From 0-to-illumos on OmniOS r151016

Today we updated OmniOS to its next stable release: r151016. You can click the link to see its release notes, and you may notice a brief mention the illumos-tools package.

I want to see more people working on illumos. A way to help that is to get people started on actually BUILDING illumos more quickly. To that end, r151016 contains everything to bring up an illumos development environment. You can develop small on it, but this post is going to discuss how we make building all of illumos-gate from scratch easier. (I plan on updating the older post on small/focused compilation after ws(1) and bldenv(1) effectively merge into one tool.)

The first thing you want to do is install OmniOS. The latest release media can be found here, on the Installation page.

After installation, your system is a blank slate. You'll need to set a root password, create a non-root user, and finally add networking parameters. The OmniOS wiki's General Administration Guide covers how to do this.

I've added a new building illumos page to the OmniOS wiki that should detail how straightforward the process is. You should be able to kick off a full nightly(1ONBLD) build quickly enough. If you don't want to edit one of the omnios-illumos-* samples in /opt/onbld/env, just make sure you have a $USER/ws directory, clone one of illumos-gate or illumos-omnios into $USER/ws/testws and use one of the template /opt/onbld/env/omnios-illumos-* files corresponding to illumos-gate or illumos-omnios. For example:

omnios(~)[0]% mkdir ws
omnios(~)[0]% cd ws
omnios(~/ws)[0]% git clone https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/ testws

omnios(~/ws)[0]% /bin/time /opt/onbld/bin/nightly /opt/onbld/env/omnios-illumos-gate

You can then look in testws/log/log-date&time/mail_msg to see how your build went.