Sun to Sell Unbundled Solaris 9

An anonymous reader writes "Sun VP John Loiacono told eWEEK that the company is scrapping its plan to limit Solaris 9 support to Sun x86 hardware. Loiacono said the version for non-Sun hardware will retail for $99 for a single CPU and that the company is committed to supporting both Sun and non-Sun hardware in the future. Sun will also publicize the compatibility test suite it used internally, and said it may ultimately open the code for the product to the open source community."

Comments

Re:dual booting solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are lots of howtos online. I believe the trick is to boot from floppy or CD and temporarily change the partition types of the Linux partitions, because Solaris uses the same ones. After installation of Solaris, you change the types back.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[guacamole]

I really doubt anyone is running a website on a 100 CPU server. Using a single large unix server as web webserver is just not very practical or economical. It is very easy to distribute the load between multiple cheap, comodity x86 servers. They scale greatly for this kind of application. Databases and such is a different story..

Re:This is great...

[larien]

From experience, I've been able to run Solaris 7 & 8 on x86 hardware in a lab environment quite stably. The biggest issues you'll find are:

• No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128
• Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL.
• Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows.
• Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited.

If you can work around that, you'll do OK, but linux will probably run smoother on commodity x86 hardware.

Re:One CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is like the Sparc version, it merely means that using it with multiproc boxen is illegal.

Re:This is great...

[chegosaurus]

True, but a couple of points:

> No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128

The one thing I don't like about Solaris on x86. I've *never* been able to get the OSS soundcard drivers to work on my system. (Dual CPU - something goes very screwy and system usage goes up to ~95%!)

> Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL

True, but many non-HCL cards can be persuaded to work without too much trouble. I've got a great system, works beautifully except for the sound card, which I don't miss, and none of it is on the HCL. (Oh, maybe the SCSI cards..?)

> Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows

Not so bad as it used to be, especially with the porting kit. The XiG Accelerated-X server, or Summit as I think they call it now (www.xig.com) is very reasonably priced, works with anything, and generally *rocks*.

> Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited

Solaris IDE support really sucks, even on SPARC. Give it SCSI disks - it loves them.

Sun Hardware can be cheapest!!!!

[moorewr]

"Raped on hardware?" You may be behind the times.
Sun is actually the cheapest way to go to put
100 servers in a farm - the SUnFire V100 is $800 -
at least in the educational market - I can get a
sun rack server in the door cheaper than I can any
rack x86 server.

Re:open sourced in the future

[jukal]

the open sourcing appears to refer to the hardware compatibility testing suite - not Solaris

Yes, this seems to be the case in this article. However, I found this maybe more interesting one (Making Solaris open source)

Clip (Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell, August 28, 2002 ):

The really valuable thing to us is this community. Not all predecessor communities have agreed to operate on the same IP principle that the Linux community operates on. Getting by that is a real impediment to throwing open the kimono and saying, "Here, Solaris is now open sourced." So, some of it has happened, and we are working on the rest of it. We may never be able to do it all because we may never be able to reach an agreement with the originators of the stuff. In short, the answer is that we're just sort of chipping away at it

This might be worth submitting to /. as a separate story if it has not already been here.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[Doctor_D]

In 2000, I would have agreed with you that most sites would just throw a slew of linux boxes running apache to host the website. At my old job that's what me and a couple of others were proposing--we so wanted to get rid of the boss installed M$ IIS server--for many many reasons.

In 2001, I got a job with Sun. I went to a customer site to monitor an E10k, and I asked them what they were running on it, when they said their website, I was shocked. The usual answer is a ERP system with a database of some sorts. I have heard of clustered E10k's hosting websites, but I haven't heard of F15k's running websites.

So, since an E10k can only scale to 64 UltraSPARC II processors, you're right....as far as I personally know that no one is running a website on a 100 cpu system (which would imply a F15k).

Re:Unless...

[rnd()]

ASP .NET allows you to do this by automatically storing session state info in a MSSQL database. Of course, this solution isn't free, but it's probably a bit cheaper than a 100 processor Sun.

Solaris drawbacks

[emil]

• First and foremost, Solaris patchchk. This utility, written in perl, generates an HTML page which must be read by a browser. Now, RedHat up2date, which I like a lot, is python-based, and RedHat goes a little overboard with python support in the OS. patchchk is awful compared to up2date, but I must confess that I haven't used it in some time.
• Solaris perl is built with Sun's C compiler, and this perl version cannot be extended by gcc. If you lack Sun cc and you need to extend perl, then you must reinstall in a separate location and then manage two installations. You cannot uninstall Sun's perl without breaking lots and lots of things.
• The Solaris package system is an abomination. Please, PKZIP is something we should have left behind in our DOS days. Let's integrate bzip2 into something with the speed of RPM.
• If you want an LVM, you have to load DiskSuite, and the documentation leaves a great deal to be desired.
• UFS, Sun's native file system, supports journaling, but is loaded by default without it and very little mention is made of the importance of turning it on.
• Solaris is certainly better than HP-UX with /etc/system (versus rebuilding the HP-UX kernel every time you change SHMMAX). However, AFAIK, Solaris must be rebooted for changes to /etc/system to take effect. I know that HP-UX is very recently getting dynamic kernel tunables, I hope Solaris is as well. I certainly enjoy them in Linux.
• Some of this stuff is really old. Seriously, do we really need both awk and nawk? HP-UX standardized on nawk, but really we should all just switch to gawk.
• Along these lines, it's time to remove every SysV utility that can be replaced by a GNU equivalent. Every commercial UNIX should be doing this.
• Both Sun and HP are still trying to get out of Motif/CDE. What's the holdup? CDE on my workstation makes other people ask me if I drive an Edsel.

Solaris suffers from the same problem as all commercial UNIX: the question of GNU integration. They now rely upon GPL utilities in a BIG way, but they are hesitant to integrate them properly and make them work well. In the meantime, there is enough SysV cruft that hasn't been touched in years that you could realistically call this OS "Solaris the Living Dead."

It's time for Sun to concentrate on the OS components that it does well, and throw everything else to GNU.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[pmz]

The Solaris package system is an abomination.

At least, the Sun package database (/var/sadm/install/contents) is plain text and fully greppable. It is actually very nice. RPM would be a good choice if it didn't suffer so much from bloating featuritis.

If you want an LVM, you have to load DiskSuite, and the documentation leaves a great deal to be desired.

The DiskSuite documentation is fine. I learned DiskSuite all by myself just using the Answerbook and the man pages.

UFS, Sun's native file system, supports journaling, but is loaded by default without it and very little mention is made of the importance of turning it on.

People who really want and need journaling already understand its importance.

I know that HP-UX is very recently getting dynamic kernel tunables, I hope Solaris is as well. I certainly enjoy them in Linux.

The Solaris `ndd` command allows run-time changes to many tunable paramters for device drivers. The 'mdb' man page mentions some things about modifying a live system kernel, but I have never tried it.

Some of this stuff is really old.

Some of Sun's paying customers are pretty old, too.

it's time to remove every SysV utility that can be replaced by a GNU equivalent.

Only after those GNU "equivalents" are actually standards-compliant. Also, the GNU tools often abandon the KISS philosophy of UNIX, which often gets in my way (yes, extra features can be a PITA). It slices, it dices, it cures the common cold...but I just want a text editor!

CDE on my workstation makes other people ask me if I drive an Edsel.

CDE does exactly what it was intended to do. It is very functional and useful and is very appropriate for a workstation. However, Sun is responding to the "eye candy" kids out there by adopting GNOME as a replacement for CDE.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[larien]

Ok, let's pick some holes in the arguments:

• patchck; yup, the old version at least gave you a plain text file. However, there's nothing stopping you writing a wrapper round it to parse things out.
• I've managed to get perl extensions installed using gcc; you just have to edit the Makefile to use gcc instead of cc. Alternatively, make a symlink from /usr/bin/cc to /usr/local/bin/gcc.
• PKZIP=zip/unzip; that does more than bzip2, even if bzip2 does have a better compression algorithm. I'm not sure where this comes into the package management in any case.
• LVM: the documentation on docs.sun.com (i.e. the same as the answerbooks) is fine. I've set up mirrors, concats, stripes and RAID-5 volumes using that documentation.
• If your admins don't know about UFS logging, hire better admins. There are also occasions when it isn't always prudent to enable ufs logging. That said, I do think it may well be about time they enabled it by default.
• Setting kernel parameters: as someone has said, some can be set with ndd; adb is available for some others, although a reboot is required for others with /etc/system. At least with /etc/system, if it goes wrong, you can at least boot from CD and edit the file (unless you use VXVM for your root disks or something wacky like that).
• What's the hardship in having awk, nawk *awk all on one system? It takes mebbe a meg of disk space and keeps $DEITY knows how many user scripts working.
• SysV commands should only be replaced as and when their GNU equivalents provide drop-in functionality; i.e. they respond to all the flags that the SysV ones do in the same manner. Again, some scripts may rely on some arcane switch and/or the output from the command being absolutely identical.
• CDE fulfilled a design goal, that being all Unices looked identical (or at least similar). I personally don't see the problem with CDE, even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Gnome/KDE.

As I've implied above, the SysV "cruft" is there for the end users; even if you don't use any of it, what is the harm in it staying? The harm in removing it is to break a large portion of user scripts and completely piss off your customer base, many of whom have large wodges of spending power.

Re:Easy solution...

[irix]

The "we can't upgrade because stuff will break" crowd really gets on my nerves sometimes.

You must be a Solaris sysadmin. Let me give you a Solaris developer perspective :-)

I have complicated package install scripts that rely on many of the old Solaris SysV stuff to be there. If it isn't, things will almost certainly break.

The suggestion I would have is put the GNU stuff in /usr/local/bin for now - and this is exactly what Sun is doing. After some period of time, announce that you are deprecating the SysV coammands. Some period of time later (several releases) consider reversing the situation - make the GNU stuff the default, leave the old commands somewhere else.

We still have plenty of customers running Solaris 7. When you have high availablility high transaction systems, you make upgrade moves slowly and carefully. I know this isn't the way Linux works, but Sun plays in somewhat of a different market.

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[cybrthng]

Uptime on all of our Solaris servers is usually over a year. We wouldn't trust our Oracle Financials and Web applications to anything else.

Great Support, Great Warranties, Great Service and excellent prices for what you get. Consider a 4 cpu V880 costs 50k, but you get 8 gigs of memory and 350 gigs of diskspace and a system that is "hot upgradeable" and the cost of downtime for your business is over 1 million dollars a day. That 50 is pennies to the cost of downtime and being able to throw in more cpu's, memory or change devices WHILE STILL RUNNING (solaris 9) is worth it.

Uptime counts when your business relies on it. Linux is great and all, but i need the stability or Solaris with Veritas in combination with EMC arrays and the support contracts that go around everything.

We aren't talking about simple needs when you usually buy sun equipment in which case if your looking for low end hosting boxes and what not, they're still even a bargain considering how many customers you could loose when your systems crash or need upgrades.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[bolthole]

Yeup. And I know of .. umm... "a company out there" that just bought a 15k with 72 CPUs, to run an application server for the backend of their core website.
I suspect they may end up throwing the extra CPUs in there eventually, too :-}