Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Release Notes |
These release notes provide last-minute information regarding the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software. This document also applies to the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Update 1 release.
These notes are complementary to the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software documentation.
These are some of the features added since Sun Shared Visualization 1.0.1 software.
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 components have been upgraded to new versions:
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software supports Red Hat Linux 5 in addition to Red Hat Linux 3 and 4.
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software supports Windows Vista clients, as well as Windows XP clients.
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Update 1 software supports Mac OS X clients on Apple Macintosh x86 systems.
The Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software includes a reporting script, /opt/SUNWvrpt/bin/vis_report. This script is helpful in debugging product installation, configuration, and usage problems. This feature was introduced in Sun Shared Visualization 1.0.1. Details on this feature are included in Appendix A of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 contains VirtualGL 2.1, which includes these features:
Procedures and instructions for configuring a graphics server for use with Shared Visualization 1.1 clients have been greatly simplified from the version 1.0 procedures, because the vglserver_config script automates almost all VirtualGL configuration steps. Use of the vglserver_config script is explained in Chapter 4 of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Server Administration Guide.
Procedures for Sun Shared Visualization 1.0 made explicit use of xhost, ssh, and vglclient, along with setting of DISPLAY or VGL_CLIENT environment variables. Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 documentation has replaced those procedures (in most cases) with simple invocations of the vglconnect script with various options. This situation is explained in Chapter 3 of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide and summarized in that document’s Table A-1.
In addition, dynamically allocated ports are used, so multiple instances of vglclient can coexist on the same server, if necessary (for example, in multiuser client environments).
To normalize file paths on the Solaris OS and Linux OS, the symbolic links described in TABLE 1 are installed automatically:
Symbolic links enable both Solaris and Linux to find VirtualGL commands in /opt/VirtualGL/bin and TurboVNC commands in /opt/TurboVNC/bin.
The Windows VirtualGL package now includes an optimized version of the PuTTY 0.60 SSH® client terminal emulator, which is used by the Windows version of vglconnect. This version of PuTTY provides significantly better performance when tunneling the VGL image stream than the stock version of PuTTY 0.60.
The VirtualGL Configuration Dialog has been enhanced, and now also applies to Sun Ray clients. For details, see Appendix A in the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
The VirtualGL Solaris and Linux packages now include a benchmark called GLX Spheres. This program is meant to provide an alternative to GLX Gears. GLX Spheres also includes modes you can use to test VirtualGL’s support of advanced OpenGL® features, such as stereo, overlays, and color index rendering. For more details, see Appendix A of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
VirtualGL adds a grayscale subsampling option, providing additional bandwidth savings over chrominance subsampling, since grayscale throws away all chrominance information. This option is potentially useful when working with applications that already render grayscale images (such as medical imaging). This option is documented in Table A-3 in Appendix A of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
VirtualGL can now encode images as uncompressed RGB and send these uncompressed images through the VGL Image Transport. This feature has two benefits:
A gigabit or faster network is recommended when using RGB encoding.
For more about this feature, see the section on VGL_COMPRESS in Table A-4 and the section on the VirtualGL GUI in Appendix A of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
When VirtualGL detects that an application has rendered something in stereo, its default behavior is to try using quad-buffered stereo.
But if the client or the image transport do not support quad-buffered stereo, then VirtualGL will fall back to using anaglyphic (red/cyan) stereo. This situation provides a quick way to visualize stereo data on clients that do not support quad-buffered stereo rendering. VirtualGL 2.1 can also be configured to send only the left eye or right eye image from a stereo application. This situation is documented in Table A-4 in Appendix A of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 contains TurboVNC 0.4, which includes these features:
TurboVNC (when used with the TurboVNC viewer) on Solaris has greatly improved performance over a high-speed network. Also, the high-latency network option to vncviewer is no longer needed. You should update both the TurboVNC server and the TurboVNC client viewer to this release.
This release removed unnecessary pixel format translation when sending JPEG from a big endian server to a little endian client (or the other way around). This feature improves performance when connecting x86 clients to SPARC® servers (or SPARC clients to x86 servers).
This release includes an optimized version of PuTTY 0.60 in the Windows build (and viewer package). Use this version when tunneling TurboVNC connections over ssh, as it will perform as much as four times as fast as the stock version of PuTTY 0.60.
This release added a lossless refresh feature, which instructs the server to send a mathematically lossless (Zlib-encoded RGB) copy of the current screen. This feature is described in Appendix B of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
This release adds an option for lossless (uncompressed RGB) image encoding. This option is useful for reducing CPU usage on the server and client (at the expense of increased network usage) when connecting over a gigabit (or faster) network.
TurboVNC quality options (which trade off performance gains at the expense of image fidelity) now include three alternatives. These alternatives are documented in Table B-3 in Appendix B of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
The default of opening a new window allows your TurboVNC session to be sized independently of your web browser window. This change also allows the Tab key to function properly, being passed to the TurboVNC session from your keyboard.
TurboVNC is based on TightVNC. The TurboVNC in this release includes relevant patches from TightVNC 1.3.9.
This release added an additional subsampling option to enable grayscale JPEG encoding. This option provides additional bandwidth savings over chrominance subsampling, since grayscale throws away all chrominance pixels. This option is potentially useful when working with applications that already render grayscale images (such as medical imaging).
This release changed default geometry to 1240x900, an appropriate size for most 1280x1024 displays.
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 extensions to Sun Grid Engine now include these features:
A new config_gfx script automates Sun Grid Engine graphics configuration for each execution host. Use of the script is explained in Chapter 4 of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Server Administration Guide.
A job script is provided to invoke VirtualGL 2.1’s new GLX Spheres test program. This program and the RUN.glxspheres script are used in examples that referred to RUN.glxgears in past Sun Shared Visualization documentation.
In Sun Shared Visualization 1.0 and 1.0.1, RUN.vncserver created a window with the title "EXIT this window to kill TurboVNC server.” Exiting this window would cause the TurboVNC session to exit. This technique is no longer necessary in Sun Shared Visualization 1.1. See "Terminating the TurboVNC Session" in Chapter 3 of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
The Advance Reservation facility now supports email to be optionally sent at a variety of times, such as when the reservation is confirmed, begins, completes, is canceled, or at a specified number of minutes before the reservation starts. This functionality is available from either the command line or GUI clients. See Chapter 5 of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Client Administration Guide.
Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 now supports the subcluster definition and allocation in Sun Scalable Visualization 1.1 software.
With the release of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software, the following noteworthy change requests were resolved since Sun Shared Visualization 1.0.1.
You can check the SunSolveSM web site and download the latest revision of appropriate operating system and OpenGL patches at:
http://sunsolve.sun.com
The patch revisions listed in TABLE 3 and TABLE 4 are included in the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Update 1 product in this directory:
TABLE 3 provides a list of suggested patches for your operating system.
TABLE 4 provides a list of suggested patches for your version of OpenGL.
To optimize compression on Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86 platforms, the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software uses Sun’s mediaLib library (libmlib). If your system does not have the SUNWmlib package installed, obtain that package and install it.
mediaLib is installed as part of Solaris 10 software, but this is not the latest version. mediaLib 2.5 improves performance significantly for x86 systems running the Solaris OS. Check the version on your system using this command:
If your system does not have the SUNWmlib package installed, or if your Solaris x86 system does not yet have mediaLib 2.5, download the latest version from:
http://www.sun.com/processors/vis/mlibform.html
If your Windows client is using Exceed 2008 to support VirtualGL, you can optimize performance (as much as a 20 percent gain) by enabling the MIT Shared Memory Extension (MIT-SHM extension). To enable the extension, obtain and install the xlib patch xlib.dll v13.0.1.235 (or higher) for Exceed 2008. This patch is available from the Hummingbird support site:
You need a Hummingbird support account to download the patch.
Certain applications might need fonts that are not available on all X servers. The client system might not have the fonts, even if an application installs the extra fonts or the fonts are normally installed for the operating system that runs the application. This remote X font situation might occur even without involvement of Sun Shared Visualization software (for example, when redirecting using GLX).
One approach is to install on the client system any fonts needed by the application. (For a Sun Ray ultra thin client, the client system is the Sun Ray server host that runs the X server.) This approach is hard to execute consistently, because you might not know which fonts will cause a problem and the fonts might not be packaged for the client system.
Workaround: Perform the appropriate procedures to use the graphics server host’s font server to provide fonts to the client’s X server.
To Assure the Font Server of a Graphics Server Allows TCP Access |
1. Perform this step on a Linux host (for a Solaris host, go to Step 2).
Modify the Linux graphics server’s font server to disable no-listen tcp.
a. Locate the configuration file.
This file has a name such as /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config.
b. Edit the configuration file by commenting out this line:
2. Start (or restart) the font server.
This step differs depending on the operating system.
If the font server had not been configured to start automatically, as root enter:
This command assures that the font server is started by inetd.
Add the graphics server’s font server in the path used by the client’s X server.
As superuser, type a command such as:
Replace my-graphics-server with the name of your graphics server or of another host that has the needed fonts. (That host’s font server must already allow TCP access.) The normal port number for a font server is 7100.
This command appends the remote font server on my-graphics-server to the font path for the current X server session. The my-graphics-server location will follow the existing locations in the session’s font path.
For more information, see the man page for xset(1).
To Add a Font Server to the Client’s X Session Startup Script |
This procedure allows the client’s X server to consult the font server on the graphics server every time the X server starts. You will not need to enter the xset command each time, as described in To Add a Font Server to the Client’s Current X Session.
1. Locate the script that starts X for the client.
For Solaris, this file is typically /etc/dt/config/Xservers.
However, on a Solaris Sun Ray server, the file with that name is a link to a file in /tmp that you should not edit directly. Instead, edit the file named /etc/dt/config/Xservers.SUNWut.prototype. If that file does not already exist, copy the /usr/dt/config/Xservers file to that location as a starting point for your edits. Changes that you make to this file take effect the next time the server is booted.
2. Add tcp/my-graphics-server:7100 to the X server’s font path.
In either case, replace my-graphics-server with the name of your graphics server or of another host that has the needed fonts. (That host’s font server must already allow TCP access.) The normal port number for a font server is 7100.
For more information, see the man page for xserver(1) and the FONT section of X11(1).
A graphics server using a system virtualization technology, such as Solaris Zones, can run 3D applications only in the zone containing one or more graphics accelerators.
A system running a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows must use a 32-bit version of Exceed rather than a 64-bit version of Exceed.
In recent Solaris OS releases (such as Solaris 10), the Secure Shell daemon (sshd) has the default of not allowing remote logins as user root. This default is configured by the PermitRootLogin entry in the SSH® daemon’s (ssh) configuration file, /etc/ssh/sshd_config. To avoid this problem, log in as a user other than root when running ssh or vglconnect (which uses ssh). Become root only when necessary by using the su command.
The Sun Ray server software can be configured to encrypt the network traffic between the Sun Ray server and the Sun Ray appliances. However, the network traffic between the VirtualGL Sun Ray plug-in and the Sun Ray appliances is not encrypted. The 3D images sent by the plug-in could be seen by someone who has access to the network and detailed knowledge of the Sun Ray protocols.
If the Sun Ray traffic is encrypted, a warning is printed pointing out that the VGL traffic to the Sun Ray DTU is not encrypted.
There are two workarounds available:
Note - To prevent any users from inadvertently using the Sun Ray plug-in, remove the SUNWvglsr package from the graphics server. |
An application using the VirtualGL Sun Ray plug-in sends images directly to the Sun Ray desktop unit (DTU), rather than to the Sun Ray server. You should not suspend an application in this situation.
The Sun Ray plug-in has responsibility for drawing the application’s areas of the screen. But if the application is suspended, the plug-in cannot draw, nor can it update the areas’s clipping area on the screen. So other windows are unable to overlap the graphics window while the application is suspended.
Workaround: Do not suspend the application by using the STOP or TSTP signals. (TSTP is generated by a TTY’s suspend sequence, normally Control-Z.) Also do not use a debugger to stop the application.
If you suspend the application accidentally, you might need to send it a CONT (continuation) signal, perhaps from another session.
If you need to suspend a VirtualGL application that will display to a Sun Ray, avoid using the Sun Ray plug-in by using -c proxy. With this option, the application graphics go through the Sun Ray server, which will decrease performance and increase network traffic. (The impact is explained in Appendix A of the Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 Software Server Administration Guide.)
You can connect multiple Sun Ray thin clients to the same multihead session (using utmhconfig). At the same time, you can enable Xinerama (using utxconfig -x on). An application running under VirtualGL on a Linux graphics server can display to such a multihead Sun Ray session using VirtualGL’s Sun Ray plug-in.
However, in such conditions, when you remove and reinsert the Sun Ray’s Java card (and enter your password to unlock your session), the application will occasionally not resume animating.
Workaround: To get the application to resume, move or resize the window.
Very rarely, an application will exit on its own when you reinsert the card, and sometimes leave a core dump. Therefore, save your work before removing your Java card to protect against this unlikely failure.
In Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 software, some key terminology in the product and documentation has been improved from past releases. These differences are summarized in TABLE 5.
Copyright |
Copyright 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc., 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, California 95054, U.S.A. All rights reserved.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. has intellectual property rights relating to technology that is described in this document. In particular, and without limitation, these intellectual property rights may include one or more of the U.S. patents listed at http://www.sun.com/patents and one or more additional patents or pending patent applications in the U.S. and in other countries.
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