For information on installing using the native Solaris PKG format, see Section 2.6.1, “Installing MySQL on Solaris using a Solaris PKG”.

On OpenSolaris, the standard package repositories include MySQL packages specially built for OpenSolaris that include entries for the Service Management Framework (SMF) to enable control of the installation using the SMF administration commands. For more information, see Section 2.6.2, “Installing MySQL on OpenSolaris using IPS”.

To use a standard tar binary installation, use the notes provided in Section 2.2, “Installing MySQL from Generic Binaries on Unix/Linux”. Check the notes and hints at the end of this section for Solaris specific notes that you may need before or after installation.

If you want to use MySQL with the mysql user and group, use the groupadd and useradd commands:

groupadd mysql
useradd -g mysql mysql

If you install MySQL using a binary tarball distribution 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. In Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris gtar is normally located in /usr/sfw/bin/gtar, but may not be included in the default path definition.

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 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.

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.