Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like 400
ramboando writes "In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of Linux's success.
Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux. Sun wants to embrace some Linux elements so "we make Solaris a better Linux than Linux," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, quoting Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose latest start-up, Ning, uses Solaris.
But it's a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility. "As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive.""
Backward Compatibility?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of my users on various boxes are afraid to even apply Sun patches because it breaks applications left and right. Granted, we are development segment of my company, but still... the Solaris operating system is barely backward compatible within it's own major release, much less between versions. Simple tools will run just fine, of course, but the more complex the application, the less likely it is to run between major versions, and likely going to cause some sort of havoc between minor revisions within the same version. I see it happen daily.
They really don't need to worry about their "backward compatibility," when trying to make Solaris more Linux like... I'm glad they are doing this - I absolutely hate administrating a stock Solaris system. It feels so archaic and like something straight out of the late 80's or early 90's, back when I was logging into the beasts on my 300 baud modem. The only worse offender in this area is HP-UX... though I will admit that with Solaris 10 and HP-UX 11 there have been some minor inroads into the monolithic, archaic feel to both OS's, but they both have a very, very, very long way to go.
Just to clarify - I understand why those OS's are that way, but it doesn't mean I like it nor want to use them. If they can retain the stability of Solaris and make it more comfortable to use, I'm all for it.
It was suggested years ago... (Score:2, Interesting)
not helpful to change it (Score:5, Interesting)
Solaris serves a niche in the market that is growing like crazy now, and most web developers who are building apps today should look into it seriously, IMHO.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Backward Compatibility?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I just migrated an entire system from Solaris 7 to a Solaris 10 Zone - How? I tarred up
Solaris 7 is from 1999, and this is 2007. Try that on an 8 year old redhat box and see what happens. Good luck with that.
Have they completely lost the plot? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then sun comes along with Solaris 10 and adds in a ton of complexity with out providing any additional services. The new things like zones and zfs don't need all the new extra crud but its nearly impossible to build a lean system with solaris 10. There are also a number of issues that are just plain wrong and reeks of security the Microsoft way. Why does live update look inside zones? If its in a zone, its not to be trusted outside the zone. Thats covered in Security layers 101 so back to school guys. (you can purge one file inside a zone that breaks doing patches in the global zone). The new admin tools remove the rc scripts... except that most of them are just moved and hidden by layers of config files. Then it uses a binary file to figure out what to run at shutdown, and it keeps changing the file when servers start and stop and you can't get an accurate picture of the data its going to use when it shuts down the system. Since the file is a binary file, you can't checksum it and you can't dump it so you've got no clue if someone has put a Trojan in it. The data in the file could have just gone in a nice plane text file but I guess the coders missed the Windows registry too much. The appear to be handing the keys to the source castle to any old hack. Someone "fixed" telnetd and added a new feature in one of the worst security lapses I've seen in a long time.
I just bought 3 new netra 210 because 1) they run SPACR Solaris 9, 2) they fit in my racks and 3) are one RU. I'll stop buying Sun hardware the day I can't run Solaris 9 because there is no way I'm putting Sol 10 on a production machine.
Re:Making Solaris more Linux-like... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Okay, call me a noob. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm using Solaris because the data mining application I'm building (in Lisp) brings the Linux kernel absolutely to its knees. Solaris runs it just fine on the same hardware. (We're talking 30+ GB of heap -- Linux is dead meat after 3 to 4 GB.)
A friend of mine says this is because the Linux kernel hackers optimize for the common case, not for extreme cases. I suspect this is correct. To put it another way, they are more into cycle shaving than analyzing the time and space complexity of their algorithms -- just as one might expect from smart hackers with a relatively weak computer science background.
The result is a kernel that does great on normal workloads, but just falls over when subjected to unusual stresses. Unless and until this is corrected, there will be a need for Solaris.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha ha. That "don't add child directories' disk usage to the parents'" option in the Solaris "du"? Yeah. Um, I wrote that when I worked at Sun. Along with a bunch of other things, e.g. the first CD player app (WorkMan) that could pull track listings over the network. That existed on Solaris years before anyone ported it to Linux. I think I've earned my opinion on Solaris, thank you very much.
Although you're right that one can install the companion disc (and then go to sunfreeware.com to pick up the stuff that's missing or out of date) it still remains the case that, e.g., if I log in as root on one of the random Solaris systems at work (where I have superuser privileges but not unilateral control over what root's environment looks like) I get a nasty old Bourne shell with no history, no completion, etc. If I were to change root's shell to bash or zsh, I'd run the risk of breaking system admin scripts that assume I'm using the default shell.
If in your book it makes me a Linux fanboy to want Solaris to improve in the areas where it's currently behind Linux, then so be it, I don't really care what name you put to that. My interest is in seeing Solaris improve because I think it's fundamentally a pretty good piece of software.
Solaris is becoming a Linux distribution (Score:1, Interesting)
Solaris will just be another Linux distribution...
Re:Have they completely lost the plot? (Score:2, Interesting)
I do note that many Linux sysadmins post to the Solaris news groups whining about an automounted
Compelling and Competitive? (Score:5, Interesting)
If Solaris was compelling and competitive, they wouldn't be trying to make it more like Linux.
Solaris is something that we use as a legacy OS where I work. We have well over 700 Linux systems in the school of engineering. At last count we had maybe 35 systems running Solaris still lingering here and there in places where they either cannot be replaced or there is no economy in doing so. There has not been a NEW installation of Solaris deployed in at least two years. We've also got five Tru64 systems, two HP-UX systems, three Irix systems, and I think 4 VMS systems that a dedicated die-hard won't allow to expire.
The bottom line is that the unix wars are over, Linux has won, and whatever contender eventually does take the crown from it will NOT be one of the has-eens of the past.
I'm long past caring what Sun does or does not do with Solaris for the same reason that I don't care what E-com does with OS/2. Both OS's may or may not be configured with fancy new features in the future, but it doesn't matter because they've already lost.
Game over dude, and no you don't get your quarter back.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:2, Interesting)
Did that and I didn't even get to the part were I was supposed to get 'surprised'. The biggest drawback of Solaris 10 when it comes to just 'trying it' is hardware compatibilty. Unfortunately it doesn't even come close to Linux. My graphics card's 3D accel, audio, wireless and SATA controller did not work. I can live without 3D on a server and without audio but no hard drive and network connection!? -- Sorry. I had to pass.
Oh I know, I know, I need special hardware 'blessed' by Sun. But I will not spend thousands of dollars buying a new machine just so I can 'play' with Solaris. Linux became popular exactly because geeks and nerds could 'play' with it at home....
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:3, Interesting)
This can be an irritant if, for example you're installing tomcat on a client's vanilla Solaris box. Yes Solaris has some truly fantastic features, however the GNU userland is just an easier place to inhabit.
Sun is feeling the heat... (Score:2, Interesting)
In short Sun is feeling the competition from the Open Source Linux. And Jeff's blog entry shows that pretty well
I don't know much about Sun but certainly they are not very happy with the way Linux is eating up Sun's share of servers.
At this juncture such an announcement does not come to me as a surprise.
~psr
Celebrity Endorsements (Score:4, Interesting)
At any rate, it's a very awkwardly constructed and confusing sentence, and if I was some kind of grammar Nazi, I'd fucking parse the author's ass.
hip kernel with lousy sw environment (Score:2, Interesting)
I have seen solaris boxes being responsive to ssh login with an load of #proc * 20 in top.
This is worth every penny, especially if it is a productive webserver.
Using a different OS in your access layer as reverse proxy is great and makes you sleep
a bit better at night.
Not to speak of dtrace, zfs and the other nifty stuff, which I personally do not use, but
I know it's there in case I need to fly in an engineer to help me out.
But userland solaris is really annoying. I want to to feel like a standard unix
box and a standard unix box these days is a gnu/linux box and "gtar" and "ggrep" do
not feel standard. Solaris tools break my scripts and make me cry out loud for
decent debian box.
Solaris kernel rocks, solaris environment is poor.
Re:Err.... (Score:3, Interesting)
No thanks.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've liked many aspects of Linux for a long time, but the #1 thing that turns me off it is the userland tools. BSD style UNIX is the only layout worth a dam, give that the BSD layout is more prevalent, then Linux, Sun should go back to it.
Re:I'm frightened already. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is it going to be free? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun is ignoring a huge group of up and coming CS/IS/IT students by being asshats and not giving away free sun hardware licenses for the older solaris. I had a stack of old hardware I would have loved to give away to a local computer club or school but it needed to have Solaris 9 installed as 10 is molasses slow on the stuff.
So I ended up pirating a copy of 9 and installing on the machines and giving them silently to friends that ask for them.
Network drivers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I'm typing this from a Sun SPARC laptop, and the wireless drivers are there, as well as a gui from Tadpole for configuring/diagnosing them. They were available somewhere in the Solaris 9 lifetime.
For cards where there are only or primarily proprietary drivers, Solaris is actually a pretty good bet, as Sun made the effort to go out and buy them and make them available on both SPARC and x86. Breifly, there were more Solaris wireless drivers than Linux, but Linux and the BSDs have since mostly caught up (;-))
--dave
Spoken like a true wackademic (Score:1, Interesting)
Where reliability isn't just important, it's critical. Where scalability isn't just important, it's critical. Where maintainability is valued over a hacker's OS because there aren't a bunch of free grad students to do all the damn work.
Show me a Linux kernel that can handle multi-threaded apps running on 144 CPUs and using a terabyte of virtual memory.
Hell, show me a 64-bit Linux that doesn't puke on its shoes when you put a multi-threaded app like Oracle under strace to see what it's doing. Kinda important for apps that want more than a couple of gigs of memory, isn't it? Solaris has been fully 64-bit compliant for over a decade.
Put that in your hash pipe and smoke it.
Re:Spoken like a true wackademic (Score:3, Interesting)
Where reliability isn't just important, it's critical. Where scalability isn't just important, it's critical. Where maintainability is valued over a hacker's OS because there aren't a bunch of free grad students to do all the damn work.
Hmm reliability, scalability, and critical workloads like perhaps with supercomputers [top500.org]? You'll note how Linux totally dominates this list with over 70% of all supercomputers. Where's Solaris.. oh that's right 1%. Also latest surveys have shown the majority of code commits to the Linux kernel as coming from major corporations like Novell, Red Hat, IBM. I will also say that you can't judge the code quality by the company behind it. I'd probably take most Hacker code over something written by some corporate drone who isn't passionate (as a hacker IS) any day. Grad Students want good code for thesis
Show me a Linux kernel that can handle multi-threaded apps running on 144 CPUs and using a terabyte of virtual memory.
What about this [sgi.com]? 4096 Itanium2 Processors (64 Bit), 17TB of Ram. This system is multi-partitioned though, so it isn't all one kernel. However, they are using SUSE's Enterprise Server 9 bundled kernel which supports up to 512 Processors. So even there it's beaten your criteria for criticism.
Solaris has been fully 64-bit compliant for over a decade.
Linux has been 64bit for at least 7 years with Itanium and I'm assuming it has been 64 bit for over a decade with MIPS and Alpha architecture support. The majority of development was on i386 arch, however. I'm assuming this is now changing to x86_64 arch (like the majority of the world is running).
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:3, Interesting)
What don't you like about them? I personally prefer the GNU tools to the older BSD derivatives.
BSD style UNIX is the only layout worth a dam, give that the BSD layout is more prevalent, then Linux, Sun should go back to it.
Solaris uses the System V layout which is very common, more common that the old BSD layout in my exerience. Linux has no single layout. Slackware uses the BSD layout while Redhat and Debian use the System V layout. Then you have other distros like Arch and Gobo that use neither. Though the LSB does have System V as the standard.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh. The very reason Unix has succeeded, and has lasted so long is the "everything is a file" paradigm. The whole MS PowerShell philosophy is catering to a completely different mindset, one that rewards complexity, and has been proven, at every step, to be inferior in the real world. Yes, it might seem very tempting now. But I'll guarantee you that it won't have the same success as the Unix shells. The complexity will be its downfall.
Re:Okay, call me a noob. (Score:2, Interesting)
I did discuss it with the Linux kernel maintainers at the time (over a year ago -- I don't recall exactly when), and they didn't seem to care much. But no, I didn't file a bug report.
I did, however, take a look at the relevant kernel code. It didn't look like an easy fix (else I would have attempted it myself). It looked like it would take at least a partial rewrite of the VM subsystem.
If it were fixed, would I come back to Linux? Probably not on that machine. Oh, I should have mentioned another nice thing Solaris did for me -- the new Fault Manager pinpointed a hardware problem (a marginal DIMM) that had been causing occasional crashes for months.
On the down side, getting Solaris running on that machine initially was a major pain. To make a long story short, the motherboard's onboard SCSI controller caused some conflict that kept Solaris from booting (though Linux had no trouble with it). I had to turn it off in the BIOS and buy a PCI-X card to get SCSI. But we all know that motherboard compatibility and driver support are Solaris' weak point.