Solaris Archive

Sun Microsystems has delayed the release of two major features the company has trumpeted as reasons to try its latest version of the Solaris operating system. Eric Schrock, a Solaris kernel programmer, said on his blog in April that he's "completely redesigning the ZFS commands from the ground up" after finding some deficiencies.

Among the flavors of UNIX, Solaris is considered to be the closest to Linux, so before starting a port of large Unix-based application to Linux, the OS-dependent code is generally picked up from Solaris. But for migration purposes, differences can arise in the areas that depend on the architecture, memory maps, threading, or some specific areas like system administration or natural language support.

The "two man rule" (also sometimes called the "four eyes rule") has its origins in military protocol although for quite some time it has been welcomed into the stockpile of IT security controls used by organizations around the world. The "two man rule" specifies that there must be two individuals that must act in concert in order to perform some action.

Wow! With Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems has done a marvelous job of bringing Solaris fully into the x86 world. Gone are the days when Solaris only runs on Sun hardware or when it only runs well on Sun hardware. Solaris 10 comes with greatly expanded off-the-shelf x86 hardware compatibility and a license that is hard to beat. It's a binary right to use and Open Solaris, the open source version is soon to come. IT Managers that have been wanting to bring a stable, scalable Operating Environment into their network infrastructures, but who have been unwilling to commit to the Sun hardware platform, for various reasons, are now free, pun intended, to bring Solaris on board and to run it on the hardware of their choice.

Significant performance, availability and feature enhancements make Solaris 10 an automatic choice for existing Sun customers. But as an alternative to Linux, it doesn’t yet deliver, says ZDNet.

A new feature of the Sun Solaris 10 Operating System lets you run Linux applications, unchanged, on their own or side by side with Solaris applications.

Solaris Express 3/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 9) should arrive later today providing improved hardware support, performance, the Network Layer 7 Cache, and new developer APIs. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is available.

Sun today announced that it has distributed more than one million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 OS since Jan. 31, when the software became available on Sun's Web site. Sun also announced that the Solaris 10 OS has set fourteen world-record benchmarks in this same timeframe and demonstrated application performance improvements greater than 50 times that of previous versions of Solaris.

Zones are one of the many useful new features in Solaris 10, both for adminstrators and developers. This article gives an example of using zones to replicate a multi tiered environment for use in development.

DTrace developers Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal have posted presentations covering Advanced DTrace Tips and Tricks and The DTrace pid provider on their blogs over the last few days. Update: RHEL benchmarks against Solaris.

There are people who believe in the doctrine of social or historical inevitability: that, when the time is right and no earlier, several people will independently invent what turns out to be a crucial new technology. Read more of the editorial here.

Sun has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Read the review here.

A recent post in Jonathan Schwartz blog says there were 151,039 SPARC and 269,856 x64/x86 downloads for Solaris 10 so far. "An early look suggests we're not going to have a problem with demand" Schwartz said.

This article illuminates many reasons why Sun faces an uphill battle in keeping enterprise customers interested in it's operating system, describing a large enterprise customer choosing Linux over Solaris and IBM over Sun.