Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 66 is now available via ‘pkg update’ from the support repository or by downloading the SRU from My Oracle Support Doc ID 2433412.1. Highlights of the changes in this release are given in the release announcement and important information to read before installing it is provided in the Readme linked from the above support document. This blog post provides more details about selected new features and interface changes in this SRU, as well as some preparation work for changes coming in future SRUs.
↫ Alan Coopersmith and Jan Pechanec
Oracle is still developing Solaris. I still find it very difficult to care after Oracle’s bullshittery.
Yup. Oracle taking something open and interesting via OpenSolaris and immediately stuffing it back into a commercial product box made it unattractive for use in… pretty much anything.
They did the same thing to Sparc as well… it positioned itself like Power but they failed to do that.
kallisti5,
Agreed. I had a significant interest in OpenSolaris, but like Java, I have moved off from these technologies for more open, or at least more consistent ones. (I would prefer Microsoft over Oracle for example).
I don’t know if I would call things like this continued development of an operating system, it seems like its basically in maintenance mode. The release notes don’t list a single new feature, just updates of packages. Solaris 12 has been cancelled, so it really looks like an enterprise crutch right now.
A typical Oracle “silent EOL”. They laid lots of employees some years ago so they are presumably down to skeleton staff doing maintenance only: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Oracle-More-ZFS-Solaris-Layoffs
Yeah, from what I heard they are down to low double digits personnel involved in Solaris within Oracle. And SPARC was completely killed.
It blows my mind, I worked at SUN a while back and seeing the SPARC and Sol teams reduced to that trickle feels just bizarre.
About SPARC, I am not surprised. It’s not the best RISC architecture out there: the “register windows” functionality became obsolete by register renaming and advancements in compiler design, and with the recent move to adding more execution units in a core, it’s just wasteful. Ever wondered why all recent SPARC implementations only implement the minimum 3 register windows required by the spec? Now you know: It’s a legacy feature. The three good RISC ISAs (ARM, MIPS and POWER) are still with us to this day one way or another (note: MIPS is still used in media players and such, and POWER in supercomputers). SPARC implementations had no chance at completing either with POWER or with commodity x86-64 CPUs or later with ARM64, so it makes you wonder why Larry Ellison even tried.
About Solaris, it’s sad to see it become legacy, along with IRIX, but GNU/Linux was good enough and where everyone else was, and Larry Ellison couldn’t find a niche for Solaris. Larry Ellison is not someone like Steve Jobs who will chase dream OSes.
Sometimes I wonder what exactly Oracle got from their Sun purchase that they couldn’t do themselves.
(clarification from Gen-Zers: IRIX was an SGI thing, not Sun, but I consider it along with Solaris to be the two major Unixes that went legacy while deserving better)
The register windows ended up being a terrible idea. They ended up making SPARC a very hard architecture to extend into out-of-order. Only Fujitsu managed to ship speculative SPARC64 parts. Whereas SUN literally went bankrupt trying to get one out of the door. Even intel managed to get x86 to do out-of-order before SPARC.
The one thing interesting about SPARC is that it is/was an IEEE standard. So it was an open ISA, which you could basically license very easily. SUN even provided the verilog for some of their cores.
So anyone with an FPGA big enough and some free time can bring up their own SPARC if they want 😉
Oracle’s interest in SUN was simply on keeping SPARC and Solaris supported enough to migrate the Oracle DB users. Since SUN was back then the platform with the largest number of Oracle users.
MIPS is pretty much dead. But for all intents and purposes RISC-V is its spiritual successor as they are both surprisingly similar.
It’s however fascinating how quickly Solaris faded into irrelevance.
> SPARC implementations had no chance at completing either with POWER or with commodity x86-64 CPUs or later with ARM64, so it makes you wonder why Larry Ellison even tried.
His goal was most certainly to milk big corps and administrations using truckloads of legacy software.
I bet it’s been working very well, and that’s why updates keep coming up.
Yes, that was one of Jonathan Schwartz’s gifts to the world: An open-source CPU based on a commercial product (instead of being yet another “look what I made” hobbyist or research thing). Much like OpenOffice was an open-source office suite based on a commercial product (instead of being yet another “look what I made” hobbyist thing). However, unlike OpenOffice, where open-sourcing was a smart way to solicit minor improvements (for a product Sun didn’t have an interest in monetizing anyway), the open-sourcing of UltraSPARC T1 and T2 didn’t bring any meaningful improvement to the product (not many people know how to design hardware and fewer are willing to burn large FPGAs to test the improvements at meaningful speed), so it didn’t help from a business perspective in any way.
Oracle bought Sun to make more money selling Oracle databases. I think they made more than enough money for Larry to be happy with how it worked out. There is a reason they do not kill Solaris even now and I doubt they care if a single new customer ever uses it.
I am curious about Java. I feel like they must have made a boat load of money there but it is hard to be sure.
Oracle Applications is a cash cow and owning Java probably helps with that.
You probably know already, but there is Illumos (of which the OpenIndiana distribution is closest to OpenSolaris). So if you don’t want to use Solaris, there is that.