Sun’s upping the ante against Linux with Solaris 10. First, it will be available free for download, with a pay-for-support model. Also, a feature called Project Janus allows users “to create a virtual container inside Solaris in which they can run Linux applications.”
well, i am not so sure, but doesnt this mean Linux has a very strong competitor now in the server arena? i would definitely consider using it, thinking that Solaris is a more stable and secure OS. am i wrong?
more stable and secure? yes defenently. dont get my wong linux is good but solaris is better. especialy now it can run linux programs easily is a big plus….and free download is always nice……i think linus is not gona stand a chance
“well, i am not so sure, but doesnt this mean Linux has a very strong competitor now in the server arena? i would definitely consider using it, thinking that Solaris is a more stable and secure OS. am i wrong?”
It’s definately more stable and secure–and my recent tests with the Early Access Solaris 10 on x86 suggest that it also performs better than Linux, which was not true of Solaris 8 on x86.
However, the main gotcha you are going to run into with Solaris 10 on x86 is hardware support. So if you are planning to build or buy a server for Solaris x86, choose your hardware very carefully.
Another drawback is that many applications do not have pre-compiled binary packages available for Solaris x86, so you might end up building a lot of stuff from source. http://www.sunfreeware.com has a fairly good selection of Solaris software in Solaris package format though, but for Sparc and x86.
Of course, if you want to set up a Web server with Java application support, this might be a nil problem since your application server, and even your database might very well be written in Java.
One more drawback for Solaris x86: The installation program is absolutely horrible. However, once you have it up and running, I personally think that maintaining a Solaris server is easier than maintaining a Linux server. The patch system and upgrades are easier on Solaris than on Linux.
Yes, I do believe that Solaris is more stable than linux. Free software distributions based on Linux have other merits, however. Ease of use, especially in development, is a huge advantage. Solaris 10 doesn’t signal the end of Linux no more than Fedora core whatever signals the end of Solaris. The tide may change, but neither the ocean or the beach will go away completely.
I have no doubt Solaris is more stable and secure than linux for HA applications (tho I guess linux can be made just as secure and stable with some work), but what about *BSD vs Solaris?
Yanik
Im not trying to be a troll, just hear me out.
i installed solaris 10 on x86 machine, everyhting went fine it detect everything except my network card, no probs as the NIC was on board and i just needed to download from the ASUS website.
The thing that annoyed me is the device conventions ??? why on earth is every device named by its driver ?? how is that easier ? in Linux or BSD(Darwin) if im not mistaken, you have know the nic will be either eth0, eth1…. and so on or en0… en1 and so on. This might sound silly but simple things like this would make solaris even more simpler, i think its just made complicated for know reason.
Snake
Another drawback is that many applications do not have pre-compiled binary packages available for Solaris x86, so you might end up building a lot of stuff from source. http://www.sunfreeware.com has a fairly good selection of Solaris software in Solaris package format though, but for Sparc and x86.
A considerable amount of open source software is available precompiled on the Companion CD.
What I want, what I really really want: stable support for Solaris 64b AND 64b Java on Opteron. Has anybody seen a timetable for the Java part? Supposedly they support x86/64 with Solaris 10, but I haven’t seen a definitive statement.
@Snake – yeah, the netdevice naming scheme does suck. I think it is because they don’t want to rename “hme”, the happy meal driver 🙂
“Sun is done! Solaris is cool, but it’s slow (They don’t call it Slow-laris for nothing), not modular, and doesn’t even come with a compiler!”
See my previous post. Solaris 10 on x86 is MUCH faster than Solaris 8 on x86 was–so much so that it is now faster than Linux.
http://www.blastwave.org/
Has a lot of cool stuff compiled for Solaris.
Also for the doesn’t come with a compiler comment. The companion CD contains all the gnu compilers like gcc. So does http://www.sunfreeware.com.
“A considerable amount of open source software is available precompiled on the Companion CD.”
True. Much of it is rather dated though. However, the companion CD does come with GCC and the GNU make and autoconf utilities. So building most applications from source is pretty much a no-brainer as long as they use GNU autoconf.
The thing that annoyed me is the device conventions ??? why on earth is every device named by its driver ?? how is that easier ? in Linux or BSD(Darwin) if im not mistaken, you have know the nic will be either eth0, eth1…. and so on or en0… en1 and so on. This might sound silly but simple things like this would make solaris even more simpler, i think its just made complicated for know reason.
The Linux approach is terrible (note that FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD function like Solaris). In Linux, network interfaces are enumerated based on the order in which the kernel loads their drivers. Adding a new network card in the system can change all the interface names depending on the order the Linux kernel decides to load the drivers in, and if this is disadvantageous you’re expected to hack around it on the kernel command line or by specifying your own order in which to load the modules.
By giving each driver its own interface name, you can be certain that the only ordering that’s important is the position on the PCI bus of two cards which use the same driver. Adding a new network card will not disturb your existing configuration.
A similar problem occurs with SCSI device enumeration. Adding or removing host controllers or devices on the SCSI chain changes how SCSI devices are enumerated.
For anyone managing systems with large numbers of network interfaces or SCSI devices, the disadvantages of the Linux approach quickly become obvious.
“The thing that annoyed me is the device conventions ??? why on earth is every device named by its driver ??”
If you aren’t sure what the device name for your NIC is, you can get it with ifconfig -a, or by looking at the dmesg output. But yes, I will admit that the Solaris device tree is confusing until you get used to it.
I think perhaps the initial learning curve with Solaris might be higher than with Linux. But long term maintenace is easier. It is easier to install patches and do upgrades, and it is also easier to back out patches if they cause problems and restore the system to the previous state.
See my previous post. Solaris 10 on x86 is MUCH faster than Solaris 8 on x86 was–so much so that it is now faster than Linux.
Faster then which version? That statement is really not relevant because there is no way that Solaris is faster then the Linux kernel it’s self. So you would have to compare it to a distro. So which distro would you be comparing it to?
By the way there are some good arguments for not having a compiler on a production server. After all, chances are you won’t want to build your software on that production server anyway. You will probably want to build it on a development workstation and then deploy it on the server after it is built.
But either way, how hard is it to download and install GCC? It’s a Solaris package, so all you have to do is pkgadd package_name and you are done.
“Faster then which version? That statement is really not relevant because there is no way that Solaris is faster then then Linux kernel it’s self.”
Have you tried Solaris 10? I’m telling you it is MUCH faster than Solaris 8 was.
Here’s a challenge for you. Install Apache on Solaris 10 x86 and also on Fedora. Then do some load tests. I bet the Solaris 10 box will come out ahead–And I almost gurantee it will come out ahead if you do it on a dual processor system. Solaris SMP support is vastly better than Linux SMP support.
“For anyone managing systems with large numbers of network interfaces or SCSI devices, the disadvantages of the Linux approach quickly become obvious”
buddy. udev has solved what you call a problem with persistent naming rules long before. it just parses /sys and you have consistent naming easily…
for everyone claiming solaris faster where is your benchmark?
solaris is still the same old proprietary OS with a pay for updates usage. installation is horrible and drivers are lacking big time.
only thing for solaris is its super integrated with sparc
“Its amazing to see how a; small, slow, buggy, userunfriendly, hippie, communist, crappy, zealot kinda os can change the face
of IT.
”
Well, yes. It can. And the competition is good for those who support Solaris. Without Linux, I doubt Sun would have ever bothered to port Solaris to x86. After all, before Linux, the idea of running a UNIX server on x86 hardware was not taken very seriously by anyone other than SCO. And they never really gained very much mindshare. Linux has pretty much forced Sun to take the cheap x86 platform seriously.
“solaris is still the same old proprietary OS with a pay for updates usage. installation is horrible and drivers are lacking big time.”
Sure. But most business customers buy Linux anyway rather than donwload it for free cause they want the support, etc. And when it comes to businesses who are going to buy Linux, Solaris is significantly cheaper than Red Hat Enterprise.
Here’s a challenge for you. Install Apache on Solaris 10 x86 and also on Fedora. Then do some load tests. I bet the Solaris 10 box will come out ahead–And I almost gurantee it will come out ahead if you do it on a dual processor system. Solaris SMP support is vastly better than Linux SMP support.
Now do that same thing with RedHat enterprise or Suse enterprise. (Since Fedora is not Red Hat’s top of the line Linux version like Solaris is Sun’s)
Remember Sun used to sell this same OS for $2500 per CPU and now it’s free because of Linux.
Just because it’s free remember it is still an enterprise OS. It’s like comparing Windows XP to Windows Server 2003 enterprise and then ask which can handle more hardware. LOL!
Faster then which version? That statement is really not relevant because there is no way that Solaris is faster then the Linux kernel it’s self. So you would have to compare it to a distro. So which distro would you be comparing it to?
The scalability of kernel facilities (i.e. VMM, VFS, schedulers, networking) provided by the Solaris kernel substantially exceeds those provided by the Linux kernel.
In regards to modularity, I’d say Solaris is considerably more flexible. Solaris has modular schedulers which are dynamically loaded and unloaded as you assign processes to them. Processes may be migrated between schedulers on the fly. For example, in addition to the time share scheduler (which was constant time years before Linux 2.6) and the real time scheduler, there’s also the Fair Share Scheduler which lets you assign processes to use a certain number of shares of one or more processes. This is extremely useful on high end servers which can have several dozen processors… you can designate processors on which certain jobs should be run, and the others in the system are left free to be managed by the time share scheduler.
Solaris provides the best of both worlds in regards to throughput and kernel preemption. Portions of the kernel which are impacted negatively by preemption are marked as non-preemption points so as not to impact kernel throughput. On the Linux side of things, this is an all or nothing choice, either preemption is on or off.
In regards to the “Slowaris” moniker, that described previous Solaris/x86 releases. Those of us using it on UltraSPARC III systems certainly would not regard it as slow. The performance of Solaris on AMD64 is almost on par with the SPARC version, and the IA32 support is also substantially improved.
i installed solaris 10 on x86 machine, everyhting went fine it detect everything except my network card, no probs as the NIC was on board and i just needed to download from the ASUS website.
The thing that annoyed me is the device conventions ??? why on earth is every device named by its driver ?? how is that easier ? in Linux or BSD(Darwin) if im not mistaken, you have know the nic will be either eth0, eth1…. and so on or en0… en1 and so on. This might sound silly but simple things like this would make solaris even more simpler, i think its just made complicated for know reason.
Snake
In the BSD world network devices are refered to by their driver name. I always thought the linux way of eth0, 1 etc was odd, I guess it’s just what you’re used to.
How does Solaris 10 and Novell’s SLES 9 compare in terms of price?
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/pricing.html
Does Sun have a pricing scheme for Solaris 10 yet?
“Now do that same thing with RedHat enterprise or Suse enterprise. (Since Fedora is not Red Hat’s top of the line Linux version like Solaris is Sun’s)”
Shouldn’t matter. Same kernel, same TCP/IP stack.
But as I said, if you want to compare Red hat Enterprise to Solaris, now you have to deal with the fact that Solaris is about 1/3 of the cost of Red Hat Enterprise.
It sounds like you haven’t tried any of the Solaris 10 releases. The “Slowlaris” days are long over, and it has come packaged with the same compiler (GCC) that most Linux and BSD distros (and Darwin / Mac OS X, for that matter) come with for quite a few releases now. It’s true they offer an additional “more professional” compiler package as a costly add-on, but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come with any compiler at all.
The new file system is definitely worth checking out. I think a lot of places will be seriously considering changing over for their hosting needs. It’ll be interesting to see if it manages to take a bite out of the MS-Windows hosting market; it’s a heck of a lot better than any of the MS-Windows variants for hosting purposes, and it’s always been cheaper, too. Now it’s a lot cheaper…
By modularity I meant the ability to handle so many more hardware platforms and the ability to make the OS any way you want.
Still with slowlaris you are mostly stuck with what Sun gives you.
Anyway it does matter what we say, we will see what the market says. (Today RedHat’s stock was rated as a buy on the NYSE) Sun hasn’t made a profit in 2 years.
“Red Hat (RHAT:Nasdaq – news – research) got a much-needed boost Monday, when First Albany upgraded shares of the Linux vendor to buy from neutral.
In recent trading, shares were up $1.30, or 11%, to $12.88 on heavy volume, reversing a slide that erased 60% of the company’s share value since early June.
Once a darling of investors who believed that Linux, an open-source operating system, could successfully challenge Microsoft’s (MSFT:Nasdaq – news – research) Windows juggernaut, Red Hat has been beaten up, in part over concerns that a price war with rival Novell (NOVL:Nasdaq – news – research) is killing profitability.
In a note to clients, analyst Mark Murphy said that those concerns are overblown and set a price target of $15 a share. “We believe the tone of business in RHAT’s November quarter supports our targets for subscription volumes and cash flow, potentially setting the stage for RHAT to report record high quarterly cash flow,” he wrote.”
http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/tech/software/10194351.html?cm_ve…
Shouldn’t matter. Same kernel, same TCP/IP stack.
Kernel is compiled for server operations not desktop operations like Fedora.
BTW, the selling points of Red Hat Enterprise are NOT better performance. It’s the same kernel and TCP/IP stack. The selling points are value added features that make deployment on large networks easier. Things such as vastly simplified LDAP and so on.
“Kernel is compiled for server operations not desktop operations like Fedora.”
I never told you had to use a stock kernel. Build your own kernel with all the server optimizations you want. I still say Solaris 10 will beat it, especially on SMP systems.
“n regards to modularity, I’d say Solaris is considerably more flexible. Solaris has modular schedulers which are dynamically loaded and unloaded as you assign processes to them. Processes may be migrated between schedulers on the fly.”
this has been in linux for quite sometime too. read some latest news from kerneltraffic.org and kerneltrap.org
this has been in linux for quite sometime too.
Perhaps you’re thinking of sched_setscheduler(). Rest assured this is not the same thing.
Linux does not implement a Fair Share Scheduler.
” I still say Solaris 10 will beat it, especially on SMP systems. ”
who cares what you say. where is the benchmarks?
“Linux does not implement a Fair Share Scheduler.”
what about cfq 1 and 2 or deadline and others implemented by linux?
“who cares what you say. where is the benchmarks?”
I’m telling you to do your own tests because I know that you won’t accept the validity of a benchmark. After all, look at the Linux vs. Windows tests. Microsoft can produce benchmarks that show Windows 2003 is over 400% faster than Red Hat Enterprise. Red Hat Enterprise can do the same thing. And advocates on both sides will not accept the benchmarks that show their system to be slower.
So do your own tests. YOu can download both products for free and see the results for yourself. And that way you can’t argue with the validty of the benchmarks.
“BTW, the selling points of Red Hat Enterprise are NOT better performance. It’s the same kernel and TCP/IP stac”
performance is a significant selling point in every operating system and redhat el is NOT an exception.
schedulers and other stuff can significant affect performance. not a tcp/ip stack
“m telling you to do your own tests because I know that you won’t accept the validity of a benchmark.”
without even benchmarks to assert your claim I am not going to believe your word. when good scientific benchmarks are published you can talk about performance. till then its all heresay. completely untrustworthy.
“schedulers and other stuff can significant affect performance. not a tcp/ip stack”
When it comes to serving up internet content, the tcp/ip stack has a very significant effect on performance. Linux is still trying to catch up to the Berkeley TCP/IP stack.
Their binary program doesn’t allow you to install it on a amp machine. Did this change with Solaris 10?
” Linux is still trying to catch up to the Berkeley TCP/IP stack.”
not again. other than your opinion where is the relevant information to back your claim?
“without even benchmarks to assert your claim I am not going to believe your word.”
I can provide benchmarks from which I can extrapolate that Solaris is faster than Red Hat Enterprise based on the following:
1. Benchmarks that show Windows Server 2003 is faster than Linux.
2. Benchmarks that show Solaris is faster than Windows Server 2003.
Therefore, Solaris must also be faster than Linux.
However, as I said, you will dispute the benchmarks that show Windows Server 2003 is faster than Linux. So this would be a rather pointless excersise.
“I can provide benchmarks from which I can extrapolate that Solaris is faster than Red Hat Enterprise based on the following:
”
where is YOUR benchmark. come out with something other than just your words
And worse can be improved as well (and marketed, if that’s any important.)
Solaris can be marginally better, but that is temporary or doesn’t matter to most.
People didn’t start using Linux because it was the better OS or the better Unix. With a poor Solaris license they can rest assured that it won’t build momentum. They have to go all the way and set it free and Free.
without even benchmarks to assert your claim I am not going to believe your word. when good scientific benchmarks are published you can talk about performance. till then its all heresay. completely untrustworthy.
Heresay is 3rd party information. I assume Simba has tested his own applications on both Solaris 10 and Linux, and I have as well. I’ve seen considerable performance improvements in applications running on Solaris 10, as have many of Sun’s customers. YMMV.
I don’t have RHEL, so I cannot do this benchmark. I can do it with a custom Fedora kernel that it optimized for server use. But I’m not going to waste my time knowing that you will reject those results is invalid since you would be able to accuse my of not knowing how to properly tune a Linux kernel, etc.
“I don’t have RHEL, so I cannot do this benchmark. I can do it with a custom Fedora kernel that it optimized for server use.”
so you claim solaris is better than rhel without even bothering to test it. great
“Heresay is 3rd party information. I assume Simba has tested his own applications on both Solaris 10 and Linux, ”
its actually worse. simba compared fedora and solaris and claims solaris if faster than rhel.
compare rhel 4 with solaris 10 when both have done their final release and then talk about peformance. till then its waste.
Solaris 10 is huge improvement over previous versions of Solaris. There are soo many new features (JDS, DTrace, Zones, ZFS, etc. ) that Linux just doesn’t have. You can install additional kernel modules and software packages to get maybe 40% of the way there, but not close enough. I’ve been using it at home (on an U60 and a Netra X1) exclusively for almost a year and I’ve been using it at work (on a no-name PC and a Compaq Laptop) for almost 6 months. The performance and new features are incredible. The improvements to the kernel, installer, device management and support(on both Sparc and X86), included software, etc are more than enough for a production environment. I remember how painful it use to be to install Solaris on a PC, let a lone a laptop. Now it’s soo easy, no screwing around with hardware settings or tryingt to figure out what X11 driver to use. It just works! Hell, even the sound just works on my compaq laptop. Of course, it works even better on an UltraSparc, but that’s to be expected because of the development investment there. But it runs just as well if not faster than using Linux. I use to run Linux at work because I could not get Solaris 9 to install on my desktop or laptop. And Linux was slow and buggy, things would crash and the network performance was crappy. Then I installed Solaris 10 and it runs like a champ on both systems. So for all of those “Slowaris” ppl out there, you’ll have to eat your own words.. give Solaris 10 a try. If you don’t.. what are you? Afraid that Sun has a good product?
Just because something is free and open source doesn’t mean it’s the greatest thing in the universe.
“There are soo many new features (JDS, DTrace, Zones, ZFS, etc. ) that Linux just doesn’t have. You can install additional kernel modules and software packages to get maybe 40% of the way there, but not close enough”
this features game is very bad thing. how do you actually install kernel modules for ANY of the above features?.
jds is a polished version of gnome
dtrace is similar to kprobes
and so on.
“Just because something is free and open source doesn’t mean it’s the greatest thing in the universe.”
no but it prevents vendor lock. keeps things competitive. scales better and thats why Sun based itself on a bsd product and wants to open source solaris
no but it prevents vendor lock. keeps things competitive. scales better and thats why Sun based itself on a bsd product and wants to open source solaris
And who’s making unsubstantiated claims now? All a 10,240 processor Altix cluster proves is that the Altix platform allows you to combine more processors in a single system image than the Sun Fire architecture. It has nothing to do with the actual scalability of kernel facilities to handling more threads, more I/O, etc.
Also, Solaris is SysV based, not BSD based. SunOS was BSD based.
“And who’s making unsubstantiated claims now? All a 10,240 processor Altix cluster proves is that the Altix platform allows you to combine more processors in a single system image than the Sun Fire architecture”
i was talking about scalibility of the development model. why do you think Sun is bothering to talk about open source solaris?
and altrix has proven that it scales well. when sun can do that I will believe them
“Also, Solaris is SysV based, not BSD based. SunOS was BSD based.”
I said “thats why Sun based itself on a bsd product”
I didnt say solaris is bsd based. i know they are based on sysv and thats why SCO presents another problem for them now
“ts actually worse. simba compared fedora and solaris and claims solaris if faster than rhel.”
Tell me why this is not valid if I build a kernel optimized for server use? It’s the same kernel! it’s not like there are proprietary kernel extensions in RHEL.
And this is far better than what you are doing, which is completely dismissing my statements despite the fact that it sounds like you have never even tried Solaris 10!
”
And this is far better than what you are doing, which is completely dismissing my statements despite the fact that it sounds like you have never even tried Solaris 10!
”
solaris 10 is a work in progress. ironical that you somehow riducule me not trying out solaris while accepting that you didnt even bother trying out RHEL
“Tell me why this is not valid if I build a kernel optimized for server use? It’s the same kernel! it’s not like there are proprietary kernel extensions in RHEL. ”
because they are different products. plain and simple. which version of fedora did you try. redhat EL 4 is about to be release around 4 months later. do you really think for 4 months nothing will change from fedora to redhat EL 4. you got to be kidding.
I repeat when redhat EL 4 and solaris 10 FINAL versions are released we can talk about performance. both of them have debugging stuff now which will slow down performance.
Hi,
My apologies if this sounds impertinent, but are you just repeating what you read somewhere on a bb in some misaligned effort to appear informed? ‘Slow-aris’ indeed…
Solaris 10 is *not* slow – obviously, this is a subjective stance, and covers a range of issues, however I’ll try and mention a few.
Do you mean slow as in responsiveness/latency of the UI? If so, they I’m sorry but Solaris (10) completely blows – it’s fast, responsive, and amazingly stable (although I’ll be the first to admin that CDE still looks like the dogs breakfas – but hey, it’s functional). If you mean networking-wise, then the new FireEngine is also spiffily fast (using my *cough* scientific test of mldonkey *grin*).
Also, I think you’ll be interested to know that a compiler *is* included – not SunStudio, but a basic one. Also, gcc and auto* are easily available (try blastwave, or sunfreeward). However, I’ve read reports (note: haven’t done an objective test myself) that the Sun/Intel compilers produce faster stuff than gcc anyway.
Speed of install – dude, does the word ‘Flash archive’ mean anything to you? I suggest you read up on some of the admin docs at docs.sun.com (see the Solaris 10 section), and also the installation guide. Sun is an *enterprise* product.
Also, with regards to your comments on YAST, config, and whatever – from my own experience, Solaris is indeed a b*tch to install, but it’s a damn sight easier to maintain and configure afterwards.
Finally, you mentioned that you think Solaris is more secure and stable, because “tons of patches have come out”. I’m sorry, but this is really not a very good way of measuring how ‘secure’ an OS is. Even though I like Solaris (though I don’t use it day-to-day – use WinXP/Ubuntu), I really don’t think I could argue the case that’s its somehow ‘secure’ because Sun decides to do a lot of patching.
Just my 2 cents =).
bye,
Victor
Trust me, kprobes is nothing at all like Dtrace. You should give it a try and you’ll see that it beats kprobes hands-down. Besides Dtrace is builtin, it’s not some addon that could break because Linus desides to make a change. Zones are isolated containers at the kernel level. Again, not something you have to go and compile or install to get working. Obviously, you think that compiling a kernel is a plus.. it’s soo backward.. welcome to the 90’s.
Yes, JDS is a polished version of Gnome, but the only thing close to it would be Novell’s offering. The level of controls and integration is just not there in a standard Gnome build. Also remember that Sun has helped the Gnome project considerably more than any other commercial company.
Vendor lock in in the Unix world is a joke. Unless you write an application that depends on toolkits and methods that are not standards based, you can port any application from one Unix to another. And just so that you know, Solaris has an excellent track record of sticking to standard API’s and for maintaining backward compability. Something that Linux lacks completely and utterly. On the commercial software front, there are still more products available for Solaris than for Linux. Especially on the enterprise side. And besides, most of the major software vendors (Oracle, Veritas, Sybase, etc) make a version of their product for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc and Linux. So I don’t see the vendor lock-in that you alude to. If anything Sun makes it easy to switch to or from Solaris. It’s one of Sun’s strengths.
Having the source code doesn’t make a product better, it’s just an aide. Hell, if ppl had the source code to every M$ product, would ppl stop buying from M$ and role their own? Probably not in the business world.. maybe in academia or for hobbiest. Just because you can take a toaster apart and make your own, doesn’t mean you’re going to invent a better toaster. But hey, some ppl like to do things like that. As for me, I prefer to spend my time on more important things.. like getting work done or spending time with my family.
Remember, computers are just tools! It’s what you do with them that makes the difference. And besides each OS has it’s niche market. Linux will probably not end up being used by grandma or managers in board room meetings. Just as Windows isn’t going to run every computer task out there. Solaris has its place in the enterprise production world and on the backend of mid to large scale businesses. It even has a place in smaller shops. But it’s not going to save the world or make a big mac taste better. Each product has it’s place.. that’s why there are soo many products. What a boring world it would be if the only soda was Mr. Pibb. Variety is good. So give Solaris 10 a try.
I once loved Java and for that I’m still grateful to Sun. But I would hate to see it degrade to the next SCO in 5 years.
“Trust me, kprobes is nothing at all like Dtrace. You should give it a try and you’ll see that it beats kprobes hands-down. Besides Dtrace is builtin, it’s not some addon that could break because Linus desides to make a change. ”
lol. so you think linus randomly breaks stuff and he is allowed to lead the whole multi million dollar effort just like that?. how is kprobes an add on by any means. it has been integrated with the mainstream kernel long back
“Zones are isolated containers at the kernel level. Again, not something you have to go and compile or install to get working. Obviously, you think that compiling a kernel is a plus.. it’s soo backward.. welcome to the 90’s. ”
if you have any idea of how zones work and how they are being proposed to be done in linux you wouldnt talk like this. I have never ever compiled a linux kernel for anything useful. just for learning how it works. thats all. welcome to 2003.
“Also remember that Sun has helped the Gnome project considerably more than any other commercial company”
by what means?. sun and novell has contributed far more than sun. just check the lines of code or features or modules or actually development by any means. ”
“Vendor lock in in the Unix world is a joke. ”
this shows you have no real world experience with unix. unix is the primarily example of how vendor lock in destroyed a good product
“. And just so that you know, Solaris has an excellent track record of sticking to standard API’s and for maintaining backward compability. Something that Linux lacks completely and utterly. ”
linux – the kernel has a consistent external api and only changes in kernel api. this is not a problem due to the design differences between solaris and linux. linux is open source with in kernel drivers which are changed to match the api changes whenever required.
“Especially on the enterprise side. And besides, most of the major software vendors (Oracle, Veritas, Sybase, etc) make a version of their product for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc and Linux. So I don’t see the vendor lock-in that you alude to”
you are saying there is no vendor lock in unix. you are not in reality then
”
Having the source code doesn’t make a product better, it’s just an aide. Hell, if ppl had the source code to every M$ product, would ppl stop buying from M$ and role their own? Probably not in the business world.. maybe in academia or for hobbiest.”
not just academia but also major goverments decide on this factor. this is why MS came up with something like shared source and Sun is talking about open source solaris
“Remember, computers are just tools! It’s what you do with them that makes the difference”
for people passionate about it, its not just tools and some people work towards improving the OS itself. so what you say is not applicable to everyone
I will ignore the rest of your rant because operating systems are not sodas
Sun is doing some live benchmarking of Solaris 8 vs. Solaris 10 vs. Redhat on the webcast, showing Solaris 10 double transaction processing for a financial application over Linux.
If you have any predefined notions about what Solaris was, and therefore what Solaris must now be, get rid of them now. Sun has a lot to overcome with respect to misinformation of the current state of Solaris, based on the past state of Solaris. The amount that Solaris has advanced in the past few years is tremendous. Sun places an exceptional amount of stock in it’s OS product, unlike most other commercial UNIX vendors. They are trying to leverage their product into a new market where Linux is rapidly gaining, and Solaris 10 does it very, very well. In addition to the features listed above (DTrace, Zones, which if you do not know about, do not knock), they have committed to making Solaris/x86 as good of a product as Solaris/sparc, especially on 64 bit x86.
I spent an entire day yesterday in a conference training session learning about how much has been done with Solaris since the earlier days. It’s impressive. The slides are available at http://www.solarisinternals.com/ , which are incredibly in depth. I encourage all of you to read them before making any conclusions about the state of Solaris.
The granularity of the control that Solaris gives you without the need to make kernel modifications is enormous. The amount of data you can collect with DTrace is enormous. This is really a landmark release for Solaris.
“Sun is doing some live benchmarking of Solaris 8 vs. Solaris 10 vs. Redhat on the webcast, showing Solaris 10 double transaction processing for a financial application over Linux.
”
its obvious that isnt going to be neutral and they have benchmarked redhat el 3.x release a year or so ago.
Solaris 10 is awesome! Like it or not, with open sourcing of Solaris Linux will be becoming pretty irrelevant in the enterprise now. RedHat is pretty pointless now with its ridiculously high licensing and support prices. I expect a tidal wave of migrations from Linux to Solaris pretty soon as there is whole bunch of features that are just to hard to ignore in Solaris.
Solaris 10 is *not* slow – obviously, this is a subjective stance, and covers a range of issues, however I’ll try and mention a few.
Do you mean slow as in responsiveness/latency of the UI? If so, they I’m sorry but Solaris (10) completely blows – it’s fast, responsive, and amazingly stable (although I’ll be the first to admin that CDE still looks like the dogs breakfas – but hey, it’s functional). If you mean networking-wise, then the new FireEngine is also spiffily fast (using my *cough* scientific test of mldonkey *grin*).
You are talking of speend but again you compare this to what? On top of that we can compare GUI’s and I could put on XFCE or ICE and say yes it’s MUCH faster then CDE. But lets see how it runs with GNOME or something else installed for the GUI installed (Which I plan to do tonight to test it
Speed of install – dude, does the word ‘Flash archive’ mean anything to you? I suggest you read up on some of the admin docs at docs.sun.com (see the Solaris 10 section), and also the installation guide. Sun is an *enterprise* product. Wow I can take REDHAT install it then box the intall into an ISO, burn it to CD then Roll it out. Or I can do that using ghost or I can do that using a USB drive. No big deal.
But tonight I am going to try out the full version of 10. And see where it’s at. In the mean time, when Sun gets tools like YAST2, Edirectory, Zenworks etc call me. When you find a use for Solaris besides databases and websites call me. (You are not going to use for your workstation, even sun admits that which is why they have a Linux version. And you are not going to use it for file and print or directory services.)
Thank you for the positive replies
ill go back to solaris and try harder 
i think i have been sitting on linux too long anyway 
, but i guess as Linux was my intro to the *UNIX world i judge everything by it which is unfair.
I hope i get the hang of it
P.s i am a RHCE with 5 years+ linux exp, so i am not a noob with linux, just with solaris, but if anyone knows of a doc lying around the net comparing the difference (admin wise) i would be very grateful.
Snake
It does not matter what we say, we will see what the market says. (Today RedHat’s stock was rated as a buy on the NYSE) Sun hasn’t made a profit in 2 years.
“Red Hat (RHAT:Nasdaq – news – research) got a much-needed boost Monday, when First Albany upgraded shares of the Linux vendor to buy from neutral.
In recent trading, shares were up $1.30, or 11%, to $12.88 on heavy volume, reversing a slide that erased 60% of the company’s share value since early June.
Once a darling of investors who believed that Linux, an open-source operating system, could successfully challenge Microsoft’s (MSFT:Nasdaq – news – research) Windows juggernaut, Red Hat has been beaten up, in part over concerns that a price war with rival Novell (NOVL:Nasdaq – news – research) is killing profitability.
In a note to clients, analyst Mark Murphy said that those concerns are overblown and set a price target of $15 a share. “We believe the tone of business in RHAT’s November quarter supports our targets for subscription volumes and cash flow, potentially setting the stage for RHAT to report record high quarterly cash flow,” he wrote.”
http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/tech/software/10194351.html?cm_ve…..
Oh and Solaris will never be 100% open source. It will be Open for developers like Java is but Sun will control it like it does Java. They are just saying open source because it sounds good. When they have a version like RH that can be recompiled like people do with RH enterprise (And make versions like White Box which is 100% free and open!) Also Sun only give Solaris 10 away for “For Non Commercial Use” For Commercial use you still have the same high fees and support structure that guess who invented?? RED HAT!
Remember Sun is coming “down” to Red Hat’s level, not vice versa.
Linux is just a “step” of Unix world, you can also try FreeBSD, OpenBSD and macosX with Solaris 10 of course
> And see where it’s at. In the mean time, when Sun gets tools like YAST2, Edirectory, Zenworks etc call me.
Err, YAST2 is not a make or break tool — it is just crutch for clueless sysadmins and it is not even that good. As far as the other two, Sun has already got much better products in stock. Sun ONE Directory Server is by bar the best most full featured, most scalable, and highest performing directory server on the market and it runs on more platforms than rather lame eDirectory. As for Zenworks alternative, there is always Sun Management Center (SunMC) — for servers it can do much more than Zenworks. Sorry dude you should probably pull your head out of your ass before making ignorant comments and making an idiot out of yourself.
“When you find a use for Solaris besides databases and websites call me. (You are not going to use for your workstation, even sun admits that which is why they have a Linux version. And you are not going to use it for file and print or directory services.)”
I use it for everything, although it is not the most feature rich desktop system, and I concede that other operating systems are good for this. I personally use MacOS X on my desktop. Fedora Core is also a usable desktop. For that matter, so is Windows. I’m not as concerned about desktops.
I am not sure where the notion of not using it for file or directory services comes from. Sun built NFS. Solaris is ideal for file serving. I’ve used it for all three functions (file, print, directory) for many, many years.
Solaris’s maturity shows through in server operations, because patches are tested in production environments before being released. This causes Solaris to be very stable. Does this make Solaris bug free? Of course not. But I do consider it more so than Linux. Sun is less likely to integrate experimental features without fully verifying their stability. Once added, these features are expanded upon, but not changed, meaning that upgrading Solaris releases or adding patches will very, -very- rarely cause application instability. In no cases have I had an update actually cause an application not to work. Things compiled under Solaris 2.6 still work. That’s a good thing, in my opinion.
“because they are different products. plain and simple. which version of fedora did you try. redhat EL 4 is about to be release around 4 months later.”
Ah… So now you want to put Solaris 10 up against vaporware… Cute…
“When you find a use for Solaris besides databases and websites call me. (You are not going to use for your workstation, even sun admits that which is why they have a Linux version.”
I use it for my workstation. I find it extremely fast on my workstation, and easier to configure than Linux. It took me 2 minutes to get my cable modem working in Solaris 10. I was never able to get it working in Linux because for whatever reason, Linux would not properly retrieve the DHCP information from my ISP.
Sun does now use GCC by default so any apps you compile with GCC on solaris will be SLOOOOOOOW. But hey sun will sell you their compiler.
Where do you get the idea that GCC is being used “by
default” ??
GCC is slow on sparc – imho – because the developers do
not work on sparc as a primary platform, they work on x86.
And of course Sun will sell you their compiler. They’ve
invested a lot of money in getting it optimised.
I’ve heard from friends that other compiler-selling
companies will reverse-engineer the output from the Sun
compiler in order to work on their own optimiser. You would
be chuffed too if that happened to you.
However, the main gotcha you are going to run into with Solaris 10 on x86 is hardware support. So if you are planning to build or buy a server for Solaris x86, choose your hardware very carefully.
The serious enterprise linux server run on name brand hardware configurations such as Dell and HP. Server hardware that has had Solaris support for quite sometime. Will it run on the old pentium machine you have had in storage in your basement for 2 years? maybe not but are you going to run an enterprise on hardware like that?
As far as precompiled binaries http://www.sunfreeware.com I have never had a problem getting GNU binaries for Solaris or compiling from scratch.
When you find a use for Solaris besides databases and websites call me. (You are not going to use for your workstation, even sun admits that which is why they have a Linux version. And you are not going to use it for file and print or directory services.)
I run Solaris 10 on my x86 Pentium IIIm laptop. It works just fine for my purposes.
In a note to clients, analyst Mark Murphy said…
I wouldn’t put much stock in analyst reports. Keep in mind, analysts thought Enron had a good business model…
Oh and Solaris will never be 100% open source. It will be Open for developers like Java is but Sun will control it like it does Java. They are just saying open source because it sounds good. When they have a version like RH that can be recompiled like people do with RH enterprise
This is nothing more than speculation and prejudice on your part. I’ve met a number of the principals for the OpenSolaris project, and their goals are to have it released under an OSI approved license so that you can indeed go recompile it and build your own product, if you so choose. You won’t have to pay license royalties to Sun for any of this.
“Ah… So now you want to put Solaris 10 up against vaporware… Cute…”
what are you smoking. redhat enterprise release 4 has a beta two betas released already. when you claim that fedora and redhat EL are just the same you lose all credibility. you havent even tried out this “vaporware” and still bother to talk about performance comparisons between them
http://www.linuxcompatible.org/story36797.html.
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/nahant-beta2/iso/
you are calling that vaporware?
very cute
”
The serious enterprise linux server run on name brand hardware configurations such as Dell and HP. Server hardware that has had Solaris support for quite sometime. ”
oh I see. so all enterprises now run on dell and hp software all over the world. fascinating that people come up with such poor excuses for solaris lack of drivers for x86 in a competitive manner
I meant hp and dell hardware
“when you claim that fedora and redhat EL are just the same you lose all credibility.”
Please show me the kernel optimizations in EL that I cannot compile in myself by building a custom kernel in Fedora. If you can’t show them to me, then you are the one that loses credibility. As I said, there are no special extensions in the EL kernel that I cannot add in Fedora. Hence, there is no reason that Apache performance should be any worse in Fedora than in EL.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sx/
The list is growing and contains a number of different manufacturers, which indicates to me that Solaris 10 enjoys a fair amount of hardware support.
It says 512 MB minimum on the specs page:
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/specs.html
Is that a typo?
I was hopping to give Solaris 10 a test, but if this isn’t a typo (512 MB), then I have to rule it out.
“I was hopping to give Solaris 10 a test, but if this isn’t a typo (512 MB), then I have to rule it out.”
It’s a typo.Or at least it is way over the top. I am running it in 128 Mb or RAM and it performs great.
It would be completely and utterly retarded to call it this now.
I must admit that previous versions of solaris had been slow, mainly on x86 but solaris 10 is much different in terms of speed.
I suppose if a someone started calling a computer a peice of cheese you’d start to believe that all computers made were a peice of cheese?
“It’s a typo.Or at least it is way over the top. I am running it in 128 Mb or RAM and it performs great.”
On a 400 Mhz K6/2 no less. It blows Win XP away on the same system.
”
Please show me the kernel optimizations in EL that I cannot compile in myself by building a custom kernel in Fedora. If you can’t show them to me, then you are the one that loses credibility”
a product is much more than a kernel. basically you compared a version of fedora(which one?) and solaris and said that solaris is faster than redhat EL which is not true since redhat EL is not even released yet. how can i tell you what optimisations will be in a future product?
1) which version of fedora did you use?
2) which build of solaris 10?
3) what factors did you compare?
lets get the real facts now
Suse does use names for the interfaces.
This is not a problem with any machine with udev
please read the messages to which you reply properly. Tyrone was saying that comparing Solaris to ‘Linux’ is a little silly, as Linux is purely a kernel on top of which several different distributions are built, each of which potentially has different performance characteristics. He was suggesting you ought to compare Solaris to a specific Linux distribution, not to ‘Linux’.
I tried to install Solaris 10 on my Dell laptop which has 128 MB or ram and it bombed out telling me that I for 1 had only 96 MB of ram (But I have Xandros installed on this machine and it runs fine) and that it needed at least 128 MB of ram to even install. (So it makes me wonder who is running Solaris great on a machine with 128 MB of ram) But I can not doubt anyone.
Also I read someone wrote: Sun ONE Directory Server os better then Novell edirectory which was NDS? Which can handle over 1 Billion objects and not even burp! Please NDS is much older, more robust, works on Unix, Linux and Windows and is WAYYYYY more used then Sun One for user management etc. Yea Suns is well used for websites but that is about it. Also you are saying that Sun Management Center is better then Zenworks which when the new version comes out will manage any linux servers and clients and also any windows servers and clients. Can SMC even manage anything other then Sun servers??? NOOOOOOOO!
SO Anonymous (IP: 168.143.113.—) Learn a little before you take, you sound like you have a foot in your mouth!
Also: I am not sure where the notion of not using it for file or directory services comes from. Sun built NFS. Solaris is ideal for file serving. I’ve used it for all three functions (file, print, directory) for many, many years.
Come on, who uses NFS?? Is there a native NFS client in Windows? Does anyone even use NFS when you can use samba or something more easy!
Come on, who uses NFS?? Is there a native NFS client in Windows? Does anyone even use NFS when you can use samba or something more easy!
Any major Enterprise on the this planet. Go to NetApp or EMC and see what interfaces thier NAS boxes support, NFS for sure?
Why would Windows support NFS, which MS didn’t develop? MS developed CIFS? Samba is a SMB/CIFS implementation to help you connect to CIFS services.
As the front page at samba.org says, “Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients.” Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.
from samba.org
Please NDS is much older, more robust, works on Unix, Linux and Windows and is WAYYYYY more used then Sun One for user management etc. Yea Suns is well used for websites but that is about it.
One wonders what rock you’ve just climbed out from
underneath. NDS has lots of problems — ever tried
backing it up using an enterprise-class backup app
such as netbackup or networker? It ain’t pretty. It
doesn’t scale well either. The corporate world is
running on ldap (one form or another) and NDS + ldap
is still (as far as I’m aware) dodgy at best.
Also, “wayyyyy more used” ?? please, show us the stats
from a reputable survey and we might take you seriously.
Your final point is based in lala land. If you’d read
any of the preceding comments in this topic or any
other topic regarding Sun, or perchance you’d done some
research on what the F1000 run their backend, middleware
and frontend servers on you would not be making that
statement.
Unless of course you were being sarcastic, but I doubt it.
Re SunMC/SMC/whatever — don’t compare it with ZenWorks,
that’s an invalid comparison. SMC is designed to administer
Solaris machines, and nothing else. Don’t compare apples
with oranges in a public forum and expect to be taken
seriously.
Finally re your laptop – try doing a character-mode
install (“b – install – w” at the prompt should work)
rather than a gui install, and turn down the ram
you’ve got allocated to your display.
Let us see that OSI approved license first, then we’ll talk.
Free means real Freedom, not some look-a-like.
There is more to FOSS than an OSI approved license though, so even if that license isn’t too onerous, SUN still needs to build a “living” community around this project.
so all enterprises now run on dell and hp [hardware] all over the world. fascinating that people come up with such poor excuses for solaris lack of drivers for x86 in a competitive manner
It’s a simple market reality — tier-1 vendors such as
Dell, IBM and HP have the budgets to spend on getting
their gear certified with Solaris/x86, so Sun can therefore
justify spending the money on making their hardware work
with Solaris. Quid pro quo is what it’s called.
As everybody knows, the volume players in the computer
hardware market write drivers for windows because that
is where their sales volume comes from. Sun has to either
rely on interested and capable staff to write drivers if
the specs are available, or get an agreement going with
the other vendor to get those specs. And if there’s no
business justification (eg, only 10 customers are expected
to pay for driver/feature X) then you can’t really expect
Sun – a company which is trying to get back in the black –
to spend valuable cash on such a project.
If you want drivers for Solaris, how about you contact
the vendor of the card you want to use and make them
realise how big the Solaris market is?
don’t just whine about it, get out and do something to
help!
> Sun ONE Directory Server os better then Novell edirectory which was NDS? Which can handle over 1 Billion objects and not even burp!
Same thing can be said about Sun ONE Directory Server — it is overwhelmingly #1 choice of directory server for the largest ISP’s worldwide. Sun ONE Directory is also lightyears faster than NDS, which is as slow as molasses due to its X.500 legacy.
“If you want drivers for Solaris, how about you contact
the vendor of the card you want to use and make them
realise how big the Solaris market is?
don’t just whine about it, get out and do something to
help! ”
why should i support a proprietary software company which blantantly lies about redhat being proprietary and all such gibberish. NO. i will not beg for drivers
Companion CD
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/
binary packages, for Solaris 7/8/9 x86/SPARC
http://www.sunfreeware.com/
pkg-get (like apt-get), install packages over network
http://www.blastwave.org/
“Come on, who uses NFS?? Is there a native NFS client in Windows? Does anyone even use NFS when you can use samba or something more easy!”
You apparently don’t live in the UNIX world.
Just because you don’t agree
with what Sun says about RedHat
does not make it any less true.
Remember, Sun and RedHat are both
companies not movements. Companies
compete, movements do not.
Sun and Redhat sell products, and if you want
to complain about proprietary, check out the Wachovia Securities talk where
RedHat execs boasted about their lockin with ISVs such as Oracle.
Anyway, I wasn’t saying you should beg for drivers, just that you should go to closed vendors and ask for specs. Like Theo does. Like the community does for sane (sane-project.org). Get with the real world and stop whinging
Hi pals,
I would like to test solaris x86 on one of my x86 rack servers , Im planning to make a comparison using oracle 9i importing a 4gig database. I already did that with RHEL 2.1 and took 7 1/2 hrs on a HP DL380 dual 4gigs ram.
Regards,
jay
“(So it makes me wonder who is running Solaris great on a machine with 128 MB of ram) But I can not doubt anyone.”
The install was rather slow. it took me over 2 hours to complete the install. That might have been due to only having 128 Mb of RAM. But seriously, I’m running the system right now. Typing this message from Mozilla on Solaris 10 x86 with 128 Mb of RAM on an AMD K6-2 400, and performance is great
“Just because you don’t agree
with what Sun says about RedHat
does not make it any less true.
”
calling redhat a proprietary OS is a lie and I can call it a lie anywhere
”
Anyway, I wasn’t saying you should beg for drivers, just that you should go to closed vendors and ask for specs. Like Theo does”
theo is asking permission to *distribute firmware without signing contracts for *open source* operating systems. talk about apples and oranges.
You apparently don’t live in the UNIX world.
You are right cause that is a SMALLLL world. (Besides the BSD’s)
In the linux, Windows, and BSD (Including MAC OS) worlds most people use SMB not NFS. Older versions of NFS were very insecure and slow on data transfer.
Why would Windows support NFS, which MS didn’t develop? MS developed CIFS? Samba is a SMB/CIFS implementation to help you connect to CIFS services.
(IBM created SMB, Microsoft just updated it and changed the name)
RE: By McBofh
Do you have your head screwed on right. First off you didn’t read the back posts. Someone else hit me with the SMC statement saying it was better then Zenworks and I replyed.
Also you said “The corporate world is running on ldap (one form or another) and NDS + ldap is still (as far as I’m aware) dodgy at best. ”
Ummmmmmm, NDS is now called edirectory and HELLO It is LDAP Certified by The Open Group—signifying conformance to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol version 3 (LDAP v3) standard. Also It runs natively on Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, NetWare and HP-UX!
And last: Finally re your laptop – try doing a character-mode
install (“b – install – w” at the prompt should work)
rather than a gui install, and turn down the ram
you’ve got allocated to your display.
Duh, I know how to do that, I was making a point that it is much more easy to install Linux and do it through a GUI. I could do the same thing with Windows also. But I have to do it by text in Solaris (Still!)