The Myrinet software distribution includes a loadable device driver for SunOS 4.1.2 and SunOS 4.1.3. The driver has been tested on Sparc-1, Sparc-2 Sparc IPX, Sparc LX, Sparc-5, Sparc-10 and Sparc-20 machines. See Solaris Installation for information on installing on a Sun Solaris system.

To install the SunOS device driver you will need to be root to allow access to /dev and /etc/rc.local. On some systems /etc is NFS-mounted and write-protected even from "root". The install script may fail to successfully write to files in that directory.

There are two versions of the driver for each architecture. One works with the normal SunOS distribution and the other works with a SunOS kernel that has been patched for IP Multicast. You will need to know whether your kernel has been patched for multicast.

If you are unsure whether IP multicast is built into your kernel, go ahead and load the multicast driver. There's no harm in trying to load the wrong file. You'll probably get a message similar this one if you choose the wrong one.

Loading the Myrinet driver - One moment please: 
ld: Undefined symbol
	_addmultiaddr
	_delmultiaddr

If you get such an error, you can simply re-run the install script with the other object file as a target.

First go to the install directory, then run the install script.

cd [...]/myrinet/install
./INSTALL.sparc_sunOS

The script will load the driver into the running kernel and configure the myrinet devices. The script will also ask if you would like to automatically load the driver whenever the system reboots.

Some systems don't allow "root" to write to NFS-mounted files. If this is the case, the writes to /etc/rc.local may fail. The file /var/adm/messages (sys console log) might contain some useful information if the install failed.

After running the install script you'll need to configure the Myrinet software and tools for your environment. This is done with the script myri.INIT. Please see "Configuring Software" for more details.