“Sun Microsystems announced the Solaris 10 10/09 Operating System. The Solaris 10 OS has been extended with new performance and power efficiency enhancements, more streamlined management of system installations, updates and fixes, new updates for Solaris ZFS and advancements to further leverage the functionality of the latest SPARC and x86 based systems. Solaris 10 10/09 provides new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install manner, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications, including Oracle database and application software.”
preserving full compatibility … including Oracle database and application software.
No kidding.
How considerate.
Since everybody seems to like their kernel, but dislike their userland, maybe it is time for Debian GNU/kSolaris as well? Yes, I know Nexenta, but it would be nicer to see such a thing in a stable project such as Debian.
OpenSolaris has much of GNU userland. And also Solaris 10 userland. You just have to set your path.
But there are things missing from the default install of OpenSolaris that stops one from being able to download and compile applications; worse still the fact that Sun still include GCC 3.4 with OpenSolaris. Come on guys, get with the programme – I expect at least 4.4.x to be included already! Almost as bad as Xorg on Solaris with mountains of legacy crap still being kept around in OpenSolaris.
Many things are available as IPS packages. For instance gcc 4.4 or 4.3 – can not remember. To me, it doesnt matter if they come bundled or if you have to IPS download.
The problem is that most of open source applications are written for non-POSIX compliant operating systems like Linux. This way the code usually won’t compile without additional effort.
… not even close. Try again.
Umm… yeah. Thank you for constructive and educated reply.
Uh…retard much?
Linux is the *MOST* POSIX-compliant environment out there.
I think that’s possibly the worst excuse I have ever seen for the poor and outdated state of Solaris’s userland. There is no evidence at all for trying to label Linux systems and the GNU-based userland as problematically non-POSIX compliant as regards availability of popular userland software.
This is interesting. I have heard from several old solaris sysadmins that Linux is non posix compliant, and therefore there are problems porting Linux software. Some people say this is not true. That Linux is posix compliant. That Linux software is correctly written.
OTOH there are old solaris sysadmins stating the opposite, that Linux code is a mess written by amateurs, that Linux does not follow true Unix traditions and instead follows GNU. That even old Solaris code is portable, while Linux code is very often not portable.
So what is true? Can anyone shed some light on this? I think the best would be to ask old sysadmins on AIX, Solaris and HP-UX. But are there any such sysadmins here? I dont have knowledge on this, myself. Would be interesting to hear more on this.
The toolchain and basic userland are highly portable. OpenSolaris is a testimony of this. There are few GNUism’s here and there, but every large codebase contains similar things.
But when the talk turns about “Linux software” in general, the picture is not so bright. Increasingly open source software is written only and only for Linux. This is especially true with desktop-related software and different, often hardware-related, abstraction layers, IMO. Porting of these is often impossible without creeping adaption of the system to match Linux.
Long gone are the shiny days of open source and free software when it was a personal ambition to get your software running on everything from Linux to AIX.
EDIT: spelling.
Edited 2009-10-13 18:15 UTC
The biggest problem with compatibility is compiler and library implementation (glibc et al) pitfalls – or kernel specific stuff obviously. It always has been, even when POSIX compliance was supposedly all the rage in the 80s and 90s. We still got a ton of incompatible software then, which is why people talked about a ‘fragmented’ Unix world.
Still, things are a lot better now than they were then. The BSDs seem to have no trouble porting over a great deal of open source software that was probably originally written on a Linux based platform, but that’s probably because they’re largely using the GNU toolchain. Still, it shows that portability on a practical basis has definitely improved.
The only thing that Solaris/OpenSolaris seems to lack is the manpower to port more updated software.
Edited 2009-10-13 21:31 UTC
Outdated according to what? Solaris’ userland is perfectly up to date with whatever Unix standard there is. If it weren’t it wouldn’t be certified. On the other hand, gnu coreutils are non-standard and sometimes broken (tar). Top was for example measured to be 10 times less effective than prstat (I know that it’s usually not an issue.) ls -v doesn’t work… To be fair, Sun really has room to improve some command line options, I would welcome -[cma]min and -iname for ‘find’ and -R for ‘grep’ for example. It shouldn’t require much work, so shame on them for being lazy
There actually is strong evidence of incompliance. For userland example I recall that tar -I doesn’t work. More importatnt for system calls and library functions I stumbled upon union semun, which is used with semctl. It has one extra entry and even the man page states that it’s Linux specific. These are just things that come to mind without extra research and I’m not a programmer. I’m pretty sure there must be plenty of other differences that experienced Unix/C programmer would reveal for us.
ls -v should work with all versions of Opensolaris post build 116 (2009.06 is based on build 111b) they added in a large subset of the gnu extensions to ls.
http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/PSARC/2009/228/
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/116-120/
While you expect newer packages, SUN expects and maintans full backwards compatibility, something that Linux totally lacks.
Install a new package of something and you can break lots of software.
Yeah, i know that there are dependency checks and so on, but most of the time you only wish to upgrade one package and not 45.
That’s great, but it misses many scientific packages, I like APT far more than IPS, and I like the Debian way of handling things better. What’s wrong with having the familiar Debian environment with a Solaris kernel? And if you like that environment, why switch to something very different? I have no interest in OpenSolaris, but having the OpenSolaris kernel on Debian would be nice for e.g. DTrace.
Mix and match!
Edited 2009-10-10 13:57 UTC
Then try nexenta, problem solved.
I do love how OpenSolaris handles upgrades and patches. I doubt Debian or any other OS handles it better.
If I do a patch or upgrade, then a snapshot will automatically be created – called Boot Environment, BE. In GRUB, all BE will be listed so I can choose which BE I want to boot into. If the patch breaks something, I just reboot into an earlier BE.
This is due to ZFS. Snapshots writes all new data on a new place on the hard drive, and all old data are still left intact. No changes occurs on the old data, they are only read from. This makes it possible for a fail safe rollback. You can destroy the BE and the system will look exactly as before the BE. Every single bit will be the same.
This allows you to have several different branches. One stable branch with lots of different BE. Another unstable branch where you try different things. If you delete the kernel by accident, you just boot into an earlier BE in GRUB. True versioning of the entire system, on bit level.
It has happened that a upgrade to a new build of OpenSolaris has broke something. What do you do, if you make a large upgrade on Linux and something breaks? How do you rollback? Reinstall everything? I just boot into the earlier BE and destroy the new failed BE, and I am exactly in the same state as before the upgrade.
It is fail safe to upgrade and patch with OpenSolaris. Therefore, I doubt that Debian or any other OS has better ways of handling things than IPS.
And this works very fast and quick too. Sometimes you read about a tech, that sounds good but in practice it is too cumbersome to be used. Not so with BE. Once you try BE you never want to go back.
http://www.nexenta.org/os/TransactionalZFSUpgrades
Solaris 10 is a server platform designed for industry not for Windows/Linux Desktop Distro Userland.
sure would be nice if they would bring back support for the older sparc32 especially sun4m
They would make perfectly good home severs for people on a budget for people that still have theirs (I mean seriously who wouldn’t want a home server that sounds like a jet plane 🙂 ….unless you are running the quieter barracudas.. )
I think the OS of choice on them at the moment is OpenBSD assuming they get SMP working
I wonder how similar the BSD and Solaris kernel code is
Edited 2009-10-10 16:46 UTC
I believe the kernels are quite diferent
SunOS was BSD but Solaris is System V. So don’t believe they are so that alike
the source code is there, nothing is stopping you from modifying the kernel to support sun4m processors
Although for those machines, netbsd may be a more fitting match.
NetBSD runs perfectly on my quad-CPU SS20, with SMP. 🙂
Edited 2009-10-11 08:17 UTC
http://www.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/faq.html#smp-cpus
So that FAQ isn’t relevant for -current anymore or are you running 4.x?