Saturday, August 6, 2016

Solaris 10 and year 2038 problem

Now I got a moment of a spare time to write why the Solaris 10 boot was failing under the new sun4v (sparc64) emulation target for QEMU.

It turned out that the now solved SMF issues I mentioned before were caused by a single character typo.

Stepping through the SQLite code I’ve noticed that there are two schemes: one persistent, which to my surprise has been opened with no problems, and a temporary one which failed because it could not create a file under /etc/svc/volatile which resides in RAM.

Why? Because of a very funny reason. The old Solaris versions used to check whether Real Time Clock (sometimes they call it “rtc”, sometimes they call it tod) returned a sane value and ignored it if it's not.

Solaris 10 issues a warning, but goes on and uses the given time. Then init system call creating file on a UFS considers time after 0x7fffffff invalid, which sends SMF into busy error loop.

The fatal typo was writing “qemu_clock_get_ns” instead of “qemu_clock_get_ms”, so I hit the error which the rest of the mankind using Solaris 10 for OpenSPARC T1 will hit 22 years later.

So let’s wait and see how many people will find my blog entries about SMF in February 2038.


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