5108R development started

The development of the 64-bit version of BlueOnyx just got started.

As you may be aware of: We are also aiming to deliver a 64-bit version of BlueOnyx on EL6, called BlueOnyx 5108R.

Development for the 64-bit version had already tentatively been started in June 2010 on the 64-bit beta version of RHEL6. This endeavour however didn't get very far. There were crucial problems with some components and the remotely hosted development box lost their network settings repeatedly during some early stages of testing the new code.

But now that BlueOnyx 5107R is released and the bugs that were discovered after release have been fixed, it is time to give 5108R another try.

This time around the development is done on a VirtualBox VPS on a workstation in my office. The OS used for the development (and also for productive usage afterwards) is the 64-bit version of Scientific Linux 6.1.

That way I have a bit more control over the box if it should loose its network settings again, which will probably still happen very early on until the underlying problem that causes it has been identified and fixed. It's probably related to some code in Sausalito that's not yet fully 64-bit ready. And I expect to find quite a few cases of code that's not 64-bit ready, because so far anyone working on the Sausalito sources (us and others before it) never really took it into consideration.

All in all I spent the last two evenings and parts of the nights onto setting up the 64-bit build environment, chasing dependencies, building and installing all the SRPMs and RPMs that are needed to start the build procedure of the 5108R Sausalito RPMs.

I also took the opportunity to clean out the x86_64 YUM repository. It had previously been populated with the 5108R RPMs from June/July of 2010 and that code is by now very outdated. Additionally all RPMs directly related to Sausalito somehow had the 'noarch' extension, which was just plain wrong in some cases.

Sometime tonight I hope to have a very basic Sausalito and CCE framework up and running on the 64-bit build box.

While the work continues on 5108R I'll post regular updates of the work in this blog.