Building on Solaris

These instructions have only been checked for GHC 6.12.1 on Solaris 10 on SPARC. They should also apply to later versions of GHC, Solaris 8 and later, and perhaps Solaris on x86.

GHC versions 6.10.1 and earlier don't have a working SPARC native code generator, and have many small build issues with Solaris. Use GHC 6.12.1 or later.

Get the latest development tools

See Solaris Preparations.

What can go wrong

The rest of this page discusses problems with specific tool versions. If you stick to the versions in the above list then you shouldn't have to read further.

Only some GCC versions work

• GCC version 4.1.2 is known to work. Use this version if possible.

On Solaris 10, /usr/bin/gcc is "GCC for Sun Systems (gccfss)". This is a version that uses Sun's code generator backend. This is completely unusable for GHC because GHC has to post-process (mangle) the assembly output of GCC. GHC expects the format and layout that the normal GCC uses. Trying to compile a "hello world" program using gccfss will fail like this:

benl@greyarea:~/tmp$ ghc --make Main.hs
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Main.hs, Main.o )
/opt/gcc/bin/../../SUNW0scgfss/4.0.4/prod/bin/fbe: "/tmp/ghc19018_0/ghc19018_0.s", line 242: error: invalid character (0x40)
/opt/gcc/bin/../../SUNW0scgfss/4.0.4/prod/bin/fbe: "/tmp/ghc19018_0/ghc19018_0.s", line 242: error: quoted-string operand required
/opt/gcc/bin/../../SUNW0scgfss/4.0.4/prod/bin/fbe: "/tmp/ghc19018_0/ghc19018_0.s", line 242: error: statement syntax

GCC version 4.3.x produces assembly files that GHC's "evil mangler" does not yet deal with.

GCC version 4.2.x works but takes hours and hours to build the large .hc files that GHC generates. It is reported (#1293 (closed), #2906 (closed)) that particular modules can take upwards of 5 hours and the overall build takes a couple days. This is due to complexity issues with respect to GCC moving to a unit-at-a-time compilation scheme instead of function-at-a-time.

GCC version 4.0.2 does not support thread local state (TLS), at least on SPARC.

GCC version 3.4.x is reported (#951 (closed)) to mis-compile the runtime system leading to a runtime error schedule: re-entered unsafely. But such a gcc version is sufficient for most user programs in case you just installed a ghc binary distribution.

Using the wrong assembler

If you fail to install GNU binutils then GHC will try to use the native Sun assembler, and you'll get something like this:

benl@greyarea:~/tmp$ ghc --make Main.hs -fforce-recomp
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Main.hs, Main.o )
/usr/ccs/bin/as: "/tmp/ghc19665_0/ghc19665_0.s", line 242: error: invalid character (0x40)
/usr/ccs/bin/as: "/tmp/ghc19665_0/ghc19665_0.s", line 242: error: quoted-string operand required
/usr/ccs/bin/as: "/tmp/ghc19665_0/ghc19665_0.s", line 242: error: statement syntax

The offending line is:

.section .note.GNU-stack,"",@progbits

Split objects

Split objects didn't work in GHC 6.10.x, not sure about GHC 6.12.1.

It worked on Solaris 10 with ghc-6.8.3, gcc-4.1.2 and the system (not GNU) binutils (ie as, ld etc from /usr/ccs/bin).

If you run into linker problems then you can try turning it off by adding the following to your mk/build.mk:

SplitObjs=NO

Test Failures

The following regression tests are known to fail on SPARC/Solaris10 with GHC 6.12.1, using the 6.12.1 testsuite. Some of these are not platform specific.

Unexpected failures:
  1861(optc,profc)
  3171(normal)
  3586(normal)
  T3016(hpc,optasm,profasm)
  T3294(normal)
  arith011(profc)
  barton-mangler-bug(profc)
  break024(ghci)
  conc012(ghci)
  concprog001(ghci)
  concprog002(threaded2)
  derefnull(profc,profthreaded)
  divbyzero(profc,profthreaded)
  hClose002(normal,optc,hpc,optasm,profc,profasm,ghci,threaded1,threaded2,profthreaded)
  hClose003(normal,optc,hpc,optasm,profc,profasm,ghci,threaded1,threaded2,profthreaded)
  joao-circular(optc,profc)
  rtsflags001(normal)
  seward-space-leak(ghci)
  signals004(ghci,threaded1,threaded2,profthreaded)
  space_leak_001(normal,optc,hpc,optasm,ghci)
  testblockalloc(normal,threaded1)
  user001(normal,optc,hpc,optasm,profc,profasm,ghci,threaded1,threaded2,profthreaded)