About a few years ago I was offered a $10K bounty to make Solaris 7 work with QEMU, and the only progress anyone ever made was mounting the ISO image as a hard drive image and install from there. Nobody ever got the NIC card to get on the Internet. I found out CDROM0: or something could access the ISO image. Everytime I set up TCP/IP it would cause a kernel panic, or lock the system up, or crash. I was given like a week and could not do it. Then I found out about Hackers in Russia trying to do the same thing and not getting anywhere. Apparently the Solaris 7 Kernel has a NIC bug in it where some pointers are out of place. It was solved in a Y2K CD-ROM from Sun which is no longer offered.
Client who wanted me to make it work has a failing SPARC Server with Solaris 7 and needed everything the same. Problem was fixed in Solaris 9, but they needed Solaris 7 even if 9 is backward compatible.
Writing a new Kernel for Solaris 7 based on the old Kernel that works with QEMU might just work. Remember it is QEMU SPARC that I was working with to get networking going.
But if the best and brightest Hackers couldn't get Solaris 7 to have networking, then I for sure couldn't do it either.
But there is a need to emulate any sort of hardware no longer supported or made anymore because many businesses run on software created for those old hardware and software standards and when they can't buy the old hardware or it costs too much, it is better to just run it on QEMU.
> businesses run on software created for those old hardware and software standards and when they can't buy the old hardware or it costs too much, it is better to just run it on QEMU.
Or rewrite the software. At some point they're just going to pay more for not upgrading than it would cost them to start from scratch. And that's not including the cost of teaching people to manage old solaris boxes and dealing with non-accelerated QEMU draining your power budget.
Or port the software. I was given the task to port a soap-based MLOC client-server application from kylix-apache to modern delphi xe-apache.
All I had to do was to fix everywhere that used ansistring which meant rewriting compression, variants handling, hashing and porting a bunch of delphi library stuff that changed in the past 14 years.
After a few months and a gigantic commit on a few dozen files we can now debug everything, all apache modules run smoothly on windows and even android clients work.
If you have access to the source, that's possible of course. But I'm assuming that Solaris 7 also means you're stuck with proprietary, closed solution.
Yeah but they had a problem. The people who wrote the software for their business never gave them the source code and either died or retired. It apparently only works with Solaris 7 under SPARCServers and SPARC Stations.
They claim without the source code, the cost of rewriting it would be more than the cost of running a QEMU virtual machine on a Linux box.
They even had an OpenBSD Box with the same problem using an old version of software with no source code. But I think they could run the old OpenBSD on an X86 box or QEMU machine as there was no SPARC factor like with Solaris 7.
Apparently a lot of small IT shops pay people to write software in the 1990s, and get binaries but no source code because the contract didn't specify they get the source code. Contractors had the source code but kept it from the client to make sure they still get business to modify the software and the client doesn't hire someone else. During the Dotcom busts the contractors went out of business or one of them died from being old and nobody knows where the source code is located. Might be in a storage locker, they forgot to pay, and it was auctioned off. Might belong to a lawyer or underwriting who bought out the stock and IP and nobody knows who that person is.
About a few years ago I was offered a $10K bounty to make Solaris 7 work with QEMU, and the only progress anyone ever made was mounting the ISO image as a hard drive image and install from there. Nobody ever got the NIC card to get on the Internet. I found out CDROM0: or something could access the ISO image. Everytime I set up TCP/IP it would cause a kernel panic, or lock the system up, or crash. I was given like a week and could not do it. Then I found out about Hackers in Russia trying to do the same thing and not getting anywhere. Apparently the Solaris 7 Kernel has a NIC bug in it where some pointers are out of place. It was solved in a Y2K CD-ROM from Sun which is no longer offered.
Client who wanted me to make it work has a failing SPARC Server with Solaris 7 and needed everything the same. Problem was fixed in Solaris 9, but they needed Solaris 7 even if 9 is backward compatible.
Writing a new Kernel for Solaris 7 based on the old Kernel that works with QEMU might just work. Remember it is QEMU SPARC that I was working with to get networking going.
But if the best and brightest Hackers couldn't get Solaris 7 to have networking, then I for sure couldn't do it either.
But there is a need to emulate any sort of hardware no longer supported or made anymore because many businesses run on software created for those old hardware and software standards and when they can't buy the old hardware or it costs too much, it is better to just run it on QEMU.