OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective 370
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."
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.
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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...
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.
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...
The AdvFS myth ! (Score:3)
As much as I love tru64, I think it really is time to put this myth to bed. AdvFS is a good solid filesystem and cluster aware too, but it's no ZFS. AdvFS doesn't do any form of RAID other than concatenating disks into disk pools (domains) which can then be populated by filesets (AdvFS speak for filesystems) that share th
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.
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?
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yet you can't see the improvement on Linux's model?
Yah, the OOM crashes, flush hangs, dbf fragmentation and performance degradation issues really left a bad aftertaste. I didn't go into those details, as anyone else who'd run ZFS in production for some time would most likely know about them. Some are fixed now, but improvement... lets just say that any improvement I could see was rather outweighed by the problems.
Don't get me wrong, ZFS is nice if you use it where it has it's strengths. It's a perfect files
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.
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Only when it forgets where drives are, or wipes configuration during upgrades, or the fact that it's slower than software raid setups in FreeBSD or even Mac OS X.
md on a single box occasionally works. Managing 120 machines with md became a reason to never use md again.
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.
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Irix was never meant to be more than a workstation OS...
Say what? SGI sold servers too. In the late 90s it was their main business. The email server at AOL used to be an SGI Origin — running IRIX.
SGI's business was an is (they still exist, albeit as a very tiny supercomputer/server vendor) high performance computing. Doing HPC with workstations and doing it with servers and supercomputers is not all that different. And until they shifted from MIPS to x64 and Itanium, all their systems ran IRIX.
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in that case what you want is Solaris 10, not OpenSolaris
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.
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There is also 'glusterfs', which has some pretty impressive specs.
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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.
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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)
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.
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No, I said I've had the argument several times before and don't see the need to repeat it. Just look for previous posts (like the ones I've listed above).
Trolls get off on pissing people off. I'm trying to avoid an argument. How the hell does that make me a troll?
If anything you're trying to bait me, and frankly I could care less.
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.
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Very insightful. One of the things I've always said was a strenght of OSS was that it provided redundancy of that nature. Even if one fork/project of a given set of code fails, if the idea is worthy it will live on.
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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.
Clarification (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun has not yet released ZFS an openSolaris under GPLv3, which is the first step.
Next, the Linux kernel would need to be GPLv3.
Linus can relicense all of his contributions to GPLv3, but then the kernel can not include any code currently licensed GPLv2. So actually, every developer who contributed code and maintained copyright on that code would have to be contacted, and all of them would have to agree to relicense the code.
Unlike many other projects where people contributed under "GPLv2 or later", the Linu
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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.
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That's a tough argument... the GPL is very widely used but is hardly the only license. It's entirely possible that OpenSolaris would still exist if the GPL had never been used and something like BSD was used instead.
And for some reason... (Score:2)
I thought the ZFS on the "free" version was crippled down to 1 TB.
On VirtualBox, it blows (Score:2, Interesting)
I put up Sun's free VirtualBox VM environment on a MacBook Pro, and both OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 Intel were worthless. Both achieved speeds reminiscent of PearPC.
XP worked OK. Ubuntu was fine.
You'd think if you were going to release a VM, at least you'd make sure your flagship OS would run on it at speeds that would compare favorably to a 20-year-old Amiga.
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The OS X version of Virtual box does not support (yet) any of the processor specific virtual machine extensions that speed things up considerably.
ZFS rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
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It depends: if it's the ZFS specification that's CDDL licensed you're screwed as kernel space goes. However, if it's only Sun's software that writes a ZFS file system (the ZFS drivers and toolchain) it's possible that an alternative implementation of ZFS could be created. Sun have said they're 'investigating' a Linux port [sun.com].
I've used Solaris (I ordered the DVD over the Internet) and I like it: it's no slower than, say, Kubuntu (KDE4), in VirtualBox, and I love ZFS. Unfortunately, I've misplaced the DVD, and a
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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.
I don't think the problem would be "using it", it would be with distributing it.
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ZFS does have issues with NFS though. In particular NFS writes can lock up the client. Hopefully this issue will be fixed soon. it's not really ZFS's fault; it's NFS's fault. Yet no other FS has this issue, so I'm sure a workaround could be done. In the meantime there are times when the NFS clients on our 12 TB ZFS (Solaris 10) system are unusable.
ZFS will never come to Linux while the license remains incompatible with the GPL. I predict that one day Sun will relicense it, but not before they've really
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Can you create a filesystem in the time it typically takes to create or delete a folder?
Can you take snapshots and/or clones, quickly, so that one always has a history of each and every file on disk, and easily accessible?
Can you create automatically-expanding storage pools?
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That actually does seem a little Trollish (as do most posts that start with "This is not a troll..."), but I'll bite anyway.
Disclaimer - I've not used ZFS and know zilch about it.
But your lack of excitement over FS capabilities is disturbing.
Does it make efficient use of the space available on the HD? Maybe.
Does it organize files in such a way that they can be quickly found and read? Maybe.
Can it recover from minor disk errors? Maybe.
Does it throttle the HD by constantly having to rearrange data in order to
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.
I have a problem with this kind of "open source" (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, it's Open Source and everything. But the problem is that complex programs like this are often designed with a top-down instead of a bottom-up approach. I mean, this isn't a bazaar, it's a cathedral. Oh, and OpenSolaris is not GPL. *buzz*
There's still one company responsible and only that company will make the changes, because the codebase is so huge that it's a pain in the *** to maintain. Well, eventually many open source projects end up like that, with a huge codebase and with a company. BUT, this w
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Slashdotted?! Whatever. Site's fast and snappy. (Score:2)
Sun is battling hard to break into the open source operating system world with OpenSolaris. Juliet Kemp takes it for a test-drive, sampling its unique features and seeing how it fares against Linux...
OpenSolaris is an open-source project based on (some of) the Solaris operating system code, and sponsored by Sun, but being developed independently. The main aim of the project is to create a downloadable codebase. Currently, though, there's a Live CD/install image available which gives you a full OpenSolaris d
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."
Mind the install. (Take backups first) (Score:2)
I had a box with a drive with an empty primary partition at the beginning and Linux on a few extended partitions at the end. The OpenSolaris install documentation and the installer itself promised not to touch the existing extended partitions. Which it didn't. It did, however, wipe the partition table so I could not find my extended partitions and had to restore from backups.
I will not be using OpenSolaris anytime soon.
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)
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Microsoft also replaced the BSD TCP stack, but they kept the same userland commands. They already had a different config command (ipconfig instead of ifconfig)... probably because they had to rewrite that to cooperate with their netbios and other stacks, but ...
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.
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I've been bitten too many times by companies killing off products. Also, my experience in the past has been that the first thing you need to do with a Solaris box is install all the GNU tools anyway, to replace the broken awk, broken sed, etc. So really, why would I want the non-GNU licensed tools available if I'm not going to use them?
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Narrow the choice.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If your main concern is whether or not it runs KDE? Then stick with Linux.
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If you work in an environment that has the luxury of dismissing products and solutions because they are NOT GPL...
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.
Funny you should ask (Score:2)
I just installed it a couple of weeks ago. Open Solaris starts in a GNOME shell and feels quite like Ubuntu in that way. Main difference is that the booting is much slower, but that's not unreasonable for a server OS that isn't supposed to get rebooted very often. I haven't really used it that much, but mostly it seemed to be okay. (Reference basis is that I'm a heavy Ubuntu user, though my company distro is a custom version of RHEL5, and I've experimented with about half a dozen of the live CD versions.)
Ho
Solaris is great. So is choice! (Score:2)
As someone who uses Linux at home and work, and also uses Solaris at work, I'm very pleased to see what Sun are doing. Solaris is a great operating system and I'm a bit bemused by the attitude that some Slashdotters have of "Why bother when I've got Linux?". I thought we were supposed to be geeks here and fascinated by interesting technology!
The biggest grumble I usually hear is that the default Solaris commands are not as feature rich as the GNU equivalents. The easy answer is that the GNU tools are most p
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" .
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I would not even begin to think how Linux could handle this
Evidently I am somewhat more adventurous, as I will dare to think. My thought is that linux could handle this by having some sort of kernel setting, called, say, "overcommit_memory", classed in the "sys/vm" part of the proc heirachy. I would think that one could alter the behaviour by echoing a setting into it, eg "echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory". Incidentally, I think it could work this way because it actually does work this way :P
A question though -- with overcommit disabled, things like jav
Mixed Feelings (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenSolaris takes quite a bit of time getting used to IMHO coming from FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and many many versions of Linux. I used it because I wanted ZFS, virtulization, and also to try something new.
I did move back to FreeBSD after about a week or so since I thought OpenSolaris brought unnecessary learning curves for someone new. Things like 'ps' being different than every other distro, network interface setup and modification is annoying, the number of programs that you can compile outside of their package manager are slim, and overall not very friendly (I don't want to use the GUI, ever). However, I have 4gb of ram and ZFS really should only be run under 64-bit FreeBSD. Qemu doesn't seem to run, Xen isn't even an option for virtulization and WINE doesn't work under 64-bit (these are the main reasons I bought 4gb of ram in the first place).
ZFS has been running flawlessly on FreeBSD for me thus far, and even the maintainer says he's been using it since her ported it over without a hickup. FreeBSD runs version 6 of ZFS, while OpenSolaris currently runs version 11. It IS true, once you go ZFS you don't go back.
I refuse to run Linux, for personal and limiting reasons, and FreeBSD won't let me virtualize. It seems that in the next few days I'll be biting the bullet and moving back to OpenSolaris. It is very nice that ZFS is seamlessly integrated and snapshots are automatically created when updating the system. This ensures you can easily roll back or boot back into an older install to test different things.
All in all OpenSolaris HAS some potential, but their licensing is very wack and limiting. If Sun wants their OS to evolve and take on more users in the community, the licence will really need to be changed.
I thought it sucked. (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I remember there was an astroturfed Sun-staff-only developer community, little information available online, slow as hell boot time, ZFS boot partition complications, and a broken KDE (the X server didn't work correctly; I have absolutely ZERO problems, even with 3D here in Linux).
And when I looked ahead to maintaining the system (the VAST BULK of where overhead is spent) I didn't see anything that looked as sane or easy as Debian. No incremental updates, just some arcane BSD-esque 'port' or
Solaris 10: pass.
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
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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)
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There's probably a Linux equivalent of processor sets, CPU shares and the Fair Shares Scheduler, but again I've never found one.
Newer kernels allow you to put processes into a tree and assign priorities at each level, or assign priorities per user. Look for "CFS" or "Completely Fair Scheduler" and "group scheduling" or "fair user scheduling". Not sure how exactly this compares, my only run-in with it has been that various system cron jobs that used to run at nice 19 don't act like they're at nice 19 any more.
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What, no mention of dtrace? Now that's been an excellent part of the Sol10/OpenSol movement IMO.
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Some suggestions for linux users. (Note, I'm not a solaris user, so I'm sure there are some differences between features.)
--OpenVZ or vservers should give something similar to zones
--They're working on memory resource controllers for the "cgroups" functionality. There have been out-of-tree patches for years now, but I think this may be included already, or will go into 2.6.27.
--cpusets and processor affinity masks are available, cpu shares are available as part of the cpu resource controller for cgroups, a
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ZFS - Are you really using your server for data storage? SAN or NAS should be a better option depending on your price point
SMF - while nice, i have experienced many different kinds of errors. If one of the dependencies has a problem, the chain breaks and it is a pain to discover the problem.
FMA - if hardware is broken, i would rather the machine be fully broken and out of service. Running on degraded hardware is too much of a risk. if a few bits get switched or some data is not written correctly, you could
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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.
Re: (Score:2)
# There's probably a Linux equivalent of rcapd, to limit the physical memory use of particular groups of processes, but I've never found one. # There's probably a Linux equivalent of processor sets, CPU shares and the Fair Shares Scheduler, but again I've never found one.
Just starting to get added in the latest kernels.
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.
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"...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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""it scales far better" in general is as absurd as it is patently untrue."
How so? With the exception of the SGI implementation, I don't don't of Linux distros out of the box that scale to 100+ processors well (indeed, the usual approach is to run multiple instances of the kernel on each processor or so on large ensembles). When discussing an OS, scalability is usually meant in terms of how the OS itself scales ... not how one's applications can be configured to scale.
So I think the poster's claim that Solar
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)
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.
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If 100% is the maximum load, how are you exceeding it? Unless you are using a higher value as the maximum percentage, your math troubles me.
The load average is the number of processes waiting to run, quite different from % CPU usage.
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
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I guess you have never worked in supercomputing....where Linux is just about what everything runs.
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Unmodified Solaris scales to > 512 CPU's almost linear
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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?
Over 85% of the top 500 super computers in the world run Linux. http://www.top500.org/ [top500.org] as best I can tell almost none run Solaris as most of the Unix is AIX. So all you "Linux's uptime, stability and processing power sucks compared to Unix" old ass fanboys go back to your clubhouse and cry.
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.
Wow...if you are a *real* Unix admin it is no wonder Linux came along and is so successful.
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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, Informative)
Funny you should mention the "desktop orientation" of Linux, considering that any recent Solaris puts on a shiny Gnome suit...
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.
OK, I'll bite. I've been admin'ing Unix for 12 years, and a user for 20. I've maintained everything from an UltraSparc workstation to E10Ks. Lately (past five years) I've been d
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Absolute bullshit. I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (64-bit)
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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
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Well, there are other more technical reasons for considering Solaris. I'm not sure how this applies exactly in detail to the OpenSolaris but Solaris handles threading a little differently than Linux and a few other minor things that can make a big difference depending on your application. When you get down to the fine technical details of each OS, there are differences that can make or break your application's efficiencies.
For the desktop, perhaps that kind of analysis is not needed but if you are planning
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
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It's not so much them believing that CLI is better, I think it's more a case of CLI tools being far easier to develop. Writing a good GUI is non-trivial, and writing a good GUI for something incredibly technical and involved will often result in a harder to use solution than just making the CLI.
Furthermore, admins are typically highly proficient with a keyboard, and can manipulate the CLI faster than they can a mouse.
It's a case of tool for the job. Many tasks are just better suited to CLI due to complexity