Solaris Archive

Solaris Express 8/04 is out and available for download. More info here.

Solaris 9 9/04 Operating System, SPARC Platform Edition, is now available.

This article describes best practices for managing system resources for Sun Ray users. Based on an actual customer scenario, this article provides recommendations for integrating and using the Solaris Resource Manager software to fairly distribute system resources when users insert and remove their smart cards from Sun Ray desktop units.

Within the Solaris 10 OS, the event completion framework focuses on providing a scalable, performant & extendable framework that can incorporate new object & event types as they appear within the system.

Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz aired the idea of porting Solaris to two additional architectures during his 20 July earnings concall. "We’ve begun looking at Solaris on Power as well as Solaris on Itanium as a way of delivering incremental volume," said Schwartz, who apparently believes that POWER and Itanium support is just the Solaris volume exopansion solution Sun needs.

"It's alive!" was the cry issued this week by the Solaris grunts at Sun Microsystems. For the first time, the engineers managed to get a true 64-bit kernel up and running on an Opteron box. This is a key milestone in Sun's ambitious plan to make Solaris a preferred operating system in the x86 world.

"Analysis Try to imagine a geeky version of famed salesman Ron Popeil. Keep Popeil's exuberance, keep his pitchman savvy and keep his verbal overflow. Then erase his age, sturdy frame and Ronco Food Dehydrator and replace all this with a young, lanky kernel engineer hawking something called DTrace, and you have Bryan Cantrill." Read the rest at TheRegister.

Developers and solution providers might get more than they expect when Sun Microsystems details its plans to open-source Solaris later this year. Sources familiar with the company's plans told CRN at JavaOne 2004 that Sun is not going to simply open up bits and pieces of the millions of lines of code in Solaris, Sun's popular Unix-based operating system. The vendor plans to open up nearly all of the OS's source code, including, "all the rocket science," one Sun employee who requested anonymity said.

An article on the idea behind dtrace and what exactly can it do in the upcoming Solaris 10 releases.

Andy Tucker (who OSNews interviewed almost a year ago to the day) has posted some thoughts on his reasons for wanting to open-source Solaris. Speaking for myself, I share many of Andy's reasons and I suspect many of our other engineers do as well. As Andy requests in his blog entry, we want to hear from the community specific requirements and ideas (and not just about the license).

Sun said it will take an "aggressive" approach to opening up the source code of its core operating system. It just isn't saying when. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based network computer maker fended off questions from reporters and analysts Tuesday during a briefing centered on the major developments for Solaris 10. The enterprise platform is scheduled for a September 2004 launch date to coincide with the shipment of Sun's next generation Java Enterprise System. Update: More here.

"While we can only speculate about Sun's motivations, it is fair to point out that emulation is a sign of respect. We emulate mentors, teachers or role models. Imitation, on the other hand, is a sign of flattery. We imitate rivals or competitors. Perhaps, in the long run, this distinction will provide all the insight we need into Sun's decision." Read the editorial at LinuxInsider.

Sun's announcement this week that it plans to make Solaris an "open-source" operating system has been met with mixed reactions from users and scepticism from open-source advocates. "I'm totally nonplussed by the announcement," said Dale Pickford, chief infrastructure officer at Ocwen Technology. Ocwen last year consolidated around 140 servers into several high-end Sun servers running Solaris - one with more than 100 processors. For smaller servers with four or fewer CPUs, Linux on Intel is suitable, Pickford said. But for systems larger than that, "the Sparc and Solaris environment really comes into its own," he said. "And once you start playing at that level anyway, you don't want to be messing with the OS." LinuxWorld has an article as well on the open sourcing of Java and Solaris.

Learn how to engage the MPSS feature of the Solaris 9 Operating System and how to analyze the performance effect. Elsewhere, this first of a two-part series about planning and implementing Sun Fire 15K/12K server Dynamic Reconfiguration provides an introduction to Sun Fire 15K/12K server DR and details the planning phase.