Oracle Staff Report Big Layoffs Across Solaris, SPARC Teams (theregister.co.uk) 239
Simon Sharwood, reporting for the Register: Soon-to-be-former Oracle staff report that the company made hundreds of layoffs last Friday, as predicted by El Reg, with workers on teams covering the Solaris operating system, SPARC silicon, tape libraries and storage products shown the door. Oracle's media relations agency told The Register: "We decline comment." However, Big Red's staffers are having their say online, in tweets such as the one below. "For real. Oracle RIF'd most of Solaris (and others) today," an employee said. A "RIF" is a "reduction in force", Oracle-speak for making people redundant (IBM's equivalent is an "RA", or "resource action"). Tech industry observer Simon Phipps claims "~all" Solaris staff were laid off. "For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product."
Rule #1 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison." -Bryan Cantrill
Larry can be very cold hearted, but I can't fault him for this. Sparc/Solaris was a great choice in the 1980s, a reasonable choice in the 1990s, and a bad choice ever since. There can't be much more than a handful of legacy customers left. I am surprised that it took this long to finally die.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
After Solaris was open sourced, there seemed to be a time when the use of Solaris could potentially expand greatly. Once Ellison closed the code again, there was no hope at all. Ellison should be blamed completely for this.
Re: (Score:3)
This. Solaris could have gone far, but for the people that owned it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Java is painful to use, but it's around for the long haul - especially since Oracle couldn't remove OpenJDK even if they wanted to. The JVM, though, is a really useful platform, and Oracle has not yet managed to screw that up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Then why the fuck did he buy it? Maybe his company could have done less of a dick move by just selling the Sun properties that they were not interested in, like Solaris, so they could be given an actual, proper chance. Fuck Oracle.
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why the fuck did he buy it?
To kill MySql, which was a long term threat to Oracle's core business.
Maybe his company could have done less of a dick move
Without dick moves, Oracle wouldn't be Oracle, and Larry certainly wouldn't be Larry. Being a dick is his core competency.
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.
PostgreSQL perhaps, but not MySQL.
Just because its popular with 'toy database' applications (where the db is really just slightly glorified read only storage) doesnt mean it is a threat or oracle - different horses for very different courses.
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.
A threat to real database needs, no. But a threat to real database sales, yes, at least in the eyes of people who see any alternative as a lost sale. Sure, MySQL is mostly a replacement for a structured file, but that's still one replacement for a structured file that Oracle wasn't paid for.
It's not much different than the kind of mind set that would claim that a 10 year old a yearly allowance of $1200 copying a bunch of MP3s is a loss to the music industry of $12 million.
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure if you've noticed, but Oracle have spent the last 2 years pulling volume discounts from under some pretty big companies. My entire multinational has set a deadline to remove all use of Oracle, and I know we're not the only ones migrating from Oracle to Postgres
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
On a modern machine, you don't need carefully optimised queries and carefully designed on-disk data structures - you can probably fit the whole thing in RAM and run the computations in Lua and still get the whole thing done in a second or two. At one end of the market, most customers can now run their systems with cheap commodity hardware and software. At the other end of the market, companies like Facebook and Google have more data than Oracle can easily handle and couldn't afford Oracle license fees even if there was a viable Oracle product for them to buy. The middle is gradually shrinking.
Well for companies like Facebook and Google you don't care that the social feed or search index is only kinda updated by computer standards or that different people see slightly alternate versions. There are a lot of markets where you don't have that luxury, that ticket is either sold or not sold. But yes I agree those kinds of transaction processing markets don't scale the way computer hardware does, my local cinema got roughly as many seats as it had last decade. Stadiums and arenas don't get bigger. Even
Re: (Score:2)
I've actually seen a few of our line of business applications (Hyland Onbase as one example) migrate to Microsoft SQL simply because of arcane licensing from Oracle. I know this is heresy here, but MS-SQL actually performs better than Oracle and is cheaper, but of course some vendors require you run Oracle :(.
On Oracle licensing - it's one of the few cluster of servers we have that has to be on physical machines because it was deemed cheaper.
Re: (Score:3)
PostgreSQL is less of a threat to Oracle than MySQL. If you start building a system with PostgreSQL, you have a reliable database with a decent query optimiser and you'll end up putting a lot of logic into the database. Once you grow to a big enough size that you might be able to afford Oracle, they send along salesmen and convince your least competent C?O that your data would be a lot safer if you migrate to a proper database and they provide migration tools to do this.
Here is the big question. WHY would any SANE programmer put business logic into the model layer? That would tightly couple your database engine to the other layers of the application. Once a more viable solution is available, it may have already become too cost prohibitive to migrate to the next technology. We see this now with a lot of mainframe centered companies. Don't get me wrong, most mainframe based companies have a very highly tuned and efficient solution, but as technology changes, where does
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Informative)
WHY would any SANE programmer put business logic into the model layer?
To uniformly enforce rules when accommodating multiple applications accessing the same data.
Another reason is that the database will usually be the longest living part of the software architecture.
In terms of things being tightly coupled, defining a set of stored procedures for data access hardly makes the application tightly coupled. Using raw SQL tightly couples your application to the schema. If the schema needs to change for database reasons the stored procedure layer could prevent you from having to modify the applications.
Yes, there are other ways to accomplish the same thing but it's not an insane decision.
Re: (Score:2)
The issue I have with putting the business logic into database is that error handling is horrible. It will not give you anything useful about what went wrong.
That is why everything has an intermediary layer or service for checking submissions and returning human readable information about what is missing or incorrect.
Re: (Score:2)
Business logic !== logic.
You put logic into the data model that's tightly-coupled with the model. If this is code that must change when the data model changes, then it should live with the data model. It can then be re-used by different applications, and it helps isolate those applications from changes to the data model.
The "re-use" bit is really key. If you have multiple applications, with different teams of developers, all accessing the same database, then you can assume that none of the application t
Re: (Score:2)
You've obviously never had to implement 12 client side joins. Sure if you've got 12 joins to a single 100 row company table, no problem. But if each join is a server roundtrip for a lookup you've just fucked yourself with a ghost pepper.
Bad code is a bad argument, unless you think the client side is somehow immune.
Re: (Score:2)
MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.
PostgreSQL perhaps, but not MySQL.
Just because its popular with 'toy database' applications (where the db is really just slightly glorified read only storage) doesnt mean it is a threat or oracle - different horses for very different courses.
You need to understand that the "toy" database is deployed much more than Oracle today (including small companies like Facebook, Pinterest, Github). Not bad for a "toy". Doesn't matter if it is a "toy" or not, it's being used by major systems that would have been running Oracle. The good news is that Oracle's expensive attempt to kill MySQL forced the creation of MariaDB (used by Google and many others) and other alternatives, and we all know that Oracle's ploy against HP produced a huge interest in Post
Re: (Score:2)
Oracle didn't want to kill MySQL. They wanted to make it easier to sell potential customers on the transition.
If your goal is to make money, it is an obvious path to take.
Re: (Score:2)
That just means they didn't understand MySQL. Its many idiosyncrasies lock you to it. Its users are commonly ignorant of anything better, or they wouldn't be using it.
Re: (Score:2)
MySQL is second only to Devnull for accepting bandwidth.
It's problem is you aren't guaranteed anything like transactions when running it in that mode. Change MySQL's ISAM to something that supports transactions and the performance goes to shit.
Re: (Score:3)
I suspect the one thing which Oracle wanted from Sun was control of Java. Not necessarily for nefarious purposes (although a more ruthless company I have seldom encountered); it was just intolerable given the commitment they'd made to Java to have it in anyone else's hands.
MySQL was a great project, but there is no way it threatens Oracle's database customer base.
Oracle has an aggressive lock-in strategy for its database customers; to that end not only does it offer myriad proprietary ways of doing things,
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, back then every single Oracle acquisition target was writing software in Java and the language was controlled by Sun and IBM.
Oracle couldn't afford IBM.
Re: (Score:2)
Then why the fuck did he buy it? Maybe his company could have done less of a dick move by just selling the Sun properties that they were not interested in, like Solaris, so they could be given an actual, proper chance. Fuck Oracle.
To sue Google for Java patent infringement in Android. But that plan has failed.
Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Informative)
He bought it mainly because of Java. Oracle has a huge investment in Java and there was no way in hell he could afford to let it die or, worse yet, let it go to IBM.
Solaris was a nice bonus because Oracle also had lots of investment in that hardware/software platform for it's own servers. From where I sit, I saw a gradual move to Oracle Linux over the years but I can not say wether that is responsible for dropping Solaris/Spark.
There was a time I had a Solaris virtual box. Mostly unused but was useful when I needed to install a particular server instance for the applications I was doing at the time. Nowadays, I have an Oracle Linux virtual machine on which runs one of our development tools, for our App development. Other members in the team have their own Oracle Linux virtual machine to host dev or qa instances of the server for our App development use.
Haven't seen an OpenSolaris box in years, but I know one of our training center in MDC has (had?) a few boxes on there. Not sure they are still there. Been ages since I walked in that office.
Re: (Score:3)
Forgot to mention: those are my thoughts and impression. Not an official Oracle statement. I claim not to know the inner workings of management decisions.
Re: (Score:3)
Same story here, really. At a previous employer, I fed and cared for a metric ton of ldoms* running on Sparc T-3 iron, as well as other (slightly older) Sparc pizza boxes running a ton of zones. The big reason they existed was to test the product on the Solaris/Sparc platform under various incarnations (from Solaris 7 to latest/greatest, which was IIRC 11.x at the time)... and that was about it.
Anything they actually cared about (business-wise) sat on Linux and/or Windows boxen.
* for those who were unaware,
Re: (Score:2)
No idea about SPARC.
However Solaris is running everywhere.
Re: (Score:3)
You probably still have large SPARC sales due to legacy applications requiring it as part of the stack. This is changing, but I used an ERP that only gave requirements for Sun SPARC/Solaris with Oracle databases and this drives purchasing decisions. We tried for years to convince them to switch to Linux with all kinds of performance metrics. You lose your support contract when doing so, however.
Now that stuff is moving into the cloud, SPARC has no real reason to exist. It was already pretty crippled com
Re: (Score:2)
SPARK and Solaris was still the mainstay at the last large research institution I worked at up until a year ago when the first rumblings came out...
Re: (Score:2)
Science moves forward, one funeral at a time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Lots of shared, hyper-threaded cores. The performance on them is abysmal. They started to bank on marketing the number of cores rather than making cores that perform so you get CPUs with 128 "cores" based on 4 CPU dies that take 10x as long to gzip/gunzip and other simple tasks.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt that is a problem on servers where you have to handle thousands of concurrent sessions. It would apply more a desktop machine where the zip is the only process you are running.Where you have one sequential process running on the entire machine, of course the extra cores are wasted. That is not an issue on a high volume server.
Re: (Score:3)
T-series SPARC architecture is only good for one thing: serving static web pages. You will get horrid performance for anything else. I know because we ran all kinds of stuff on them including web servers, databases (Oracle), and infrastructure. You are getting a slow, 4-CPU machine that "hyperthreads" to 128 cores with little to no cache. No, it is a horrible platform that needs to sink to the bottom of the digital ocean regardless of "high volume" and "server" labels. It was designed for transactional
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
BJs were for MBAs not engineers. So yes, bad thing.
VirtualBox (Score:4, Interesting)
Has there been any word about VirtualBox? That is pretty much the only former-Sun softwarevI use on a regular basis. Since the Oracle purchase of Sun I have wondered why Oracle was keeping it alive.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope they don't kill it. I love it. I do remember they were still hiring and updating.
Re: (Score:2)
I used wget to grab the whole set of the current version installers. You can never be too safe.
Re: (Score:2)
Good idea. Another problems are fixes and updates with newer stuff. :(
Re:VirtualBox (Score:5, Interesting)
VirtualBox is difficult to explain. Oracle has never seriously tried to monetize it. They've never inflicted a Java installer on VirtualBox users. Most of it is still Open Source and they haven't driven off the entire user base to some fork. They haven't done any of the damage this sociopath or a corporation does to everything else they acquire.
I pointed this out to a moderately clever person once. He suggested that perhaps Oracle forgot about it. Maybe there is a small team of dedicated developers quietly enhancing their work, filling out their TPS reports and successfully avoiding notice.
Re: (Score:3)
So you are saying that the VirtualBox team are the equivalent of Milton Waddams?
Just hope that Oracle doesn't bring in "the Bobs".
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The idea was that VirtualBox would make it easy to create small numbers of VMs for managing infrastructure,
Too bad it never did. KVM took over that job. VirtualBox makes it easy to create one or two VMs, but you don't really want to get into more than that.
Re: (Score:2)
More information the Layoff (Score:4, Informative)
In case anyone wants more insider info. https://www.thelayoff.com/orac... [thelayoff.com]
A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets face it Sun made mistakes. These mistakes made it ripe for take over and plundering by Oracle.
The biggest mistake was Linux. When Red Hat launched no one took it seriously. Red Hat legitimised Linux in the eyes of industry. Companies faced with massive expansions of internet equipment simply could not afford the iron from SUN / HP / IBM. These small start ups went to Linux. One such startup was Google. All of a sudden massive new companies emerged on a platform that was not enterprise iron. Overnight Dell become a major player in the server room.
What did Sun do about this? Nothing. Even when faced with new unit sales that were almost zero compared to just a few years before sun still did nothing. Sun released Solaris for x86/64. But completely forgot to get 3rdparty shops and it's on internal application development teams to port to it. They only thing that ran on the x86/64 Solaris was open source software. Stuff that was already running on much cheaper x86/64 gear. Sun limped on for a few years making the occasional uplift sale for existing gear in the field.
Then Oracle pounced. Suns mistakes led to this point. They sold for far less than they were worth. Why? The market lost all faith in Sun's ability to generate a cash flow. Thus the negative impact on asset value.
Oracle saw something it liked very much. Java. Oracle instantly went on a predatory path of trying to extract money out of Java. We all know how well that went. Oracle just recently announced that they are looking to open source the Java EE specification. This predatory cash grab caused some other interesting market changes. The explosion of new languages resulted and they got market share. Ruby on rails in my opinion would have never had as much success as it once did with out Oracles legal threats over java usage.
Oracle also needed to save it's DB division. At that point Oracle DB pretty much was only ever deployed on pricey Sun gear. Also Sun owned the control of MySQL. Which was growing at an astonishing speed. This threat needed to be squashed at all costs. In my mind these were the real reasons for Oracles purchase of Sun.
There were some other assets that Oracle was looking to sell off. But in the end Oracles taint reduced their value to zero. OpenOffice comes to mind.
I still remember the day when Oracle purchased Sun. There was an audible groan in the office. Execs around the world were scrambling to find alternatives to many products. Sun certified engineers instantly saw there pricey certificates devalue in an instant.
The only reasons Oracle has kept Solaris and SPARC alive for so long are:
1. Uplift purchases still come in. But not many. These can be counted in 1000's world wide. Basically nothing.
2. The platform became part of the Exadata/Exalogic platform. ( An an holy creation in my mind. )
Re:A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. The root problem was that single-thread performance of Sparc lagged Intel x86 around the time the PIII came out. Linux made adoption of x86 possible for many applications, but few of them would have moved to x86 without the big performance and cost benefits of adopting it.
Sun tried to compensate with more cores, but that only made Sparc more expensive and many applications were not written to take advantage of multi-core hardware.
Re:A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Informative)
This is very true.
This wasn't just Sun's problem, IBM had similar issues with the AIX Power servers. The price/performance of Java on x86 was far better than anything that Sun or IBM could offer. They were still stuck with the mindset of selling expensive mid-range type systems. They could offer better scaling, with more cores in a single box, but when you could have a distributed application, with many small servers, the old vendors couldn't compete.
Once Redhat went public and management were able to convinced that Linux was a real alternative, instead of buying 4 AIX servers of $75k each, I was able to get 12 Linux x86 servers for $4k each (rack mounted, so a little bit expensive). The price for Sun SPARC servers were cheaper than the AIX servers, but still way more expensive than x86 servers.
The Linux servers were multiple times faster for the Java applications that they had to run, for just over 1/2 the price of a single AIX box.
Re: (Score:2)
The root problem was that single-thread performance of Sparc lagged Intel x86 around the time the PIII came out
Depends a bit on the SPARC, but the real problem was lack of volume. You could still buy faster SPARCs around that time, but they cost an order of magnitude more for a 10-20% performance improvement. If 20% means a lot to you, then you're going to start looking seriously at SMP and often a little bit of refactoring could buy you a 20+% improvement with a dual-processor system, which cost only a little bit more than double the price of the single-processor system.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't recall when this happened, but my (small) company was looking at buying another machine to run simulations.
One manager wanted to buy Sun, but I was sceptical.
We benchmarked the Sun machines against an x86 (PIII, I think) and the x86 was twice as fast (for half the cost). Note that we were running a single-threaded closed source application (ModelSim, I think).
Price/performance wise the x86 machine was 4 times better than Sun. We could not refactor and the difference was so compelling that we never b
Re:A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see it differently. MS killed desktop UNIX by being good enough. Desktop UNIX was better, but Windows NT 4 on commodity hardware was (perhaps just barely) good enough, and far cheaper. This impacted all the UNIX vendors, as it killed off a significant revenue stream.
Sun was losing the performance battle badly with SPARC. This was painfully obvious with the Sun Blade 2500 tower. The CPUs were no faster than the Blade 2000, and it had a quarter of the RAM bandwidth as a cost-saving measure (they reduced memory from 256 bits wide to 64 bits wide so you could install RAM DIMMs individually rather than in groups of four). They were still trying to charge premium prices for SPARC, but x86 and POWER were walking all over it in performance. They managed to score some wins on highly-parallel workloads with the UltraSPARC T series (Niagara), but it was always specialised and Suns AMD64 boxes performed better on most workloads.
Sun was spread far too thin on the ground and faced with falling revenues. They tried open source as a strategy, but open sourcing something provides no value on its own. They couldn't maintain/enhance their OS (Solaris), compilers (SunPro), Java, and everything else. They were floundering, occasionally coming out with an interesting product, but no consistency.
Ruby on Rails was framework-of-the-month already by 2006, years before the Oracle purchase. The explosion of programming languages would've happened anyway, it's a result of all the people who studied computer science after the first dotcom bubble. J2EE had already been co-opted by Apache and Red Hat, and let's face it, hardly anyone even uses J2EE. Most of the time Spring is a lighter-weight substitute, you only really want J2EE if you need distributed transactional consistency.
Sun were lucky to sell out when they did. They really didn't have a viable plan, and taking the money and running probably was the best thing for the shareholders. They'd already open-sourced most of the stuff that had any value, so it wasn't going to matter too much how Oracle mismanaged it. Oracle were stupid to buy Sun, as it was already pretty obvious there wasn't really much worth buying.
Yeah, I miss Sun, but the Sun I miss had already faded long before the Oracle purchase. I just didn't want to believe it and willingly went into denial.
Re: (Score:2)
Oracle did not buy tech from Sun hardware or software.
Oracle bought customers and revenue streams. Or the potential for revenue streams in some cases.
Oracle knows that it can not keep support more and more software and hardware platforms. Oracle never mismanaged anything internally. They would have never intended to a lot of it going past the 2,5,10 year marks for various tech. They did mismanage or failed to anticipate market and client reaction. Case in point the Java non-sense where they tried to claw
Re: (Score:2)
Solaris zones, and cluster-like features on Sun hardware (e.g. being able to take bad RAM out of service without bringing down the OS). They did have some cool technology, Linux on commodity hardware still doesn't have a viable replacement for either of these features.
Re: (Score:2)
1) I don't have the numbers to back this up, but the internet bubble had to have had a catastrophic effect on their finances. Almost all of those startups that went bust were using Sun equipment and there is no way that equipment was fully paid for by the time those companies went bust. What looked like a huge sales win for Sun suddenly rebounded on them when the market got flooded with excess e
Non-x86 Architectures (Score:2)
So what did IBM do different with their POWER machines? Someone must be buying them because they keep on making them [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
A few things things. The first is that they always had a larger market than SPARC, so their economies of scale were a bit better. The second is the HPC market. IBM doesn't put many PowerPC chips in supercomputers, but they charge a lot for the ones that they do, which helps offset R&D costs. Third, a lot of game consoles used PowerPC chips. These weren't the same designs as the high-end POWER systems (since POWER3, POWER implements the PowerPC spec and is just a marketing term for the expensive Po
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I foresee upcoming POWER releases as just another target for old LPAR consolidation until the apps that run on those systems can be retired or replatformed.
Ah good old LPAR. This was probably one of IBM's biggest successes. It allowed them to sell a lot of hardware. You basically had to massively over provision in order to use LPAR's. It also had a great security story in the sales pitch. They managed to replicate their success of statically allocated disk space on mainframes to statically allocating all other resources on the host as well.
LPAR's have for most application needs have been met by virtual machines. As the security/trust of VM's improved ove
Only real question is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only real question is (Score:4, Interesting)
The big reason they waited so long was they wanted/needed to migrate existing customers onto exa or cloud platforms. If they just killed it quickly they would effectively be loosing those customers, probably forever.
Also OracleDB was one of the only reasons to buy SPARC anymore. Database shops hate platform change in general. No one ever got fired for buying SPARC for the DB environment.
RIF is not "Oracle-speak" (Score:2)
It's common Corporate-Speak [wikipedia.org].
So who is Oracle going to buy now? (Score:2)
Obviously Oracle is clearing the decks to make room for something. The cash bleeders in the company are being sold off or shut down.
This leaves some big holes in Oracle. Things that helped prop it's DB business are now basically gone. Oracle has publicly gone all in with the cloud. Privately I think they have other plans.
So who is Oracle going to try and buy? Is it Red Hat?
RHT 19.07B
ORCL 209.399B
They could do it easily. They could buy control for 10B.
Or would they go after a global cloud provider? Like D
Re: (Score:2)
Re: So who is Oracle going to buy now? (Score:2)
If Oracle buys RedHat so it can die, can we make sure to securely rope systemd to the body before it's sunk in the bay? Also the body of that festering millineal who champions it, of course. And Gnome3 wants to ride along.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes it would kill RHEL. And super fast. But again Oracle would be buying the customer base. I also suspect that Oracle would only certify RHEL on certain friendly hardware platforms. AKA ones that kick back to ORACLE for said certification.
CentOS would fork instantly and multiple other companies would try to model them selves after RedHat. Almost every RedHat project would fork as well. Git hub would go into meltdown for a few weeks I suspect.
The Debian variant's would all of a sudden see a lot more
I started on Sun SPARC (Score:2)
RIF (Score:2)
...is not just "Oracle-speak". Ask any civil servant.
System V R4 is dying (Score:3)
And why did Larry buy Sun in the first place? (Score:2)
Ego?
I knew it was bad when they bought Sun. After the first tech support disaster, and that was for a nice server, with paid NBD warranty, I started referring to dealing with them as self-abuse.
Institutionally, I'd say they didn't know what to do with a hardware company, and weren't ready to compete with Intel chips, and probably didn't really realize the kind of financial investment that a hardware company, with their own non-Intel chipset, meant, and their ROI accountants had the vapors when they looked.
D
Re:All Solaris Staff? (Score:5, Informative)
Can the codebase be recovered?
Doesn't need to be. Illumos [illumos.org] is the open fork of (not so) OpenSolaris.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
There's still a lot of valuable code in the closed version of Solaris. ZFS enhancements come to mind.
Re:All Solaris Staff? (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS enhancements come to mind.
After the split with OpenSolaris, ZFS development moved to the Illumos project and OpenZFS [open-zfs.org] grew out of it.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Download your favorite text editor and get to work then!
Why? There are many people out there who do not have the inclination, desire and capabilities to do so, but they still want to use a good product. Supercilious answers like yours make the open source developers communities come across as a bunch of sanctimonious assholes.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As I see it Solaris is pretty stagnant since at least a decade. Most new development of *NIX environment has been under Linux and different BSD variants.
There may be certain applications that are Solaris specific, and it's probably a few of those that could be of interest to port to other environments if they aren't ported already.
But the days when Solaris was a leading significant factor in the *NIX world ended some 20 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who interviews regularly knows that 75% of developers can't count to 11
Huh? That's not hard:
0
1
10
11
Re: (Score:2)
It's been on life support for years. I knew it was coming when I saw the Blade 2500 tower in 2004, but I willingly went into denial. Since then it's just been a slow death spiral.
Re:sorry, not sorry (Score:4, Interesting)
In the early days SPARC was one of the only platforms that you could run x64 Java. Linux x64 was considered unstable and untested at the time.
So we bought massive SPARC boxes to host java apps. A lot of java apps at once. And yes the performance was garbage. A dedicated engineer at least just constantly on the lookout for performance issues.
I still remember one team going OK we built those new linux boxes for you. Only to find out they built them with 32bit linux. They simply would not build them x64. I had to remind them that the whole point of the project was to evaluate java on x64 intel. When they finally did rebuild them properly the initial performance tests were amazing. That company never looked back after that point.
Re: (Score:2)
The only reason I can think of is memory. 32bit machines are limited (in practice) to 4GB address space, and quite a bit less than that for actual physical memory.
Re: (Score:2)
That's exactly the reason.
Memory hogging java apps. Especially those that had to support lots of user sessions.
Generally you try to avoid heaps this big as garbage collection will kill the app. But sometimes you have to. Also with off heap memory methods now heaps can become enormous. We are talking Tbytes in size. I even know of a Pbyte implementation of offheap memory.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right that's meant to be part of the point of Java as a development platform, but there are also other reasons to use Java.
It scales well, it does a reasonable job helping out on correctness and security, there's no shortage of Java developers, there's no real chance the platform will die overnight, and there's the No-one ever got fired for choosing Java effect.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Having spent years struggling with Solaris instability for java (see madness linking required kernel patches to JVM upgrades) I honestly cant think of a single aspect of it that I miss.
Regarding SPARC, I remember the JavaOne conference where Intel engineers sat side-by-side with Sun JVM engineers to describe their partnership to delivery the best Java performance ever. I also remember switching a specific Java application from SPARC to Intel with no other changes and seeing at 23x performance boost while lowering hardware costs. Not missing a single thing about SPARC either.
Perhaps my experience was a fluke. Are there many people out there productive and stable using SPARC and Solaris? I had always assumed the entire market segment was maintaining legacy systems in situations where there was no money to move forward with modern choices.
Solaris and instability in the same post?
YOU SIMPLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT
Period.
You don't.
Call me when Linux actually implements AUTH_SYS properly instead of randomly grabbing the first 16 groups it finds. Yeah, that asinine, random, now-you-can-access-your-files-now-you-can't works really well in a large enterprise environment with tens of thousands of users.
Call me when Linux fixes pwrite() - read the Linux man page, that bug has been in there for years and prevents access to a file that a
Re: (Score:2)
Having spent years struggling with Solaris instability for java (see madness linking required kernel patches to JVM upgrades) I honestly cant think of a single aspect of it that I miss.
The Sun stuff I miss is pre-Solaris, and it was a product of its age and is meaningless now. Early (68k) Sun hardware was awesome compared to almost everyone else's early hardware. Of course, it was also awesomely expensive, and awesomely power-hungry, but anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember SunOS on the Sun386i. It was the first usable x86 based GUI (Sunview) or X Window system way back in 1988 that ran DOS and later Windows 3.x in virtual windows. Back then there was no usable MS Windows or SPARC yet.
When Sun announced SPARC in 1989 and put all their "wood behind a one arrowhead" with Solaris 2 we moved on. Solaris 2 was real POS for the first 7 years.
By the mid-90s there were the various BSDs and stable Linux. It was cheaper/faster/better to use x86 hardware except for corner cas
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I know, AIX and macOS are the only actively-developed certified commercial UNIX operating systems left.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
SPARC *is* open and Fujitsu (formerly HAL) also designs high-end SPARC processors. There are several vendors of low end SPARC systems for space and military applications. Heck even the Russians have a SPARC CPU clone.
Re: (Score:2)
making the whole thing cost effective would have gone a long way. because then it would have been good business.
Re: (Score:2)