Solaris and the 256 File Descriptor Problem

Some of you reading this may remember that back when InterBase 6.0 was released on Solaris we ran into a fundamental problem on Solaris. It seems that since 1992 there has been an open bug documenting Solaris' file descriptor problem: "32-bit stdio routines should support file descriptors >255."

Bug id:
1085341

When this issue was discovered, we chose to use SFIO, a stdio variant from AT&T
Comments on this issue can be found in jrd/common.h which forces a superserver build to use our own internal stdio.h found in extern/SfIO/include.

Well it looks like in Solaris 10 Sun have finally fixed the issue.
More details can be found in the article entitled:
Solaris OS Solutions to 32-Bit stdio's 256 File-Descriptors Limitation by Giri Mandalika dated May 2007

Suffice it say - the bug has been fixed, but in a fairly typical Sun way.... the fix is more complicated than it should be... why they didn't just change the char to a short and be done with it I really don't know.

Anyway it should be possible on Solaris 10 to use this fix instead of our "own" implementation of stdio.h, just by adding a couple of lines to gds.cpp
e.g.

#ifdef SOLARIS
#include <stdio_ext.h>
#endif
after including

and then adding the following at around about line 3535 (Firebird 2.0.4)
#ifdef SOLARIS
enable_extended_FILE_stdio (-1, -1);
#endif

Hmm that seems to be a nice simple solution, except that its always more complicated than that.
It seems that this fix is only available from later releases of Solaris 10, so if you have a version of Solaris from Solaris 10 3/05 through Solaris 10 11/06 you will need to install just 3 patches...
Well no - thats not the case. I had to do the following to get this to work...

Download and install the following patches:

1. 118855-36
2. 118919-21
3. 119255-53
4. 120273-21
5. 123840-04
6. 127756-01
7. 125504-02
8. 122661-08
9. 125548-02
10. 126420-01
11. 126424-03

And then finally in single user mode, followed by a reconfigure reboot:
To boot Solaris x86 in single user mode, requires some fun and games too...

At the GRUB menu, type 'e' before it times out and takes the default boot option.
Scroll to the default multiuser boot line, then type 'e' egain.
This will bring you in to edit mode. Add a ' -s' at the end of the line.
Then type 'b' to boot.

12. 120012-14

Install this patch - then reconfigure

At the GRUB menu, type 'e' before it times out and takes the default boot option.
Scroll to the default multiuser boot line, then type 'e' egain.
This will bring you in to edit mode. Add a ' -r' at the end of the line.
Then type 'b' to boot.

I am not sure that we can ask Solaris users of Firebird if they do not have the fix already installed to go through this, so we will have a look at keeping our own SfIO. However currently that will not compile using gcc 4.2.1 and thats something else we need to try and fix.

Addendum:
sftp is now broken - so you need to add two more patches to the list above

13. 119253-26
14. 124629-07