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OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Aug 19, 2008 09:34 AM
from the looks-quite-nice dept.
from the looks-quite-nice dept.
MSa writes "How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go."
Related Stories
Submission: OpenSolaris from a Linux Admin Perspective by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Gnome's Nautilus Gets ZFS Integration, In OpenSolaris 38 comments
13bpower writes "Sun developer Erwann Chenede posted a new plugin for Nautilus that will integrate ZFS's backup capabilities with Nautilus. This should be a pretty killer feature." As one of the comments puts it, this adds a "Time Machine-esque" function to Solaris, through which a user can specify backup frequency, and when needed browse from available snapshots to restore files.
[+]
OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop? 223 comments
Ahmed Kamal writes "Is Linux getting too old for you? Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer? OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS — but how do you think it will fare on a laptop? Let's take an initial look at the most recent OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release on recentish laptop hardware."
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maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever since the demise of SGI I haven't looked at anything but Linux / BSD, but this makes me wonder if there is maybe life for Solaris after all.
Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things, which is where I would expect you'd deploy solaris much sooner than on the desktop.
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean, the demise of SG-1? The Apophis was defeated and the replicators contained.
Oh, SGI. Sorry.
Parent
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:5, Informative)
OpenSolaris works well as a server OS - that
The ZFS filesystem is interesting for desktop installations - it does allow seamless use of the 1-2 terabyte desktop disk configurations that are now possible. ZFS was designed for the datacenter - eliminating the need for the time-honored but fragile combination of journaling filesystem over software volume manager (usually over HW RAID). It's the first real innovation in filesystem architecture since journaling filesystems were developed.
Additional software packages are available from 3 well-known (in the Solaris community, at least) sites. Sun has it's own freeware site, blastwave.org and sunfreeware.com
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/s10pkgs_download.xml [sun.com]
http://www.blastwave.org/ [blastwave.org]
http://sunfreeware.com/ [sunfreeware.com]
The package manager for blastwave.org is their own, the others use the standard Solaris pkgadd commands. The package naming convention is a long-standing convention - each vendor uses a different prefix, making it easy to differentiate the source of packages.
OpenSolaris commands, where Sun hasn't replaced stock UNIX commands with their own, reflect SVR5 standard rather than the more Linux-ish BSD syntax.
One of the places where Sun has replaced "normal" functionality is the init process. SMF is Sun's attempt at fixing the long-standing problems and in-efficiencies of the BSD or SVR5 init process. Apple has launchd, there's openrc and gentoo's baselayout that all have similar goals. SMF works well and there's a fair amount of support on the net for integrating non-distro apps.
One of the "why OpenSolaris" answers is that there is value in running the same OS on the desktop as on the server. For Solaris shops OpenSolaris on the x86* servers provides a common platform that enables system management efficiencies to be extended.
Parent
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:4, Informative)
The ZFS filesystem is interesting for desktop installations - it does allow seamless use of the 1-2 terabyte desktop disk configurations that are now possible. ZFS was designed for the datacenter - eliminating the need for the time-honored but fragile combination of journaling filesystem over software volume manager (usually over HW RAID).
It's the first real innovation in filesystem architecture since journaling filesystems were developed.
just karma whoring here, but it's important to mention that pretty much everything ZFS has to offer was already available on tru64's advFS: http://advfs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
it's a shame HP killed this fine unix to keep that abominable HP-UX, so kudos to sun for bringing back the functionality of tru64 back to the datacentre AND the desktop.
hmmm, i wonder if my notebook (presario v6210) is compatible with opensolaris...
Parent
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:4, Interesting)
With regards to ZFS, I dream of there being an equivalent on Linux.
Out of curiosity, what particular features in ZFS do you want on Linux? I mean, it's a large step upwards from solaris disksuite, but compared to the linux device-mapper/filesystem paradigm it's not a particularly large improvement (if it is one at all).
Having actually run ZFS in production, there are some serious drawbacks with the remaining features (copy-on-write fragmentation, problems in SAN environments, etc), that may leave one wishing they'd implemented the ZFS features in a more stackable way so you could easily discard inappropriate layers and features.
Parent
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:5, Insightful)
You've run ZFS in production, yet you can't see the improvement on Linux's model? You mean the fact that md is completely broken and LVM is unreliable and slow by comparison?
Parent
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:5, Informative)
I'd like to give Znork some credit here.
ZFS is really, really nice but it does have some warts and the biggest for many would be that arcane operating system that's dangling off its nutsack. Yes the solaris kernel is great, scales like a champ etc. but the userland and the lack of centralized package management (in 2008, no less!) are bad joke.
Parent
Re:md broken? (Score:5, Interesting)
No offense taken, but your first line is a typical response from most linux users -- anything that goes wrong is either an admin issue or a hardware issue.
First, md forgetting drives is not a hardware issue. Linux sees the drive, the serial number of the drive is the same, the hardware does not change, the hardware works. Sometimes, you will boot, and it just loses the configuration, so you reconfigure the array, and wait for it to check everything out. For two hours. At 3am.
Wiping out configuration during upgrades happened for two consecutive releases of the master distribution. Everything is backed up, but 3/4's of the machines didn't boot properly after md was upgraded. Turned out this was a pretty known issue. No one ever thought that people would want things migrated. Everyone seems to have a few hours to manually move arrays over.
Look, I'm all for great, open, free technology. The problem is, most people don't think about the big picture. LVM and MD are fine for personal machines that don't do much more than serve up files, or play music, or what have you. Technology like ZFS is designed to be bulletproof, documented, and it has to be supported. Not only that, but given the right amount of RAM, ZFS can outperform many off the shelf RAID systems, and give you flexibility in mirroring, snapshots, and drive support that LVM cannot possibly compare to.
The only reason ZFS hasn't had much news in Linux land is that it 'wasn't invented here' and it isn't GPL. Last I heard, there was a movement underway to reimplement ZFS under the GPL. I would imagine we'll see something in five years or so.
Parent
Re:maybe I should go and play around with this! (Score:5, Funny)
I've been a sys admin for FreeBSD and Linux machines for a computer club for a few years now.
I bet you have to beat the ladies away with a stick...
Parent
Nexenta (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd try Nexenta, except I don't really want to use the Ubuntu repositories for my Linux packages. I'd prefer something with a good KDE desktop.
I'd consider it for a web-server box to test how the kernel handles I/O.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd prefer something with a good KDE desktop.
What, exactly, don't you like about Kubuntu?
Or is that not among the packages ported? Because to bootstrap from ubuntu-minimal to kubuntu is fairly easy.
Re:Nexenta (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone asked me this question recently. And for the sixth time I answered with a laundry list of things I didn't like about it. Agian, I was modded Troll for stating I don't like Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and then people got all in a huff.
Like I always say, it is marketed at a certain target audience, and it isn't me.
I suggest that you try out a really good KDE desktop (Arch's KDEMod, Sabayon, openSUSE 11, etc) and the differences should be immediately apparent to you.
As far as whether or not the KDE packages are available in Nexenta, I'm not sure actually.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You might also want to try Zenwalk... it's an XFCE desktop out of the box, but there's KDE packages in the repository... I don't actually have kdebase installed on my system (the only things from KDE that I actually use are Konqueror and Kopete, which are in the kdenetwork package, and work without kdebase), but it's actually a stock, unmodified, compiled from source package that, if it's anything like every other package on the system, is about as close to what the KDE devs want it to behave/look like that
Re:Nexenta (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Nexenta (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a matter of taste. "I don't like it" is sufficient reasoning for this arena, like it or not. Furthermore, you have no reasonable basis to say he's saying this "just to get a reaction". He doesn't give what you consider to be good reasons for his opinion, so he's stating his opinion just to get a reaction. Erm, no, it doesn't work that way.
People, not just on slashdot, but on internet forums in general, love to claim that those whose arguments they disagree with must be trolling. It's fucking pathetic, and is just a sign that these people can't handle an opposing point of view with any amount of dignity. Grow up already.
Parent
Love that they open sourced it... but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's. The biggest issue I have with OpenSolaris is that it's still a single vendor OS. If it forks a few times and actually develops a culture and some competition between vendors than I think it will be more appealing.
That's actually what I hate and love about linux. It's a fragmented and ineffecient community, but because it's fragmented I don't have to worry that it's going away any time soon.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's.
Except the small detail that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, so you won't see things like Linux kernel-based ZFS. From what I've understood running it through FUSE (userspace) isn't all that great. I do understand why Sun doesn't want Linux to take all its crown jewels, but it's still annoying.
Re:Love that they open sourced it... but... (Score:5, Insightful)
He said 'other nix os's' not 'Linux'. The GPL may be incompatible with the CDDL, but the BSDL isn't, and bits of Solaris, such as ZFS and DTrace, have found their way into FreeBSD.
Saying the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL is misleading - the CDDL doesn't say anything about code not explicitly released under it. It is the GPL which imposes constraints on third-party code. If Linux used a more permissive license then it would be able to use OpenSolaris code, and OpenSolaris would be able to use Linux code just as it used to use a lot of BSD code back in the SunOS days.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because in order for it to operate optimally it must be part of the kernel, and Linus and crew refuse to put it in the kernel due to licensing issues.
It runs fine in userland with fuse, but it's slow.
ZFS rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone likely could easily issue ZFS as patch directly for the kernel as opposed to in FUSE. The problem is that it would be illegal to use it a such because of the license. Sun has talked about making it all GPLv3 if Linux takes their kernel GPLv3 as well. Linux would gain native ZFS in their kernel, but Sun would gain every device driver from Linux.
The problem is that too many individuals that you can't even contact own individual copyrights in the Linux kernel. It isn't just going to up and change t
Re:ZFS rocks (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, ZFS is a lot more than just a filesystem. It encompasses snapshotting, redundancy and volume management as well.
Parent
Excerpts from the article: (Score:4, Informative)
"... I found OpenSolaris significantly slower than Ubuntu or OpenSUSE..."
"There are fewer packages available than for a mainstream Linux distro, although they do have over a thousand (and certainly enough for a fully-functioning system). The package naming is slightly odd; package names begin with a handful of capital letters (eg SUNW or FSW)."
"ZFS is transactional, meaning that the filesystem is always consistent (so fsck or equivalent isn't used or needed), and snapshots are intentionally both easy and cheap in terms of disk space."
"I'm very impressed with the concepts behind ZFS, but I'm also concerned that cross-functionality with Linux is limited."
"I did find it frustrating to have to relearn commands that I've been using without thinking for years now (eg ifconfig), and right now I'm not convinced that for me it's worth the mental effort, especially given the relative scarcity of external software available."
The syntax for ipconfig is different? (Score:3, Informative)
That's because the Linux folks were worried about the pending USG/CSRG lawsuit so they reimplemented TCP instead of using the BSD TCP stack and utilities like almost everyone else (including Microsoft) did.
Just about any non-Linux UNIX implementation is going to have the BSD TCP.
On the upside the lawsuit did set SCO up the bomb. Oh, it wasn't the only thing by any means (did they actually do ANYTHING right in that lawsuit?), but one of the side effects of the USG/CSRG lawsuit was that a lot of early UNIX code code was open-sourced. Including some of the SCO claimed were examples of "infringing code" in Linux. Come on, folks, wasn't it great to have Dennis Ritchie himself point that out?
Re:The syntax for ipconfig is different? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
It's a bit late (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a Solaris admin back in the early 90s. I preferred SYSV to BSD for a lot of things. But at this point, I'm just not seeing a compelling reason to go back. Sure, ZFS sounds nice, but I don't really want a system that's slower and more RAM-hungry than Linux, and I don't want an OS with a GPL-incompatible license.
Narrow the choice.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If your main concern is whether or not it runs KDE? Then stick with Linux.
Solaris has packaging design issues (Score:3, Informative)
Trying to harden Solaris is a nightmare. Mostly because so many packages in the Solaris install are interdependent. It is either install 90% of the packages or install nothing. Why do they even bother breaking the software packages if this is the end result? Getting rid of RPC can create so many problems it isn't even funny. Both BSD and Linux offer the option of only installing the base package and only choose the services you want with little to no other packages to depend on. This however absolutely cannot be the case for solaris because a single needed software package will require you to install nearly all services.
One significant difference... (Score:3, Interesting)
... between Solaris and Linux in the Enterprise is how they react to abuse - namely stupid people running ton of stupid memory hog applications.
Where I work we have Solaris 9 and 10 boxes running literally unattended for 600+ days - they are shared boxes, meaning lot many different applications run on the same OS/FS/Memory/CPUs .
When a particular app goes haywire and starts (many of them are 64-bit apps) - that particular app just gets a NULL back when there is no longer any memory available. The app can hopefully then calm itself down or release some of its caches etc. but the main point is that the other apps are unaffected and so is the OS.
I would not even begin to think how Linux could handle this. It has this insane notion of handing out virtually any amount of memory to applications whether or not there is actually that much memory and swap available. So when things get out of control the ugly and stupid OOM killer thinks it knows better which app to kill - depending on your luck you could end up with sshd or some other good behaving app being killed to give memory to this bad app.
That is scary. Arguably this is all fixable within the applications but ground reality is that App developers are incompetent - at least where I work, they are.
Plus the newer Solaris releases are close to Linux when it comes to performance. So the only incentive to run Linux is hardware support - if you are on non SPARC hardware that is.
Linux hopefully some day will have a good memory management subsystem soon - less fragmentation, more predictability, good accounting etc. But till that time Solaris for the stupid "Enterprise" .
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Horses for courses, but Solaris has much to offer even for shops that aren't traditionally tied to Sun. Hell, even my private ``1U box in someone else's datacentre'' server for my family is now a Solaris machine.
ian
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What about hardware support? I keep hearing that the openSolaris kernel just frankly doesn't have many drivers. If I can't install it on my hardware, it isn't doing me any good.
Also, I'd really like to see some basic benchmarks between the kernels. People benchmark the BSD kernel against the Linux kernel on IO, networking, etc.
Show me some quantifiable numbers on openSolaris.
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What, no mention of dtrace? Now that's been an excellent part of the Sol10/OpenSol movement IMO.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
"ZFS - Are you really using your server for data storage? SAN or NAS should be a better option depending on your price point"
Why not set up a server for data storage? Then you get all the ZFS checksum/auto-heal/snapshot goodness ?
"Zones - I still have yet to see a reason to use this except for dedicated virtualization servers."
Zones are so cheap, I run every single service in a zone so that they can be migrated between machines, any dependencies can be contained, etc. If you haven't seen a use for them it's because you haven't ever used them.
"rcapd - ulimit can do this per process, and there are also multiple 3rd party open source resource limiters."
And yanking the ram stick can do it per-machine. How coarse grained do you want to go before you look like a fool?
In almost every case, the Solaris and other random unix environments could be replaced with Linux at 1/10th the cost."
Solaris is free. Support is 1/3 the price of RHEL. It runs on cheap Dell/Supermicro whiteboxes.
Parent
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Ahem...
Actually the reverse is true...
Since release 10, Solaris has been pretty well stomping the competition in price, performance and throughput. With Solaris supporting pretty much every type of virtualization (including some not offered anywhere else), it's hard to beat.
Solaris as well as OpenSolaris are free, you can download and use either flavor with no cash outlay. Want support? It's cheaper to buy Solaris support from Sun than to buy Linux support from RedHat.
There's no *tying* with Solaris, it's all about choice. I personally choose Solaris over Linux for pretty much any task.
Parent
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Having been a UNIX admin for 23 years and Solaris for 10 years, I'm not sure what you're drinking, but I'm staying away from it.
Solaris support has rocked. We've never had an issue that Sun hasn't been able to solve, and yes, we've thrown them some curves (and sliders for that matter). IBM's support has told us on multiple occasions to re-install the system as a fix for a problem. RedHat we've stumped more often than not. HP? Well - they still can't figure out how to handle more than 8 luns per target for scsi (as well as fibre)...
Solaris performance has been fantastic - outperforming Linux, AIX, HP-UX on modern equipment.
We've migrated workloads to and from Solaris - no big deal - as long as you know what you're doing.
(Our misguided DBA's started migrating from old SunOS 5.8 boxes to Linux - and are now migrating back.)
If you use tools that are available on multiple platforms, migrating isn't all that tough.
If you are developing native language apps, porting isn't terribly difficult although finding workarounds for pesky native quirks is troublesome at times.
So I guess it depends on what you call "experienced"...
Parent
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, I'll call you on this one. I'm a SCSA (Solaris Certified System Administrator) and a former Sun SSE. I've worked with Solaris systems going back to 1996 on original Sparcstations (not even Ultrasparcs). I've also worked on Enterprise 10000, 15000, and 25000. We also have a smattering of Sun Fire X4600s, the new AMD Opteron boxes.
I tested Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (64-bit) on the exact same hardware (X4600), and you know what? Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 performed better on massive storage I/O than Solaris 10. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it. We have over 50 LUNs carved from an HP EVA 8100 and presented to these X4600s, on 4x 4gb HBAs per server. They run Oracle RAC, have 4x quad core AMD Opterons, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Sorry, but Solaris used to be a good OS back in the 90s. They have fallen so far behind it's not even funny. The reality now is that I can run Red Hat and Oracle on a 32 core AMD Opteron box with a hundred LUNs on a fibre channel SAN and it outperforms Solaris now. ZFS is nice, but we use ASM (automated storage management) for Oracle anyway, so ZFS is unnecessary.
Solaris has unfortunately fallen far behind the performance curve, and I doubt they can ever catch up. Your BS about HP not supporting more than 8 LUNs per target is absolutely BS. I can do hundreds of LUNs, and I have systems like that in production.
On support, they all suck. Red Hat, HP, Sun, every one of them sucks. They have all been chasing the bottom and if it ever gets to the point where I'm stumped, they're going to be stumped as well.
Parent
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
It all depends on the skill-set your admins already have. If you have a shop of 100% Linux admins with no Solaris experience, stay away. If your shop already has some Solaris machines on Sparc, go for it - although you should double check the license.
From my own perspective, I've invested several hours getting it running. Granted, I was running the 200805 OpenSolaris installed on ZFS which had some bugs in the boot process which left my system unbootable a few times. Some follow up releases fixed those problems. But as a guy who's been using Linux since 1993, old habits are hard to break.
Parent
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Stay away?
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Solaris just works and its made for servers. Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented. I would not trust my job to it unless its Debian or RHES which costs $$$ as cutting edge features are not needed on a mission critical server. Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Oh and the article discussed a scarcity of third party apps. I found the opposite as most server ERP and database apps are on Solaris than Linux.
Parent
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Yeah, you know, the roadrunner team would like a word with you, as would pretty much everyone in the Top 500. For some business loads Solaris scales better. But the claim the "it scales far better" in general is as absurd as it is patently untrue.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Ah, and no true scotsman^W UNIX admin would run a supercomputer, right?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not the original poster, but I agree with him wholeheartedly. In my experience, tasks that can be easily parallelized work well in Solaris (web servers, polling servers, etc). However, tasks that are serial in nature (dealing with a stream of events like IDS or syslog) work *horribly* on Solaris.
When we moved some of our log parsing from Solaris/SPARC hardware to similarly priced Debian/x86 hardware, we expected a 3x improvement in performance just due to the CPU...we actually saw a 10x improvement in
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective (Score:4, Informative)
One of our Linux servers regularly copes with a load in excess of 100. Things slow down, but nothing breaks.
Be careful with comparisons like these.
Linux lumps disk I/O into the load average, whereas most "other" Unixes don't. I've seen a Linux box with a load of 300+ and idle CPU, and a Sun with a load of 2 that was near unusable because the disks were being thrashed to death.
Comparing the two can be unfair to either side depending on the context. It's apples and laundry detergent.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Stay away?
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Yea, stay away. If you have a load of 80 on a 32 CPU system, you didn't design the hardware or software correctly.
Solaris just works and its made for servers. Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented. I would not trust my job to it unless its Debian or RHES which costs $$$ as cutting edge features are not needed on a mission critical server. Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Debian doesn't cost anything, and there's always CentOS if you want the RHEL reliability without the cost.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Yea, these were the same Unix admins who used to ask me if I installed the latest kernel patch while they were still using sendmail (and patching it about as frequently). I didn't put a lot of faith in their opinion.
Oh and the article discussed a scarcity of third party apps. I found the opposite as most server ERP and database apps are on Solaris than Linux.
For the big big things, probably. Oracle? Works perfectly fine. I'm bui
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A load of 80 on a 32 cpu system sounds like a poorly architected solution to me. :)
As for the rest, give me a break. One of the benefits Linux is that if you want cutting edgeness and desktop goodies you can have them, but if you're looking for stability and vendor support you can have that too. And it doesn't mean spending a ton of money either - RHEL is relatively cheap and Debian is free (no idea what you're smoking there), as are a number of other options (CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, etc).
We run hundreds of s
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention that an uptime of years generally means someone hasn't been keeping their system patched properly. :)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
However I think this is probably a response to something I've noticed of late, in Asia and South America we don't sell support for Solaris installs any more, they've all moved to Linux, cheaper hardware, a pool of interested
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Solaris handles threading a little differently than Linux
It used to be that Solaris used an N:M model while Linux used an N:1 model. Now both use a 1:1 model. There are lots of reasons for this (Matt Dillon gave a really detailed description when explaining why Dragonfly BSD went 1:1 instead of N:M). Basically, it boils down to the fact that debugging threaded C code is such a bitch that people tend not to use high levels of parallelism in C code (which is where N:M really shines). If a language has better support for parallelism then it is easy build an N:M
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The OS X version of Virtual box does not support (yet) any of the processor specific virtual machine extensions that speed things up considerably.