Linux – Can all OSS for Linux be built to run on an Illumos based OS like OpenIndiana

Das U-Boot is perhaps the most widely used boot loader on ARM boards, and it includes some memory test features.

Interestingly, its README suggests an alternative approach that might be more portable and/or more effective:

The best known test case to stress a system like that is to boot Linux with root file system mounted over NFS, and then build some larger software package natively (say, compile a Linux kernel on the system) - this will cause enough context switches, network traffic (and thus DMA transfers from the network controller), varying RAM use, etc. to trigger any weak spots in this area.

While you're building the linux kernel, you might be interested in the CONFIG_MEMTEST=y option, which causes the built-in memory test to be built. This used to be for x86 architecture only, but I believe recent versions support it on other architectures as well, perhaps even ARM.

The memtester tool is already built and available in some linux distributions, for various architectures, including ARM.

The kernel-memtest project might interest you as well.

Bear in mind that no tool can test the memory that it's running from (so a program in a running OS will have significant blind spots) and basic read/write tests won't reveal every type of defect or other error. Set your expectations accordingly, and if you have reason to suspect bad memory, consider trying several different test tools.

Thanks for posting this. It looks pretty complete to me.

I think you should focus on the main topic which is how to setup a development host. Things like zones and DTrace and slightly off-topic IMHO. The important thing to keep in mind wrt zones and IPS is that software packages do not necessarily make their way into a zone just because they are installed in the global zone. In fact in standard Solaris the manifest that tells which packages that by default gets inherited from global zone is a pretty short list, possibly in an attempt to keep the footprint of zone to a minimum. This means that sometimes you will explicitly have to install package into the local zone even if it is already installed in the global zone. The good news is that this does not require Internet access from the local zone as it will use the IPS repository in the global zone as an intermediate proxy repo.

Perhaps you can also clarify the aim of your development host a bit further: do you intend the host to be able to build the distro itself or "just" various Linux/Unix OSS packages ?

There's another posting on how to do the equivalent on standard Solaris 11. Since Solaris 11 and OpenIndiana share the same heritage there may be something in that posting you can use.