OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop?

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."

Year of the sell out

I am interested to see more stories that are not advertising or shout outs develop on laptops reading slashdot. Down with the "Check out my favorite thing" posts.

Re:Year of the sell out

I tried it. I installed it on my spare laptop (IBM T-41, ~4 years old). Pros include excellent speed, and easy install. Cons, especially when compared with consumer grade Linux distributions like Ubuntu, include extremely sparse OSS application repository to draw from, and wireless support that I just never could get to work. Having been there and done that, with a tee-shirt, I kept it for a week and reloaded Linux. Not ready yet.

Why?

I know it is cool to try out different OSes from time to time, but is there really any solid technical reason why anyone would choose solaris on a laptop over linux?

Re:Why?

Sun's License vs. GPL? Solaris comes with multimedia codecs (such as MP3) that Linux distro's don't ship out of the box. Solaris (and maybe OpenSolaris) also comes with the proprietary nVidia video driver already installed for use.

Re:Why?

There aren't. It's supposedly patented, but since you cannot patent software in most of the world, no-one cares.

Re:Why?

I know it is cool to try out different OSes from time to time, but is there really any solid technical reason why anyone would choose solaris on a laptop over linux?

If you truly are a Linux fan - isn't your first phrase answer enough? I've asked this sort of question about Linux enough times (e.g. "Do we really need another distro?" or "Do we really need yet another window manager?"), and Linux fanboys all think that "because we can" is a good enough answer in and of itself. That's fine; but if it's true when we talk about Linux, it's also true when we're discussing other operating systems.

Re:Why?

The availability of "yet another option" doesn't make any year "a year of that yet other option".

It's nice that Solaris x86 is finally not being treated like
an ugly redheaded stepchild. Although it's about 10 years too
late and that ship has sailed already.

I would imagine any OEM would have this nagging doubt in the
back of their mind about Sun and the future of Solaris and
what Sun might do in the future to screw things up again.

Re:Why?

The Solaris kernel is very nice - good performance, good scalability, zones, ZFS, dtrace, an incredibly scalable TCP/IP stack, a stable driver ABI, and so on. It's fully supported by OSS (Sun paid 4Front to develop it) and I believe it now has a DRI implementation too. The userspace is a bit archaic - it's classic System V, which makes even a GNU userland look nice.

Or, to turn your question around, what is the compelling reason for choosing Linux over OpenSolaris or, say, PC-BSD, on a laptop?

Re:Why?

what is the compelling reason for choosing Linux over OpenSolaris or, say, PC-BSD, on a laptop?

Frequency scaling support for the processor to save power? Hardware support in general? I tried OpenSolaris 2008.5 on my laptop, and this was the main issue.

The userspace is a bit archaic - it's classic System V, which makes even a GNU userland look nice.

I was interested in trying OpenSolaris for this very reason, since I wanted to see e.g. if I could build Makefiles that worked with GNU make, Sun make and BSD make, and that type of stuff. But to my surprise the userland tools I tried were all GNU.

Re:Why?

Now the fun of ZFS is that next to RAID-Z* it also has some nice snapshot send and receive features. So you could plugin your laptop and upon leaving, leave a snapshot of your work at another ZFS system has has many drives. Now that seems quite cool :) Another reason could be just using the features of the filesystem such as quickly sharing an NFS export for a presentation. Or making a snapshot of your latest work. ZFS like for example GIT as versioning system bring very interesting 'offline/on-the-road' use-cases. The integration that ZFS has to offer with xVM/Zones just proves the point that virtualisation is also available if you want it to. So yes you can use KVM/VirtualBox/Xen/VMware on your laptop, but as far from integration with the base OS, OpenSolaris has nifty features. Personally I run Linux on all but one system. That one system runs my cluster storage on OpenSolaris.

Re:Why?

Sure! Running ZFS on a single drive sounds cool to the other people working at the help desk.

Plus chicks really dig it.

Re:Why?

This [array.org] should fix most of your problems. It got Hardy working great for me on an Eee 1000.

"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

I've never quite gotten what people mean by classifying operating systems in these two categories. Okay, it runs GNOME, office programs, and Firefox, isn't that enough to make it a desktop operating system? Hey look, it can run apache, sendmail, and bind, it's a server operating system too!

Seems to me it's just an operating system well-rounded for any task, and such vague categories don't really apply to it.

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

I would agree with you but for one point: The desktop arena is the general purpose 'swiss army knife' area, while server software has specific issues of speed, security, and robustness. Sure, they have overlap, but there are different generalized criteria for both.

I like what Solaris is becomming, and there are definite advantages to running Solaris in certain environments on certain hardware, especially when speed and robustness are critical factors.

Now I'm not talking about running DukeNukem, I'm talking about when an extra 100 transactions per second makes meaningful differences to your bottom line. This is when server OS software is a critical thing. Typically, desktop software OS is not what you want running a server with such critical issues under the microscope.

Solaris has historically been an OS which can be trusted in the server environment. I look with hope that they will continue and build on such a reputation.

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

I disagree. Desktop OS and Server OS do not overlap. I know that Linux can and is BOTH but it is not really. A server OS is an OS built on stability and security. A desktop OS is one built on user experience and usability. There is sometimes a fine line, and a server can have a Desktop, but it is typically a trimmed version of a Desktop with many services not running that would be on the "desktop" release.

A desktop OS will have services and programs enabled that specifically disqualify it from being a server OS. Programs that listen on network ports, dont provide any kind of authentication to access devices or write to files, dont have a thorough firewall. A webserver should listen only on webserver specific ports and those necessary for remote admin. I can think of less than 10. (do a `netstat -a|grep LISTEN` and count the ports your desktop is listening on and then do the same on a server(http,ftp,ssh,rsync,and some specifics for server type like imaps or smb).

The analog here is a brand new Lincoln truck. Sure it looks like a truck, but its very nature says that it cannot be a worktruck without losing its status as a luxury vehicle. You could dis-acknowledge its luxury status and MAKE it a work truck, but then it is no longer a luxury vehicle because there has been consideration to the nice paint job, the chrome, the soft leather seats, etc.

So the point is:
Ubuntu 8.04 server is a server OS. If you add everything to make it a desktop OS, it is now Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop.

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

A desktop OS will have services and programs enabled that specifically disqualify it from being a server OS. Programs that listen on network ports, dont provide any kind of authentication to access devices or write to files, dont have a thorough firewall. A webserver should listen only on webserver specific ports and those necessary for remote admin. I can think of less than 10. (do a `netstat -a|grep LISTEN` and count the ports your desktop is listening on and then do the same on a server(http,ftp,ssh,rsync,and some specifics for server type like imaps or smb).

Huh? This sounds like a bad idea for both server and desktop alike.

Firstly, it's pretty well-worn knowledge by now that it's a darn good idea to run a firewall in any context, unless you positively, absolutely trust your local network.

Second, any extraneous services should either be disabled by default on a desktop machine, or be able to be disabled quite easily. As you mentioned, it's a trivial task to take a look at what ports are open, and is equally trivial to close those ports and/or kill the underlying processes if necessary.

Microsoft learned this lesson with Windows 2000. By stripping down their "Server" OS, they (possibly inadvertently) produced what was arguably the desktop best operating ever made by the company. Sure, it didn't come bundled with much, although that was a large part of the beauty of it. Most of the "value-added" features that came with XP were crap, and rarely used by anybody. For its time, it was fast, stable, secure, and quite easy to use. The architectural differences between the 'Server' and 'Workstation' versions were virtually nonexistent.

Unfortunately, they forgot whatever lessons they might have learned with Win2k, and came out with XP, which though a step up from 98/Me!, wasn't nearly as fast or secure as 2k, and eventually Vista, which predominantly added bloat, and none of the much touted architectural improvements that were supposed to have been in the pipeline.

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

The difference between a server OS and a desktop OS is not necessarily what they're capable of...most operating systems these days can serve as a halfway decent server or desktop system. The difference is really what each of them are optimized for.

A distribution or release that's designated as a "desktop OS" will tend to include a lot more software for that purpose, such as multiple desktop environments, 3D video drivers, drivers for various sound cards, calendar apps, word processors, and the like. It may also have a kernel optimized for those components.

A server OS, on the other hand, will likely be missing a lot of the eye candy, may not have any 3D or advanced sound drivers, and may be missing a bunch of the applications you would expect on a desktop machine. It may also come pre-installed with various server apps that would be of little use on a desktop machine, like a web or DNS server. Likewise, its kernel may be optimized for these server tasks.

For example, if you're building a desktop system, you might want something that will automatically install several desktop managers, the full suite of KDE and Gnome apps, etc on it. If you're looking for a server OS, such things are just a waste of space, and the installer adding them to your machine automatically is not desirable.

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

With respect to Linus, he's wrong there. People running servers care about how many of their clients they can service without interruption. Scheduling latency often doesn't matter because it is dwarfed by network latency.

In any scheduler, throughput and latency are at odds. You get the best throughput from cooperative multitasking. Each context switch has a fixed cost, and the more context switches you do the lower your throughput, but you improve the responsiveness of each process. A UI process has much higher latency constraints than a server process. A desktop user cares more about dropped frames in their video than CPU utilisation. If the CPU is at 60% usage instead of 50% then the user won't care, but if the are getting stuttering in their audio playback then they will. In contrast, a server operator is less likely to care if requests take 60ms instead of 50ms, because the network latency is adding 100ms or 200ms to each one anyway.

Now, a good scheduler can be tuned to favour either throughput-sensitive or latency-sensitive workloads, and can run multiple tasks with both requirements (see HP-UX for some inspiration), but that doesn't mean that the requirements are the same.

Wow. OpenSolaris is a rough ride.

If you thought the driver situation was bad for Linux, and worse for *BSD, it's even worser fro OpenSolaris. Yes, I said worser. It's worser enough for me to want to use a fake, worse word to describe it. :(

I mean, great idea guys, but in execution, any OS that locks up solid so you have to ssh in remotely and kill your login session so you can log in, or that makes compilation of something as simple as Quake practically impossible--installed GNU toolchain or not--is it really worth it on commodity hardware?

We have OpenSolaris desktop machines installed at work, and the amount of effort the OpenSolaris users go through.. my god, it's herculean. And I'm making this judgement call sitting atop a farm of NetBSD machines. So you fucking know--you KNOW--that when I say something's a rough ride, you better fucking listen.

Not that it's a complete dearth of utility. There's lots of stuff going for it. I'm just saying. Fair warning.

(P.S. Tinkering with it? Good luck.)

Get yer torrents!

The server at http://www.genunix.org/ [genunix.org], where this OpenSolaris 2008.11 ISO is hosted, is responding rather slowly right now (indirect Slashdotting?). So I want to point out that if you'd like to download this build and try it for yourself, you can get it as a torrent here [sun.com].

Firefox and Suspend makes not a year of the laptop

So this guy tests the Install process, running Firefox and navigating to Youtube, to find out he has to manually install Flash.
He then puts the laptop into suspend, with a successful resume.
Then he declares OpenSolaris the year of the laptop.

Am I missing something? Any additional unit testing? Benchmarks? Usability? Application availability?

Nice Slashvertisement.

Warning: I use OpenSolaris a lot as well, love it for the sake of some serious faults, but it does its job well. That job is NOT running on a laptop however. Good luck to the poor souls who try to use it as a daily driver.

Re:Count me

Uh is it a new SCO meme ? Are you done with enough of FUD already ?

Solaris (and previously SunOS) were Sun's implementation of UNIX. Right, just like Linux and FreeBSD. As such Sun owns the copyright to it. Sun got it UNIX 'certified'. Thats right, just like OSX, Tru64, HPUX and AIX. There is no UNIX. It is a trademark of the Open Group, and they certify various implementations of it. Ever heard of SUS ? SYS V ?

Now onto SCO fiasco. Sun licensed some x86 drivers from SCO for Solaris 8 (yeah that old... Its like 10 years now). SCO's SCO UNIX was x86 based. Those drivers have long since disappeared! They dont even matter!

Whats all this infighting among Open Source group ? What is that makes some fanbois do thing and spread FUD that is most anti-Open Source ?

Guess some people just can never live happily with others!

Re:It's a trap

I have also followed Groklaw basically since they started, and you are basically scaremongering for the purpose of getting attention.

You know full well that no one is going to read through all of those documents unless they're getting paid for it. I'm pretty sure you didn't read them either, but base everything off of people's comments on the blog. Esp. given the fact that PJ never said that Solaris was illegally open sourced. In fact, I believe she said that Sun already had that right, regardless of whether or not SCO had the right to sign the contract with them.

Don't code for anything besides Linux!!

If you code on anything besides Linux the evil proprietary companies will steal your code.

Seriously though - if you write something for OpenSolaris - how is the ownership of your code in doubt? Just like an app written for Linux does not have to be GPL'ed, or an app written for Windows is not owned by Microsoft.

Typical Linux zealotry in action.

Re:Self-helpdesking BSD

I hear there's a company that sells laptops with a BSD OS and decent support... named after some kind of fruit or something.