For information about installing MySQL on Solaris using PKG distributions, see Chapter 3, Installing MySQL on Solaris.

On Solaris, you may run into trouble even before you get the MySQL distribution unpacked, as the Solaris tar cannot handle long file names. This means that you may see errors when you try to unpack MySQL.

If this occurs, you must use GNU tar (gtar) to unpack the distribution.

Sun native threads work only on Solaris 2.5 and higher. For Solaris 2.4 and earlier, MySQL automatically uses MIT-pthreads. See MIT-pthreads Notes.

If you get the following error from configure, it means that you have something wrong with your compiler installation:

checking for restartable system calls... configure: error can not
run test programs while cross compiling

In this case, you should upgrade your compiler to a newer version. You may also be able to solve this problem by inserting the following row into the config.cache file:

ac_cv_sys_restartable_syscalls=${ac_cv_sys_restartable_syscalls='no'}

If you are using Solaris on a SPARC, the recommended compiler is gcc 2.95.2 or 3.2. You can find this at http://gcc.gnu.org/. Note that gcc 2.8.1 does not work reliably on SPARC.

The recommended configure line when using gcc 2.95.2 is:

CC=gcc CFLAGS="-O3" \
CXX=gcc CXXFLAGS="-O3 -felide-constructors -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --with-low-memory \
    --enable-assembler

If you have an UltraSPARC system, you can get 4% better performance by adding -mcpu=v8 -Wa,-xarch=v8plusa to the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS environment variables.

If you have Sun's Forte 5.0 (or newer) compiler, you can run configure like this:

CC=cc CFLAGS="-Xa -fast -native -xstrconst -mt" \
CXX=CC CXXFLAGS="-noex -mt" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --enable-assembler

To create a 64-bit binary with Sun's Forte compiler, use the following configuration options:

CC=cc CFLAGS="-Xa -fast -native -xstrconst -mt -xarch=v9" \
CXX=CC CXXFLAGS="-noex -mt -xarch=v9" ASFLAGS="-xarch=v9" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --enable-assembler

To create a 64-bit Solaris binary using gcc, add -m64 to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS and remove --enable-assembler from the configure line.

In the MySQL benchmarks, we obtained a 4% speed increase on UltraSPARC when using Forte 5.0 in 32-bit mode, as compared to using gcc 3.2 with the -mcpu flag.

If you create a 64-bit mysqld binary, it is 4% slower than the 32-bit binary, but can handle more threads and memory.

When using Solaris 10 for x86_64, you should mount any file systems on which you intend to store InnoDB files with the forcedirectio option. (By default mounting is done without this option.) Failing to do so will cause a significant drop in performance when using the InnoDB storage engine on this platform.

If you get a problem with fdatasync or sched_yield, you can fix this by adding LIBS=-lrt to the configure line

For compilers older than WorkShop 5.3, you might have to edit the configure script. Change this line:

#if !defined(__STDC__) || __STDC__ != 1

To this:

#if !defined(__STDC__)

If you turn on __STDC__ with the -Xc option, the Sun compiler can't compile with the Solaris pthread.h header file. This is a Sun bug (broken compiler or broken include file).

If mysqld issues the following error message when you run it, you have tried to compile MySQL with the Sun compiler without enabling the -mt multi-thread option:

libc internal error: _rmutex_unlock: rmutex not held

Add -mt to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS and recompile.

If you are using the SFW version of gcc (which comes with Solaris 8), you must add /opt/sfw/lib to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running configure.

If you are using the gcc available from sunfreeware.com, you may have many problems. To avoid this, you should recompile gcc and GNU binutils on the machine where you are running them.

If you get the following error when compiling MySQL with gcc, it means that your gcc is not configured for your version of Solaris:

shell> gcc -O3 -g -O2 -DDBUG_OFF  -o thr_alarm ...
./thr_alarm.c: In function `signal_hand':
./thr_alarm.c:556: too many arguments to function `sigwait'

The proper thing to do in this case is to get the newest version of gcc and compile it with your current gcc compiler. At least for Solaris 2.5, almost all binary versions of gcc have old, unusable include files that break all programs that use threads, and possibly other programs as well.

Solaris does not provide static versions of all system libraries (libpthreads and libdl), so you cannot compile MySQL with --static. If you try to do so, you get one of the following errors:

ld: fatal: library -ldl: not found
undefined reference to `dlopen'
cannot find -lrt

If you link your own MySQL client programs, you may see the following error at runtime:

ld.so.1: fatal: libmysqlclient.so.#:
open failed: No such file or directory

This problem can be avoided by one of the following methods:

If you have problems with configure trying to link with -lz when you don't have zlib installed, you have two options:

If you are using gcc and have problems with loading user-defined functions (UDFs) into MySQL, try adding -lgcc to the link line for the UDF.

If you would like MySQL to start automatically, you can copy support-files/mysql.server to /etc/init.d and create a symbolic link to it named /etc/rc3.d/S99mysql.server.

If too many processes try to connect very rapidly to mysqld, you should see this error in the MySQL log:

Error in accept: Protocol error

You might try starting the server with the --back_log=50 option as a workaround for this. (Use -O back_log=50 before MySQL 4.)

To configure the generation of core files on Solaris you should use the coreadm command. Because of the security implications of generating a core on a setuid() application, by default, Solaris does not support core files on setuid() programs. However, you can modify this behavior using coreadm. If you enable setuid() core files for the current user, they will be generated using the mode 600 and owned by the superuser.