Sun Microsystems’ Solaris 10 may be powerful enough to power a data grid, but for real market growth, Sun is looking inward to the embedded space. Despite the hoopla at this month’s announcement party to launch Solaris 10, the focus for the operating system has been outside the usual realm of server rooms and desktops. Solaris Express 11/04 will be build 72 and should be available on or around November 30. The big thing for this one is… 64 bit Solaris on AMD.”
Shrinking Solaris; New Solaris Version
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hi,
Does anybody at all have any inkling when ZFS or Janus will be in? (Yes, I’m the same guy that posted on Alan’s blog).
Thanks,
Victor
Officially, these will be integrated when they’re ready. Sun gives a lot of leeway to the engineers in these situations to make sure things are done right, and well tested. That said, it should probably be available in s10u1, but that’s not official by any means.
“Officially, these will be integrated when they’re ready”
i find all the PR from SUN very misleading about this. why hype features when they are NOT ready?
I wish I had an excuse for you. I’m an engineer myself, and have no idea why marketing does the things that it does.
How can it be targeted an embedded systems when it doesn’t support a wide variety of processors?
How can it be targeted an embedded systems when it doesn’t support a wide variety of processors?
I think I remember reading somewhere a while back that sun was porting to other architectures including PowerPC
they were thinking of porting Solaris to other architectures……this is no longer the case….at least for the time being
Ok. No need to feel bad. Just have a feeling that the technical people on SUN are much much better than the PR and upper level marketing folks.
I really wish you would do the whole thing as well as you have handled the gnome process
Marketing’s job is to create a Buzz, no matter what. They are like cheerleaders. They don’t know anything about what they are cheering about but that is besides the point. Marketing seems to be a very North American thing. It’s supposed to be in your face. Every company does it, they are not outright lies, just pre-announcements.
It works like this, engineers talk about cool things coming down the pipe, marketing person overhears this and like a teenage boy, blows the load. Marketing is all about pre-ejaculation.
What I think Sun means is using Solaris for things like SANs, Routers, Firewalls and Network appliances.
I don’t think Solaris can scale down to a few KBs for things like phones or mp3 players. For things like that VxWorks, Linux and Windows Mobile and Symbian are solid operating systems.
If they deliver on their fire-engine TCP/IP platform, Solaris could be a winner for network appliances and SANs and even things like streaming media servers.
I was told by an engineer yesterday that ZFS has been delayed because its automatic data checksumming is highlighting bugs lower down in the filesystem and driver layers.
Also, I doubt anyone wants to launch a new filesystem without a lot of thorough testing to be absolutely certain it preserves data integrity and that performance doesn’t deteriorate in edge cases.
Many moons ago, SUN Microsystems made available Solaris for PowerPC back in 2.5.1 IIRC.
The processor dependent code in the kernel will still be in the source code, it would simply be a matter of writing the necessary drivers to support the chipset and so forth.
What I would love to see is for Solaris to be made available on Apple Mac; imagine being able to revive old an old G3 iMac or iBook and run Solaris on it; it would be a *great* move.
Lets hope that once Solaris source code is released, there is an enthusiastic move by some to make it available on more than just the x86 platform.
What I would also love to see is a kitset by SUN Microsystems, an UltraSPARC IV CPU, with 256K L2 Cache plus a motherboard for around a $1K. That would be *really* good move to also get the adoption of UltraSPARC on the move upwards.
Please show examples when sun tells you something ( a high level exec or an official PR) and they don’t do it?
Please, please show me. and dont show a bunch a linux links either.
ALSO..
About the embedded thing… This is great-Sun should have done this 20 years ago though. Is it too little too late? That’s the real question. Seems like open sourcing it will be a huge plus and userbase jump though
Sun has definitely ‘promised’ these features. The Solaris 10 printed marketing material shows ZFS, Linux Application Environment, and many other features in Solaris 10. It is only as the GA release date approaches that Sun is backing off on these features and claiming that they will, hopefully, be included in Update 1.
There’s nothing odd about this – Sun doesn’t have any more consistency in this area than any other company it’s size. They are constantly estimating what will be available and gambling on their talent to make it happen. LAE is a good example of misestimation, to use a Bushism, the Sun tech folks are probably ready for it to go live, but due to outside factors (the state of Linux shared libraries and such), there’s no way Legal will sign off in time for GA.
darn, stay calm – it’s a word after all.
how can solaris be for sans when they don’t have iSCSI mentioned anywhere???