Long-term strategy overhaul may alter SuSE relationship: “I guess we’re a little bit disappointed with SuSE’s performance in the marketplace,” said Schwartz. Asked if Sun would revive its own Sun Linux distribution that it discontinued last year, Schwartz said, “That’s an interesting question.“
Sun May Change Linux Desktop Platform
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I doubt that this is a technical issue – but a political one with Novell (and IBM) taking over SuSE.
What exactly does that mean ? I read the entire Article but wasn’t able to figure out what the changes would look like.
They’re going to use Solaris 10, x86. They’re scrambling to get desktop support shored up.
What is needed is some sort of ELF (Engineer Liberation Front) to barnstorm the Sun Micro complexes and set the engineers free and into the wild.
Dear God, how could this company have spawned Java and Solaris? In a former life, I dealt with Sun Micro quite heavily and had deep respect, but it has long since evaporated.
I’ve seen stray dogs with a better sense of direction and destination.
They have no credible claims against SuSE; just more Sun whining about their own pathetic business process execution.
Did someone say execution?
Kindly don’t liberate us; we think we’re doing just fine, thank you. Speaking only for Solaris, we think that we’ve got some really interesting innovation in the pipe. See the Ace’s Hardware story at http://www.aceshardware.com/read_news.jsp?id=75000449 for details.
“Customers don’t really care about what the kernel is on the desktop as much as they do on the server,”
Wrong. One of the prerequisites for Linux on the desktop is a smooth running kernel that support all sorts of devices that a server need not support. 2.4 to 2.6 was a big leap in that direction. As a server you can always add one more box to up performance.
Maybe in the end there’ll be 2 major suppliers of commercial desktop distro’s – Novell and SUN. And Fedora for those that do not need at commercial distro. IBM does not appear to want to get really involved.
I like it, I hope they leave the OS alone, nothing is wrong with it, my homepage is in the link now instead of my email.
They’re going to use Solaris 10, x86. They’re scrambling to get desktop support shored up.
Do you have any sort of source on this?
Solaris is far from an ideal desktop operating system. It has been heavily optimized for throughput with no care given towards latency. Consequently, for interactive purposes Solaris is rather sluggish, especially if there are background processes consuming most of the available system resources.
i’ve worried about the same for linux trying to scale higher.. would desktop performance be better if there was a fork created that aimed exclusively for 1 (and perhaps 2???) processor systems since thats what most desktops are??
how can gnome become the standard UI… i thought part of posix/unix standard was that CDE *HAD* to be the default?
> “Fire Engine” TCP/IP stack
Any hard numbers wrt Linux 2.6 network stack would be *very* nice.
Good luck!
Not necessarily. Two of the most important things that affect interactivity is the scheduler and the I/O system. If it takes too long for interactive tasks to get scheduled, then the user will notice. If I/O takes too long, or freezes the system, then the user will notice. What you can do is have swappable process and I/O scheduling policies. Already, Linux 2.6 supports pluggable I/O schedulers. Reportedly, the anticipatory I/O scheduler is better for throughput, while the CFQ I/O scheduler is better for interactive use. Doing things this way saves a lot of effort maintaining a seperate fork.
That was quite well stated, I couldn’t agree more. And Sun is only reconsidering SUSE becasue it’s now owned by Novel. They don’t want to base stratagy on a product produced by Novel. In the face of the smoke and mirrors from Sun, many people are just moving to Dell servers with Red Hat.
I like KDE, Gnome is ugily I saw a shot, it was on Ximains’ site.
You can theme Gnome to look really nice, by the other hand KDE is ugly even themed.
i’ve worried about the same for linux trying to scale higher.. would desktop performance be better if there was a fork created that aimed exclusively for 1 (and perhaps 2???) processor systems since thats what most desktops are??
Linux has been heavily optimized for desktop use. If anything, Linux has included optimizations which have hurt the overall throughput of the operating for the sake of lower latency. Certainly many of these options are configurable at kernel compile time, but doing my own Linux vs. FreeBSD vs. Solaris tests with dbench (on x86 even), Linux has consistently been the throughput loser and Solaris the winner.
“Customers don’t really care about what the kernel is on the desktop as much as they do on the server. Wrong.”
I don’t agree with your objection. Most corporate users have no Idea what a kernel is, or even what it does for that matter. What they do care about is being able to surf the web, write reports/emails and look at pictures (family friendly)…
The bits you mentioned as important such as drivers… are not important to the corporate desktop users as they typically do not have permissions to change them anyway – thats the IT guys job as is ensuring that the system works before the end user gets ahold of it and gets the chance to complain about a missing driver;)
Sun shouldn’t let the 2.6 kernel go to waste. Maybe they shouldn’t use SUSE, but Solaris isn’t going to work well. It would be better to improve Linux because Linux is on a roll. Solaris will never have the steam to compete against Linux, so just focus on Linux and don’t ignore the home user. Sun is positioned to deliver services to the East and Europe. They could possibly be the most successful Linux company, but I doubt that Linux users want to know or hear about Solaris (at least not in it’s current state).
Solaris has had multiple schedulers for quite some time. I believe that this also includes a “real time” scheduler and UI oriented, low latency, schedulers.
SUN needs to make up their minds. They change with direction of the wind. Doesn’t anyone in the company have the spine to make decisions and stick with them? To many wet noodles running the company.
That’s typical of Sun, “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas man.” Would someone just please put Sun out of its misery?
Solaris has had multiple schedulers for quite some time. I believe that this also includes a “real time” scheduler and UI oriented, low latency, schedulers.
The two real notable schedulers are the TS timeshare scheduler, an O(1) scheduler designed to calculate and allocate time slices to processes on demand, and the FSS Fair Share Scheduler, designed to permanently partition system resources. As far as I know Solaris has no “UI oriented, low latency” scheduler.
> Linux has consistently been the throughput loser and Solaris the winner.
Just out of curiosity, what throughput? Network / FS? Can you try something like lmbench?
What application or benchmark? Did you try them on the same box? Which OS versions? Thanks.
And you might want to read this, there’s four sched classes in the Solaris kernel, including an interactive class:
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/THREADexec/
Or else:
#dispadmin -l
to see a list of sched classes
The two real notable schedulers are the TS timeshare scheduler, an O(1) scheduler designed to calculate and allocate time slices to processes on demand, and the FSS Fair Share Scheduler, designed to permanently partition system resources. As far as I know Solaris has no “UI oriented, low latency” scheduler.
It does indeed; from the priocntl(1) man page:
Inter-Active Class
The inter-active scheduling policy provides for a fair and
effective allocation of the CPU resource among processes
with varying CPU consumption characteristics while providing
good responsiveness for user interaction. The objectives of
the inter-active policy are to provide good response time to
interactive processes and good throughput to CPU-bound jobs.
The priorities of processes in the inter-active class can be
changed in the same manner as those in the time-sharing
class, though the modified priorities will continue to be
adjusted to provide good responsiveness for user interac-
tion.
Always helps to read the documentation before mouthing off…
You should post more often
I do hope that they do bring Solaris 10 x86 up to par with their SPARC version of Solaris. Solaris is superior to Linux and if SUN can get it up to desktop quality, Solaris has the potential to blow Linux out of the water.
“I guess we’re a little bit disappointed with SuSE’s performance in the marketplace,” said Schwartz. Asked if Sun would revive its own Sun Linux distribution that it discontinued last year, Schwartz said, “That’s an interesting question.”
get over it. Novell has a plan which seems to be working.on the other hand Sun is confused.
“I do hope that they do bring Solaris 10 x86 up to par with their SPARC version of Solaris. Solaris is superior to Linux and if SUN can get it up to desktop quality, Solaris has the potential to blow Linux out of the water.”
Premise
“Solaris is superior to Linux”
Excuse me, great arguments. I immediately got convinced.
If Sun’s customers want “Linux”, I still don’t see why Sun doesn’t just take Solaris on SPARC, replace CDE with Gnome, sprinkle in the necessary GNU utilities, and then say “here ya’ go!
“. All the stability and scalability of Solaris, all the user friendliness of Gnome, and all the down-home baked-in goodness of SPARC.
As far as I understand, it’s a driver issue: since on the desktop, Sun would not be in control of the hardware side of the story, they mu make sure as many x86 desktops are supported as possible. Solaris x86 doesn’t have all the drivers Linux has.
I think Novell shouldn’t try to piss off Sun too much: Sun is still one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) contributor to Gnome. Which was, IMHO, a BF mistake. Sun should have contributed to KDE, as it’s much better and ultimately, it has god Karma associated with it. Gnome has De Icaza and GTK+.
As far as I understand, it’s a driver issue: since on the desktop, Sun would not be in control of the hardware side of the story, they mu make sure as many x86 desktops are supported as possible. Solaris x86 doesn’t have all the drivers Linux has.
Huh? I was making the point that they should stick with Solaris on *SPARC* for the desktop. Sun is a hardware company. When their customers say they want reliable and supported “x86 Linux” on the corporate desktop, Sun should say, “You want reliable and supported “Linux”? Here’s Solaris with Gnome. Can you tell the difference between this and Linux? You want x86? Why? We’ll sell you Sun Blades instead, they’re more reliable, slightly more expensive (and worth it), and that’s what we support.”
Sun just needs the cajones to stand behind the products that have brought them success all these years: Solaris on their own SPARC hardware.
If Sun’s customers want “Linux”, I still don’t see why Sun doesn’t just take Solaris on SPARC, replace CDE with Gnome, sprinkle in the necessary GNU utilities, and then say “here ya’ go!
“. All the stability and scalability of Solaris, all the user friendliness of Gnome, and all the down-home baked-in goodness of SPARC.
This is a great question really! I’ve asked myself the same several times. Solaris is known for quality that not many others can compete with (including Linux).
However, if they could get Solaris with gnome by default on x86 without driver hazzle that’d be interesting too.
Many people just want what is best and would go for Solaris and just dig Linux etc, so there’s definitely a market for Sun here…
They have no credible claims against SuSE; just more Sun whining about their own pathetic business process execution.
Could you please explain to me that bit of tautology.
“Customers don’t really care about what the kernel is on the desktop as much as they do on the server,”
Wrong. One of the prerequisites for Linux on the desktop is a smooth running kernel that support all sorts of devices that a server need not support. 2.4 to 2.6 was a big leap in that direction. As a server you can always add one more box to up performance.
Read the blasted thing again. The user DOESN’T CARE if it is Solaris or Linux, what they CARE about is, as you said, device support. That isn’t a kernel unique feature. If Solaris provided the SAME hardware support, would the user specifically ask for Linux over Solaris? nope, they couldn’t give a flying continental. If they can run their JDS along with Evolution and StarOffice, they’re as happy as Larry.
i’ve worried about the same for linux trying to scale higher.. would desktop performance be better if there was a fork created that aimed exclusively for 1 (and perhaps 2???) processor systems since thats what most desktops are??
FreeBSD is going through the same questions regarding fine graining and possible responsiveness hit.
IMHO, I really don’t understand why there is a fixation of Linux on the server, in all honesty, the thing that is intereting, and even Linus said this, is the desktop. That is the interesting thing. The server is alright well catered for the desktop is still held hostage by Microsoft. Wouldn’t it be best to concerntrate on developing a REALLY good kernel for the desktop?
how can gnome become the standard UI… i thought part of posix/unix standard was that CDE *HAD* to be the default?
Nope. I think the only requirement is Motif support. IRIX for example has its main desktop as Indego Magic by default but CDE is there for those who want it. Same goes for a few other UNIX’s. I don’t have the exact specifications, however I think the main thing is Motif support.
As far as I understand, it’s a driver issue: since on the desktop, Sun would not be in control of the hardware side of the story, they mu make sure as many x86 desktops are supported as possible. Solaris x86 doesn’t have all the drivers Linux has.
True, however, I have heard from a friend at sun that Solaris 10 may include a driver portability kit for Linux which will make porting Linux drivers to Solaris much easier and possibly one that will allow Linux binary drivers to run.
Now, Crossover Office would be the perfect thing and the desktop for me would be complete
I have heard from a friend at sun that Solaris 10 may include a driver portability kit for Linux which will make porting Linux drivers to Solaris much easier and possibly one that will allow Linux binary drivers to run.
A driver port kit for Linux–>Solaris already exists, but the problem with it is that, AFAIK, it can’t be used to create and then distribute these drivers, because of the GPL, which doesn’t allow for mixing of GPL and non-GPL code. You could only use it to make drivers for yourself, in-house.
However, if Linux drivers could run natively on Solaris, that would probably be a different cup of tea completely.
Boy I tell you what. Sun is a company in trouble. They just have no clue whatsoever what direction they want/need to go in. I’m really getting irritated with their “play both sides of the Linux fence”. One day they are a Linux company, the next day they aren’t etc. Novell jumped full into Linux and has more than proven what their new commitments are and will be, yet Sun sits there and preaches their new Linux distro one minute, then claims that if SCO backs off their Linux battle Sun will pick up where they left off. WTF!!?!?! Goodbye Sun, it was fun.
This interview seems to me to have been entirely taken out of context. I highly doubt that it went down the way it’s been portrayed.