Tuesday, May 16, 2017

no studio 12.5 for you

The situation can be summarized as "you have installed Solaris Studio 12.5 on a platform, T1000, that is not supported". 

To give you a more detailed explanation of what is happening, everything starts from 

Bug 26080816 - "Backport 25993568 - man page for -xarch=generic is wrong for SPARC to 12.5" 

which has as base bug 

Bug 25993568 - man page for -xarch=generic is wrong for SPARC 

This last bug basically says that the man page for "CC", "cc" and "f90" compilers is wrong as it says that they have been compiled with the flag "-xarch=generic" while in the reality it has been compiled with "-xarch=sparcvis2". The usage of this last flag means that the aforementioned binaries coming with the Solaris Studio 12.5 installation need that the HW system they run on MUST advise VIS instruction set to be able to run on the system. 

After an internal discussion with Solaris OS and HW Support, it seems that T1 systems (so T1000 and T2000) do not advise VIS 

=============== 
The use of VIS instructions for Niagara is deprecated, the performance of even the implemented VIS instructions will often be below a comparable set of non-VIS instructions. so intentionally VIS was not enabled/advertised for T1 in hwcaps/isalist. 
T1 supports a subset of VIS1 and only the siam instruction from VIS2. And the OS fills in the gaps via software emulation for the rest. Those platforms are quite a bit past their "use by" date. And I've found that the very latest compilers don't even run on older versions of Solaris any more. 
=============== 

From Solaris Studio Support there was lack of information in the product release notes, therefore the following bug has been filed to document that T1000 and T2000 are not supported by Solaris Studio 12.5+ 

Bug 26080849 - Backport 26052198 - release notes need to warn about UltraSPARC T1 to 12.5 docs 

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