"Don't expect to see key features of OpenSolaris showing up in the Linux kernel," said a top Linux maintainer. At his LinuxWorld opening keynote, Andrew Morton made it very clear that the appointment of former OSDL CTO and Debian co-founder Ian Murdock to Sun's OS platforms organization will not translate into a merging between the open source version of Solaris Unix with Linux. He didn't mince words. "It's a great shame that OpenSolaris still exists. They should have killed it," said Morton, addressing one attendee's question about the possibility of Solaris' most notable features being integrated into the kernel. "It's a disappointment and a mistake by Sun." Morton said none of those features - Zones, ZFS, DTrace - will end up in the Linux kernel because Sun refuses to adopt the GPL.
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Member since:2005-11-12
Member since:2006-08-01
Member since:2006-01-19
Linux killed Irix.
Linux killed SCO.
Linux killed Dec-Unix.
Well... (Open)Solaris is not yet killed.
I disagree. Itanium killed Irix, the HP merger killed Tru64, and plain market forces killed SCO*. I think that all three were killed by the general movement of comoditization of platforms, which they resisted much harder than some competitors. All three were ailing long before Linux was taken seriously in enterprise IT, and all three were backed by bad business plans.
* Actually, SCO is not EOL'd as far as I know. But I doubt they sell to any new accounts.
Anyway, this Morton thing, if it is true, sounds like a classic case of throwing his toys out of the pram on account of someone having the temerity to compete with him.
Member since:2005-12-13
Not when the competition sports features that Linux doesn't have and won't have for foreseeable time, apparently ....
This is sad since both projects have their own objectives... Morgan might as well start dumping on the idea of different distos since that might lead to confusion which in turn might make people choose something 'not Linux' for their particular use....
Andrew - grow up, will you?
Member since:2005-07-06
Linux has these things already.
Zones... Linux has had UML for a LONG time which does the same thing (run multiple copies of the same system image), plus XEN, and KVM virtualization capabilites built in. Solaris is the one lacking here.
DTrace.. Linux has SystemTap, which is 90% of what DTrace is and very young and getting better fast
ZFS - big deal a filesystem plus a volume manager built in... welcome to the 90's solaris. Most of us have had REAL LVM's for a while now, while sun has made us suffer with the peice of junk SDM for a long time or forced us to purchase the expensive vxvm product for something that should have been built in from the start. ZFS still has many stability issues, cant be used for boot...Linux already has high quality filesystems, and a more than production/enterprise ready LVM built in....Again, its solaris that is playing catch up.
Member since:2006-01-19
Linux has these things already.
(snip)
ZFS - big deal a filesystem plus a volume manager built in... welcome to the 90's solaris. Most of us have had REAL LVM's for a while now, while sun has made us suffer with the peice of junk SDM for a long time or forced us to purchase the expensive vxvm product for something that should have been built in from the start. ZFS still has many stability issues, cant be used for boot...Linux already has high quality filesystems, and a more than production/enterprise ready LVM built in....Again, its solaris that is playing catch up.
What don't you like about SVM? There is nothing particularly special about it, but I have always found that it does the job. Actually, I have always liked that Sun did not bundle Veritas FS or VM, because it provided choice. Most other UNIXs of the era (HP-UX for sure, IRIX and Tru64 I think) licensed expensive third party VM code which you had to pay for whether you needed it or not.
Anyway, as long as the Linux folks keep sticking to "We already have feature X, so shut up about it" while paying no attention when the competition is actually innovating, I think Sun has a chance of turning the tide. It's almost too late, but not quite.
Member since:2006-04-30
Member since:2007-08-04
Linux has these things already.
No it doesn't.
DTrace.. Linux has SystemTap, which is 90% of what DTrace is and very young and getting better fast
SystemTap is not 90% of what DTrace is. DTrace can dynamically instrument the entire software stack, which includes languages such as Java. SystemTap can't. DTrace can trace during bootup - great for debugging drivers. SystemTap can't. DTrace is also safe for production use and has been used in production for over two years... For other details for comparison, google DTrace.
Where did your value of 90% come from?
SystemTap ... and very young and getting better fast
Firstly, "getting better fast" - I could comment, but it may be best to let the SystemTap engineers to speak for themselves (and please post some release dates while you are at it :-).
As for "very young"... Is this some romantic Linux fantasy, where the courageous Linux developer defeats the Mighty Evil Corporate by trumping their product in a shorter time frame? Well, SystemTap has already missed the boat for that one.
The real story goes like this,
DTrace began work in October 2001, and was integrated into Solaris in September 2003, with the first customer access a couple of months later. That's 24 months. As far as we know, SystemTap began work in January 2005. It is now August 2007, 32 months later, and it still under development.
DTrace was written by 3 kernel engineers. I don't know how many engineers work on SystemTap, but when Mike Mason (SystemTap developer) was asked this question at LinuxWorld yesterday - his answer was unclear, mentioning 4 or 5 at one company, 4 at another, and trailing off. It sounds like there are about 10.
Team DTrace delivered a product with fewer engineers in a shorter timeframe, and they invented it.
If you want to point out other cool things about SystemTap, that are actually factual, then great.
Member since:2005-07-07
Zones... Linux has had UML for a LONG time which does the same thing (run multiple copies of the same system image), plus XEN, and KVM virtualization capabilites built in. Solaris is the one lacking here.
Sun has virtualization that supports advanced RAS features on thier smallest 2U systems the T2000 that Xen and Linux don't support.
http://blogs.sun.com/narayan/entry/ldoms_virtual_io_failover
Linux KVM and Xen's Dom0 have a single point of failure which brings all the virtual machines down. With LDoms the primary domain or I/O service domain can crash and the guest VMs will pause till the service comes back up or like the demo in the blog shows with IPMP and fail over you can have uinterrupted service.
Member since:
2006-03-06
I wouldn't mind seeing zones, dtrace, and zfs showing up in the linux world. I am surprised to see Andrew say that they should kill OpenSolaris...isn't competition a good thing?