The datasets we produce for SmartOS are usually released on a quarterly cadence, matching the upstream pkgsrc release branches. This is often enough to ensure that people can get up-to-date software with all the usual improvements and bug fixes.

Occasionally though, users want the very latest and don’t really want to wait for 3 months to get it, and so to satisfy those users who crave the bleeding edge I have produced a new dataset which is based upon pkgsrc trunk.

The package repository for this dataset will be constantly updated with the very latest that pkgsrc has to offer, and so you will occasionally see breakage as we integrate updates for core libraries and add new features. Think of it as being similar to Debian ‘unstable’, you get the very latest stuff but you may need to do some maintenance every so often.

Here are some reasons why you may want to use this dataset:

• It is based upon the multiarch code, so only one image is necessary. No more needing to decide between the 32-bit or 64-bit options.

• It is a full bulk build, so there are in the region of 9,000 packages to choose from (depending on the current state of pkgsrc trunk).

• It has all the Joyent specific changes integrated, so that means SMF support for many packages which we have written manifests for, static UID/GID allocation, various improvements, and uses the standard /opt/local prefix.

• There are some nice improvements only available in pkgsrc trunk, for example OpenSSL 1.0.1e with proper AES-NI support, and libpcap fixes from @postwait with a slew of networking utilities now available and working (these will be documented in a future post).

How to install

Here is a quick start guide to getting the preview dataset up and running:

: Fetch the dataset image and manifest files.  The image is 82MB.
$ mkdir -p /usbkey/images
$ cd /usbkey/images
$ curl -O http://pkgsrc.smartos.org/datasets/trunk-0.99.0.dsmanifest
$ curl -O http://pkgsrc.smartos.org/datasets/trunk-0.99.0.zfs.bz2

: Import it
$ imgadm install -m trunk-0.99.0.dsmanifest -f trunk-0.99.0.zfs.bz2

: Create a new zone using the dataset (change your json to suit).
$ vmadm create <<EOF
{
  "brand": "joyent",
  "image_uuid": "c91b3752-79c5-11e2-ad33-67667b9ee2c2",
  "max_physical_memory": 256,
  "alias": "trunk-0.99.0",
  "nics": [
    {
      "nic_tag": "admin",
      "ip": "dhcp"
    }
  ]
}
EOF

then login and start using it as you would with any other dataset.

Known issues

With this being a bleeding-edge distribution, there will undoubtedly be problems.The main one I am currently aware of is dependencies upon the GCC runtime from the /opt/pbulk prefix used to build the packages, which looks like this:

# pkgin in samba
calculating dependencies... done.
/opt/pbulk/gcc47/lib/./libgcc_s.so.1, needed by samba-3.6.12nb1 is not present in this system.
/opt/pbulk/gcc47/lib/./libgcc_s.so.1, needed by tdb-1.2.11 is not present in this system.
[...]

We are actively working on fixing these dependencies, but in the meantime if you require a package which is broken in this way you can work around it by installing the /opt/pbulk bootstrap like this:

# curl http://pkgsrc.smartos.org/packages/SmartOS/bootstrap/bootstrap-pbulk.tar.gz \
    | gtar -zxf - -C /
# /opt/pbulk/bin/pkgin -y install gcc47

The other issue to note is that not all packages have been converted to multiarch. Again we are actively working on this, but it will take some time to go through all of the 12,000 or so packages in pkgsrc.

If you find any other problems, please feel free to raise them against our GitHub project here. Or, even better, follow my guides on building pkgsrc (you will want the joyent/release/trunk branch) and have a go at fixing things yourself, we very much welcome patches and pull requests!