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I find the work behind actually making Netflix perform well much more interesting.

One thing we can look to is that Linux can be put with any user land. Linux can be used in many places. Look at Android, if the init wars has you down fork and roll, or spork it like NextBSD.

The coolest thing I've see in Linux 4.2 is eBPF accompanied by BCC,

Check it out - they are doing dtrace like things with Linux with it:

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-05-15/ebpf-one-small-step.html

- You can do IO virtualization
- All network IO can be handled by in-kernel byte code generated by bcc (BPF COMPILER COLLECTION).
- All storage IO can be watched - you can create histograms of slow and face places on disks, raid array, even ceph clusters.
- You can basically implement dtrace for Linux using eBPF to do so.

Basically eBPF has a guaranteed non-looping in kernel general purpose VM.

I think this is an example of a quiet revolution and it started with Linux 4.2

OpenSolaris has DTrace, ZFS, Zones........While Linux' hardware support is wider than that of OpenSolaris, the latter does benefit from having a static driver interface. Where in Linux hardware support might actually break as time goes by, 10 year old Solaris drivers will still work today. There's also a Device Detection Tool which will tell you if your hardware is compatible with OpenSolaris. However the number of applications to choose form is quite limited compared to what Linux distributions generally have to offer. DTrace is really cool you can learn more about it here http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html Cheers - Jeffery

Also from Brendan Gregg comes the always useful /usr/bin/maybe. Other funnies from him here.

Also from Brendan Gregg comes the always useful /usr/bin/maybe. Other funnies from him here.

ZFS lets you set up a mirror between your HDD and an external USB. When you plug the USB in, it starts to sync immediately. Gosling mentioned doing this a little while ago. It's also drop-dead-simple to backup & restore, and to make data safer on a single disk (end-to-end checksumming and (if desired) redundancy of data on a single disk).

But, really the advantage is that Solaris has some very good developer and analysis tools. Not just dtrace, which is frankly enough by itself (see here for some examples: http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html ), but also some better process analysis tools, such as pldd, pstack, pmap, etc. DTrace gives you wonderful visibility from the kernel up through your userland C app (or vm) into java, ruby, python, and php. (The last 3 were just quick google searches to verify, so YMMV).

I moved from a mac to solaris about 14 months ago, and two weeks ago my old employer called with some problems with an app that was misbehaving. All I kept saying to myself is "this is easy to diagnose, just use X... crap, not solaris."

As for porting FOSS stuff, it was harder at the beginning of 2008, but it's pretty good now. The hard ones are already ported over (e.g. eclipse) and the rest compile pretty easily with the standard ./configure..make..make install routine. They've also made it dead-easy to make your own package and submit it for the central repo.

DTrace lets us examine just about anything, with minimal impact on the system. It's way cool, and other OSes have nothing that is close (for details covering the Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT), DProbes, K42 and Kerninst see the USENIX paper.

DTrace solves disk I/O by PID, network activity by PID, elapsed and on-cpu times for syscalls, libcalls and user funcs, and much more.

DTrace is great if you are a programmer with a little kernel knowledge, but if not you may find the DTraceToolkit helpful - it is a collection of ready-to-roll scripts.

For a list of many OpenSolaris features with screenshots, see the OpenSolaris Guide.