Accelerate your porting efforts by following this six-step guide. Learn the differences between Solaris and Linux on POWER, and see how SUN’s compiler/linker switches compare with those of GNU GCC and the IBM native compiler.
From Solaris to Linux on POWER
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Now that Solaris 10 is released, I’m hoping to read stories like “How I switched from Linux to Solaris”
Ive been a linux user since way back when gnome was just beta. i recently downloaded solaris 10. and boy o boy i gotta say its a crappy OS. im so glad i didnt intall over my gentoo install. the installer is pretty lame. the way they have their config files and devices layed out is kinda complicated compaired to linux. and their binary kernel is slow. trust me linux boys and girls dont even give sun a chance its not worth the effort
I’m loving Solaris 10 – man it boots in 20 seconds flat in 64bit mode – compred to SuSE linux that takes anywhere between 35-40 seconds. Solaris’ new scf method of starting services is fast!.
As for IBM and Linux – they are trying to get out from under Intel’s thumb by pushing POWER and Microsoft’s thumb by pushing Linux. What happened to AIX?
I’m betting that Solaris + AMD64 is a better bargain than PowerPC + Linux – if you get sick of Solaris, you can install Windows or FreeBSD or Linux – take your pick of distros.
With Linux on PowerPC you’re stuck – your only option is running AIX (which is a decent OS). But you are beholden to IBM. If you dislike your Linux distro, too bad you got only two choices tweedle-dee (Novell) and tweedle-dum (Redhat)
Come on Sun – where’s the AIX to Solaris porting guide (or is it a oxymoron?)
This isn’t a good troll, because it is too obvious. The good trolls start out sounding reasonable but include a statistical hook to invigorate the response, like that classic mac file transfer troll. SPEC benchmarks are a great troll tool, also, but I guess it would be hard to do that for Solaris 10 on Opteron. The most successful troll, right now, for Solaris 10 is to bring up the CDDL, the Microsoft settlement, and throw in SCO for good measure…but, alas, even that is growing tiresome (Bruce Perens wore that one out weeks ago). Okay, why don’t you just settle for nice troll comparing a Sun Ultra 5 workstation to a 3.5GHz Xeon PC–but don’t mention that it’s an Ultra 5 just say “Sun workstation”. That would be an awesome troll. Good luck, keep at it and you shall one day become a master.
So what are you basing your evaluation on? The fact that
some of the configuration files in /etc are different to
linux? The fact that /dev is full of symlinks to device
entries in /devices?
You know what? Solaris is quite different to linux in a
lot of ways. Solaris is also quite similar to linux in a
lot of ways. http://docs.sun.com and http://sun.com/bigadmin
are places you should check out before saying trust me linux boys and girls
dont even give sun a chance its not worth the effort.
Frankly, Ahron, it seems to me that you haven’t given
yourself a chance to properly check out Solaris. Posting
before you’ve made an effort at evaluation is silly.
” trust me linux boys and girls
dont even give sun a chance its not worth the effort.
”
the sun shill speaks
Then everyone could REALLY see how slow UltraSPARC is 😛
Yep, IBM is putting all their eggs into the POWER basket it seems. Don’t worry, I bet non-IBM POWER systems from China will be popping up sooner or later. Those silly Chinese, they’re downright un-American in their desire to not enrichen Intel or Microsoft any further (sarcasm here).
The poor sister here is of course AMD. Now that Sun has taken a shine to AMD, IBM will officially give AMD the cold shoulder. That is really a bummer.
I bet IBM would be thrilled to see MacOS X server ported to power.
– lots of missing system calls in linux.
– Being an OS fan, I’d like to see IBM do an article on “Solaris on Power”, possibly help Sun with the porting and tuning effort.
With the release of Solaris X and DTrace there should be a lot of justification to get at least 1 Sun box to really tune your apps.
IBM should be more then willing to increase the popularity of Power.
“- Being an OS fan, I’d like to see IBM do an article on “Solaris on Power”, possibly help Sun with the porting and tuning effort.”
OpenSolaris is making this possible. At http://www.blastwave.org/ page down to “The Blastware OpenSolaris Community Distro” and read “One of many objectives will be the creation of a PowerPC port.” Of course, the key word is “will be”, but there were rumors of a PowerPC port by Sun in the past–perhaps they will have a head start.
If people did start running Solaris on POWER, one day, then it’s good that Sun has a few UltraSPARC upgrades due this year (UltraSPARC IV+, UltraSPARC IIIi+, Niagara) to keep them selling Sun boxes.
And to reply to Anonymous (IP: —.dq1sn.easystreet.com): New UltraSPARCs really are not much behind the competition in scaling benchmarks. Sun went multicore earlier than Intel so no longer is the single-thread performance leader–that isn’t their priority.
As for IBM and Linux – they are trying to get out from under Intel’s thumb by pushing POWER and Microsoft’s thumb by pushing Linux. What happened to AIX?
That’s my question too. Why would port my applications to something even more proprietary than my existing platform. Linux on extremely expensive POWER hardware compared to Linux on cheap x86 hardware hmmm
Of course, the key word is “will be”, but there were rumors of a PowerPC port by Sun in the past–perhaps they will have a head start.
Solaris PPC 2.5.1. it wasn’t just a rumour.