[daip] shared memory failure on SunFire 280R with solaris 8

[Eric Greisen]

Meng-Po Chen writes:

 > XASERVERS: Start XAS on fire, DISPLAY fire:0
 > XAS: ***********************************
 > XAS: **  No TrueColor found
 > XAS: **  Resorting to PseudoColor
 > XAS: ***********************************
 > XAS: Using screen width height 1270 924, max grey level 196
 > XAS: ***  Using shared memory option for speed ***
 > Shared memory id failure: Invalid argument
 > XASERVERS: Start graphics server TEKSRV on fire, DISPLAY fire:0
 > 
 > ~
 > 
 >     Do you know how to solve this? thanks very much in advance.
 > during the installing, i notice that "SOL" was chosen, not "SUL".
 > 
 >     I am using Sun Forte 6.2 C/f77 compilers.
 > 

I am suprised that the XAS did not find a truecolor visual - they are
usually present on Solaris and the computer speeds and memory now
support that choice well.  Enter xdpyinfo to see what visuals are
available.

The shared memory problem comes from the default limit on shared
memory size in Solaris - a mere megabyte.  To quote from the AIPS
Manager FAQ available from the aips web page:

Shared memory id failure: Invalid Argument 

     If you see this when the system is trying to fire up the AIPS TV
(XAS) on a Solaris system, then your X11 display does not support more
than the default of 1 Megabyte maximum for shared memory segment. If
your monitor displays 1280x1024 or larger, the sizes of the shared
memory segments XAS wants will exceed a Megabyte. Solution: have your
sysadmin edit /etc/system and put this line somewhere near the end:

         set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=8388608

While there, you may want to also add these if you have more than 64
Mbytes of real memory: 

         set ufs:ufs_HW=6291456
         set ufs:ufs_LW=4194304
         set priority_paging=1 

Only add the last one if you are running Solaris 7 or later. These
three settings will boost your overall AIPS performance.

Eric Greisen