From the press release: “Sun Microsystems has embraced the Linux operating system, rolling out a multipart program that will significantly broaden the offerings of Linux on low-end Sun servers and commit new resources to the ongoing development of the Open Source operating system.” Our Take: I am very concerned as to what this may mean for Solaris. Was this the real reason behind the Sun decision to drop support for the x86 Solaris? Did Sun took marketing/strategy lessons from IBM regarding Linux and its accompanied hype? Because technically speaking, Solaris is a far more advanced server operating system (in its core) than Linux is.
Sun Broadens Support for Linux
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I always dreamed about buying a cool looking sun system that ran linux. Perhaps now I will.
” Because technically speaking, Solaris is a far more
advanced server operating system (in its core) than Linux is. ”
Could you list the things that are better in solaris?
I would like to know the details since I have never used solaris.
Solaris scales. If you have servers (please check the article, I am talking about servers) and you got more than 4 CPUs in them, you get much better performance. The Solaris SMP scaling and memory handling is legendary. Linux.. Linux still has 3 VMs and they are still finghting in the mailing list as to whom hacker’s VM will be the default one. And poor SMP. With the new SMPng on FreeBSD 5, even FreeBSD will scale better than Linux on SMP.
And this is just one of the reasons why Solaris is better than Linux as a *server*.
I know I can probably get this answer from Sun’s website, but for the sake of conversation, what filesystem does Solaris use? And would this be an area where Solaris has an advantage over Linux?
because of the GPL sun can rewrite as much of linux as it wants… look at the stuff SGI is putting into the kernel. all these paid programmers (IBM,sun,SGI,etc…) can put all the good features from solaris into linux. they cant with BSD because the freebsd system requires a “commit bit” which might be hard to get.
linux with the new locking patches scales really well (so i have heard) so as long as the petty VM issues get sorted (and sun could sort them easily) linux can move forward again.
linux is what the old unix vendors were looking for: a standard that is non-standard enough for them to easily mold it. i just hope they dont fork as bad as they did last time…
I doubt that Sun will drop Solaris, it is just too good of an OS that has helped Sun Microsystems become legendary in solutions. The OS just plan and simple WORKS! The only problem they can’t seem to shake is backward compatibility sometimes, but it’s not as bad as it seems. It would be ashame to see a great OS like Solaris go away, Sun would be foolish to do that!!!
As far as I’m concerned I think what Sun is doing is very smart. The idea is don’t try to beat them, join them. Both these OSs can be stronger if they work with each other rather then againts.
The VM issue does need to be taken care of though.
hmm Solaris on server or Sun/linux on server? hmm
SGI/linux on workstation instead of IRIX?
hmmm
I’m well aware that when you get to 4+ cpu systems, solaris
is wonderful. Linux has a while before it can do 64 cpu’s.
But large systems are generally being replaced with
clusters of smaller systems. And typically, solaris is rather
insecure (out of the box that is). Solaris does have
advantages over linux, but it’s not like linux doesn’t
have any over solaris.
Sun moving into this direction is rather intelligent and makes
much sense as most of their money comes from
hardware. In fact, people who run linux servers have no
reason to stick to one hardware platform when
another well supported platform is superior/cheaper (I’m
not saying this is currently the case with sun hardware, just
an example of how things could work). They would be able
to use 99% of the same software that they used originally
on the old platform.
I’d personally love to see stuff from solaris open sourced
and merged into linux and/or stuff from linux merged into
Solaris.
As for FreeBSD beating poor linux in smp, well lets not forget that
linux is currently a year ahead and 5.0’s release has been
delayed, linux’s smp is significantly superior to FreeBSD’s
at this point. Of course, linux recently entered the 2.5
development cycle, I doubt the linux developers will
just wait for FreeBSD to catch up to them in smp.
OS X does great smp and it’s based on FreeBSD, but then
microkernels were made with SMP in mind. Be’s kernel
is or is somewhat of a microkernel isn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong, I love freebsd, it was my first UNIX,
but lets get our facts straight.
When i comes to code/functionality exchange between unix(type) oses i am curious how caldera does with their open unix platform. The didn’t have much press recently (or i’ve missed it).
Solidify Linux on Intel and Sparc low end servers to compete against Microsoft and keep Solaris 9 on high-end Sparc servers to compete with IBM and HP.
Brilliant! Absolutely Brilliant!
ciao
yc
Other than using Solaris on a multiprocessor system, are there major benefits to Solaris as opposed to Linux? I have used both (well…only the x86 Solaris), and I found no benefit to Solaris at all over Linux. Plus, I could get Linux to run on my desktop so I could become intimate with it and support was easy to find, but Solaris only ran on the server box because CDE is terrible. Plus Linux is free when Solaris for SPARC costs money.
I think if Sun is smart, they’ll have completely merged Solaris into Linux by v 11. Maybe v 11 should even be SunLinux (optimized for the SPARC chip and x86).
“But large systems are generally being replaced with
clusters of smaller systems”
Please don’t say that if you can’t back it up. I hear from lots of places that they are replacing small farms with a big E10k or an IBM z.
T Ly,
Solaris uses the Solaris Unix File System (Solaris UFS)
It supports lots of RAID options and redundancy.
It is rock solid and comes back after switching it off without a shutdown.
CDE is great, this is a server OS not a damn toy/desktop OS. But you could run KDE instead.
Why not Open Source it?
Hiryu’s comment that Solaris is insecure out of the box is true. But I don’t know of a single system that is secure out of the box! There is Sun’s Trusted Solaris system that is far more secure, but you have to set it up to Sun’s specs. I am running 16 Sun sparc servers, and have yet to have any security problems (as long as you keep them patched). Hiryu is also right that linux has some advantages over Solaris, but most of these can be added with little or no problem. Solaris (being Unix) can run open source stuff with next to no problem. The best thing that Sun can do in my book is to address the first point about security out of the box and not have every piece of software loaded on install! Yes, I know that Solaris has install options, but I find them limiting.
“Linux still has 3 VMs and they are still finghting in the mailing list as to whom hacker’s VM will be the default one. ”
Two, actually – RMAP (Rik van Riels) and AA (Andrea Archangelis). Both approach VM in different ways and both have their advantages and disadvantages. Having different designs battle it out ensures that in the end we get the best possible set of algorithms. VM in 2.4 is now very stable.
“And poor SMP.”
Linux’s SMP isn’t poor. It’s not fantastic – certainly not as good as Solaris or AIX, for example. It’s two generations better than FreeBSD though. Lets not forget that 2.5 will eliminate the last remaining bottleneck – the scheduler and with 2.6/3.0 is due out in approximately the same timeframe as FreeBSD 5.0 I wouldn’t get too excited about the latter.
“OS X does great smp”
Does it? I don’t see how you can possibly make that statement given that there are no >2 way SMP OSX boxes.
OpenBSD is pretty secure with the default install, NetBSD
ain’t too bad either, Debian’s default install is quite secure,
mostly because it’s so ridiculously minimal.
I think there are more advantages to Linux over Solaris than
just software. At least for x86, solaris is very resource hungry,
at least when it comes to ram. I ran solaris with 64 megs
of ram with dual pentium II 350’s, then I sold a cpu (for
money to buy my current dual p3 800eb system) but
added in 128 ram, and the system was more than twice
as fast but with only one cpu! Linux and BSD (which I also
run) benefitted from the added ram, but not nearly so
much and they weren’t as sluggish as solaris prior to the
upgrade.
Another thing that really slows Solaris down is CDE,
there seems to be a lot of people who feel CDE is light
weight, it is lightweight in terms of features and eye
candy, but it’s a slow and bloated peice software. Kde1,
windowmaker, and enlightenment (these are the only
window managers that I’ve personally used with solaris
x86) were all faster than CDE by a long shot.
Course I’m aware Solaris for sparc is certainly better,
But I’m sure at least some of solaris’s flaws transcend
x86 (and every OS does have it’s flaws).
I hope my previous post didn’t mislead
anyone, I like solaris a lot. In fact, I’ve met a lot of people
who don’t, I tend to defend it. I think solaris more than
makes up for it’s short comings.
Oh ya, one more thing about out-of-the-box security,
maybe it’s just me but solaris really doesn’t need all those
rpc services turned on by default… I mean, check out
netstat after a fresh install, your system will be listening on
a lot of sockets. Course, that’s easily fixed, I just don’t think
some things should be enabled by default.
Phil,
Correct about Linux’s smp. Mingo’s new scheduler
is also shaping up nicely, and it appears to support
SMP much better than the old scheduler, I’ve been
using his patches on 4 different smp systems so far,
good stuff.
About OS X’s smp, like I said, microkernel’s were made
with SMP in mind. Dual g4 systems are becoming available
as well. MacOS classic has supported SMP itself for a while
as well (not sure how well though). So I guess I don’t have
definitive proof from apple, but I think my assumption
is pretty safe.
> because CDE is terrible
Then use GNOME or KDE or OpenWin (Yeah, Go OpenWin
or LWM or…
For the first year at UNIX I ran nothing but OpenWin, as I hated CDE, in the 2nd year I ran AmigaWM (but using CDE’s terminal app), and 3rd year I used lwm. It’s just a Desktop Envorment (WM & libs) use which ever you like.
> over Solaris than just software
Sorry, software (in the UNIX world) does not count for much, it’s Not Hard ™ to hit Well Designed UNIX software into any shape of unix.
Not that a great deal of GNU/Linux software is well designed Unix software.
I know at least 3 reasons why Solaris can be a better choice than linux :
-better handling of high memory loads.
-much better development tools (check Rational’s PurifyPlus as an example).
-some applications are only available for Solaris (e.g. some compilers for some exotic embedded architectures).
JBQ
On a desktop machine that you hereby name a server though – which is better? Linux or Solaris?
(say, P4 1.4GHZ, .5G RAM)
but has scrolly bars @ 800×600 (using some else box, they have poor eye sight and need everything “Big”).
On unused office hardware, I say Win2K MooHaHahahah!
solaris is way ahead of linux. it is a shame. just look at the wonderful work done in the documentation for example. this must be a desicion by dumb ass marketing people. all the result of linux. they should adopt a new slogan:
LINUX! taking the IT 20 years back into thedark ages.
You don’t make many intelligent contributions really, do you. You could at least qualify your criticisms.
I rather get the impression you are a Microsoft zealot. Either that or a stout linux-hater.
[QUOTE]like I said, microkernel’s were made
with SMP in mind.[/QUOTE]
Ah, but OSX isn’t a microkernel. It’s broadly based on Mach 2.5 with a few bit’s of Mach 3 thrown in, IIRC. Mach 3 proper is an MK, 2.5 isn’t. OSX is decidedly ‘monlithic’ in the same way Linux is (loadable kernel modules, significant infrastructure in userspace).
One of the biggest issues with OSX and SMP is the BSD server – this is still pretty much held in a global lock (although certain bits are ‘funneled’). As most of OSX’s unix functionality comes from this BSD server, I think it might have a impact on scalability. Having said that, you might be right and I might be wrong – OSX could scale wonderfully.
Hiya
To add some more:
Solaris allows kernel patches to be made against a *running* server – the upgrade time is limited to a single reboot.
Solaris (SPARC) supports a 64-bit address space (not sure about max. memory, but I know some servers support up to 64 GB of ram!).
Sun’s development tools have advanced features like parallelising single-threaded source code (does gcc even support precompiled headers yet?).
–Jon
Hiya
Solaris *is* free for up to 8 processor machines. Go to their web page and you can download the latest release.
–Jon
I think Solaris’ source was made availible under some sort of semi open license as well but it’s not there anymore.
have you seen answerbook2??? the documentation subsystem in solaris???? have you seen the installation??? does linux support changing RAM modules without shutting down??? does linux support the advanced features built into the star fire servers???????????????????????????????
can you compare a linux developer to a solaris developer???????
for putting it so well!
“Solaris allows kernel patches to be made against a *running* server – the upgrade time is limited to a single reboot.”
yup.
“Solaris (SPARC) supports a 64-bit address space (not sure about max. memory, but I know some servers support up to 64 GB of ram!).”
oh puhleeze! There’s a 64bit version of Windows for heavens sake. Of course Linux supports 64-bit addressing.
“can you compare a linux developer to a solaris developer”
Yes. Some of the most talented developers in the world work on the Linux kernel (eg. Andrea Archangeli, Alan Cox and Linus himself).
“???????????????????????????????”
Using multiple punctuation marks doesn”””””’t improve the readability of your posts.
I am currently developing a multithreaded free application; which, ideally, I would like to run on Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X. I have had no problems porting to Mac OS X; word on the street is that a Cygwin port works without problem.
The only port that has been giving me a headache is Solaris. I finally got it to compile and run on Solaris; I found out the hard way that threaded networking applications need /dev/udp, /dev/tcp, and /dev/zero in a chroot() jail in order to function properly. This is, as far as I can tell, documented nowhere in the Solaris documentation.
Even after doing all this, my application crashes mysteriously trying to spawn a thread after spawning 500-1000 threads. Since my application needs to run in a chroot() jail for security reasons, I can not generate a proper core dump to find out where the application is blowing up.
At this point, I am seriously dropping Solaris support for the 1.0 release of the application; dealing with Solaris issues is slowing down development too much.
Sun’s UNIX variants have always been nortorious for being a pain to port to; it is distressing to see that Sun has not gotten much better in this respect.
Yes, I agree that Solaris scales better for high-end server tasks (which 1-2% of companies realistically need to use); and, more importantly, the documentation is better than the Linux documentation. However, Solaris has given me nothing but a headache in terms of software development.
– Sam
how cum linux doesn’t adapt modern design concepts like a microkernel or an exokernel? how come it is always a rewrite of something else with all the extra and needless layers?
Matt: actually if Sun wants to do commercial work on the kernel the BSD license is far friendlier than the GPL. With the BSD license anyone can come out with their own version and sell and give it away without even producing source. Under GPL any improvements Sun makes and distributes they would also have to give source code and all of their competitors free and commercial get their work for free. Moreover, Mr. Torvalds had been the hub of all kernal changes in Linux where there is no central figure like that in BSD. Sun actually used to use BSD unix. All SunOS’s 4.x and earlier were based on BSD UNIX. After a stock swap deal with AT&T Sun painfully dropped BSD and painfully went with SVR4 for Solaris 2.x. Anyone else here remember how awfull Solaris 2.[012] were?
“how cum linux doesn’t adapt modern design concepts like a microkernel or an exokernel?”
Because the core developers don’t see the utility of these aforementioned deisgn concepts as applied to Linux. Perhaps you, in your own words, could explain why Linux would be inherently superior as a MK (we’ll ignore the questionable utility of exokernels for general purpose OS’s)? You might even remember to include all your vowels this time.
“how come it is always a rewrite of something else with all the extra and needless layers?”
Um. It isn’t. Perhaps you’d like to give some examples?
[QUOTE]actually if Sun wants to do commercial work on the kernel the BSD license is far friendlier than the GPL.[/QUOTE]
This would only be true if Sun didn’t want to benefit from collaborative development with the OSS community. If they were to use the BSD license it would give eg. IBM free reign to incorporate elements of Solaris into AIX. The GPL ensures that everyone benefits from developments – if eg. HP makes some imporvements to the scalability of Linux they have to contribute the code back. Everyone else benefits from the code and HP benefits from collaborative development.
Some background on my background. I have been an administrator of linux systems for several years. I am employed by a major UNIX vendor (one of the ones above that is not Linux) doing kernel work.
Linux is great on a uniprocessor. It’s relative openness and available software are wonderful. I like to use it. I would not use it for mission critical work. Sun knows this, but will sell it anyway because 1. Not everything sun sells is for mission critial work 2. Customers want to buy it, and even if its stupid Sun wants to take their money
Actually customers are replacing clusters of small systems with big systems as much as vice versa. It’s just easier to administer, plus the system bandwidth is amazing. Buy the right machine for the job.
Some problems with Linux:
– Virtual Memory Manager (ok this is not laughable anymore, but still has a long way to go)
– Filesystem. Admittedly with JFS, XFS, and Reiserfs there are some promising possibilities once they stabalize on linux (JFS,XFS) and get all the features implemented (Reiser). Still, even if you build a good filesystem it is dependent on the kernel for a lot that linux doesn’t provide.
– non preemptable kernel
– Scalability. Really, using Linux on more than a 2 way with threads is a joke. Even if you apply all the good patches for preemptibility, scheduling (which is so fundamentally broken it can only be made better, not good), fine grained locking, etc, etc, etc you can only get up to 6 way and the 6 way is not as good as the commercial UNIXs.
– scheduling grows n^2, ha ha ha
– locks the size of Alaska (big)
– real thread support, not just clone
– stability, reliability, serviceability (my money says if you are running linux 2.4 you are not running a stock kernel, check yourself, Redhat doesn’t)
– NUMA (SGI will rock the world once MIPS builds nice chips again)
– is there a kernel debugger yet?
– terrible scsi subsystem
– no ssa support that I know of
The only thing linux has going for it technically is it has a really nice tcp/ip subsystem. Any other part of the linux kernel was not put down because I got tired of typing, not because it is good.
Linux is for kids, silly faggot!
Nothing more than a toy OS, not great in production and the restrictive GPL (viral) is most certainly not ‘business-friendly’.
“Filesystem. Admittedly with JFS, XFS, and Reiserfs there are some promising possibilities once they stabalize on linux (JFS,XFS) and get all the features implemented (Reiser). Still, even if you build a good filesystem it is dependent on the kernel for a lot that linux doesn’t provide. ”
This makes very little grammatical sense. There are three stable journaling filesystems in widespread use on Linux systems. EXT3, XFS and ReiserFS. All of these address different market needs and all are under active development (XFS will be entering 2.5 shortly).
“non preemptable kernel”
Merged into 2.5. Only of real use on realtime and possibly desktop systems – you do realise that reduced latency generally results in reduced throughput, right?
“you can only get up to 6 way and the 6 way is not as good as the commercial UNIXs.”
Meh. Linux has been booted on 128 processor machines so you need to get your terminology correct. The amount of scalability you get depends entirely on the workload. As 2.5 now has a completely new scheduler which offers almost linear scaling (within the restrictions of the target architecture) this point is moot.
“scheduling grows n^2, ha ha ha”
Not any more.
“locks the size of Alaska (big)”
Hardly. BKL is being eliminated in 2.5 and is extremely infrequently invoked on 2.4.
“stability, reliability, serviceability (my money says if you are running linux 2.4 you are not running a stock kernel, check yourself, Redhat doesn’t)”
What?
“NUMA (SGI will rock the world once MIPS builds nice chips again) ”
Yup, supported.
“is there a kernel debugger yet?”
Yup. SGI have a rather nice one.
“terrible scsi subsystem”
Has been completely rewritten in 2.5
Oh dear. All your “put downs” are being addressed for the next release. Wanna try again?