7.7

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Table of Contents

The VT-switching sub-system in Solaris

Notes for building X11R7.7 on Solaris

Notes for running Xorg on Solaris

Bug Notification

The VT-switching sub-system in Solaris

The original virtual terminal sub-system is a undocumented, and unsupported

feature of Solaris x86 releases 2.1 through 7. It was removed in Solaris 8 and

later releases, and was never present on Solaris SPARC. Support for this

version of virtual terminals is only present in Xorg 1.6.x and earlier releases

of Xorg, and has been removed in Xorg 1.7 and later. If you use this form of

virtual terminals, you do so at YOUR OWN RISK.

A new virtual terminal sub-system has been introduced in Solaris 11, and is

also available in systems based on the OpenSolaris or illumos sources. This

version is supported on both SPARC and x86 platforms, though SPARC support is

limited to devices with "Coherent Console" support in the kernel frame buffer

driver. Support for it is found only in Xorg 1.7 and later server releases.

When available, the virtual terminals of Solaris work basically the same way as

most other VT sub-systems.

Notes for building X11R7.7 on Solaris

1. Both GCC, and the Sun Studio compilers are supported by X11R7.7. The

minimum recommended GCC release is 3.4. Some earlier GCC's are known to not

work and should be avoided.

You should also make certain your version of GCC predefines `sun'. If

needed edit /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/*/*/specs, and modify the *predefines:

line.

2. To build X11R7.7 with GCC you need gcc and (optionally) c++filt from GNU

binutils. Don't install gas or ld from GNU binutils, use the one provided

by Sun.

3. If you are using Sun compilers to compile the X11R7.7 distribution, you

need to modify your PATH appropriately so the Sun compiler tools are

available. Normally, they should be in /opt/SUNWspro/bin

4. You MUST put /usr/ccs/bin at the front of your PATH. There are known

problems with some GNU replacements for the utilities found there, so the /

usr/ccs/bin versions of these programs must be found before any possible

GNU versions. (Most notably GNU 'ar' does not work during the build).

Notes for running Xorg on Solaris

1. Depending on the release or architecture of Solaris you are running, you

might need to install an OS driver for an aperture device.

Under Solaris x86 2.5 and later, there's a system driver (/dev/xsvc) that

provides this functionality. It will be detected automatically by the

server, so you don't need to install the aperture driver.

For older Solaris x86 and for Solaris SPARC releases, the source for this

driver is included in hw/xfree86/os-support/solaris/apSolaris.shar in the

xserver source distribution. Building, and installing the driver is

relatively straight forward. Please read its accompanying README file.

2. Xqueue is NOT supported under Solaris.

Bug Notification

Bug reports should be reported at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/ using the xorg

product or sent to <xorg@lists.freedesktop.org>.