Interview With Solaris Kernel Engineer Andy Tucker

Gentu writes "OSNews hosts an interview with Andy Tucker, Distinguished Engineer of the Solaris kernel. They talk about the internals of Solaris, the competition and how the OS compares to Linux/BSD/other-Unix and also about its future."

Comments

Still a respectable beast the UNIX

[mnmn]

I couldnt completely eliminate FreeBSD or Linux from my OS options while installing servers, each had strengths I needed.. until I ran into Solaris.

There are cards that have drivers for Solaris but not Linux or FreeBSD. There are tools and functionality in Solaris that I couldnt find in the others and had to use Solaris for some things.. such as SNAT between an ethernet and tokenring card. All linux kernels crashed after a while of doing this and so did FreeBSD with its lone Olicom driver support. Solaris held on. In other places, FreeBSDs performance just beat Solaris out of the water (no Java thrashing the harddisk like its Baghdad).

I can understand why theres little enthuisiasm for Solaris around the slashdot circles, its not free and it makes money for someone else. But just as we laugh at Microsofts lack of quality, we must laud a good product. Theres no denying the graphics capabilities of OSX and Irix, network and system admin tools of Solaris, huge features and ports of Linux and rock hard stability and efficiency of BSD.

Solaris especially makes a great package with a 64-bit Sparc CPU like the cheap used Ultra 5 systems. They still need to work on the scheduler, IDE speeds and hopefully theyll put virtual terminals back in Solaris10.

I havent used AIX, HPUX or OS/360/390/400. Does anyone know of their strengths and edge over other OSes?

Re:Still a respectable beast the UNIX

[_Sharp'r_]

I havent used AIX, HPUX or OS/360/390/400. Does anyone know of their strengths and edge over other OSes?

Yeah, their main strength (from their maker's standpoint) is that you get to pay IBM $1000's per hour or HP hundreds per hour in consulting fees for the priviledge of using them.

Really, unless you must use software or hardware that only runs on/with HPUX or AIX, don't bother. Even IBM is getting away from AIX for a lot of stuff.

Some of the biggest issues we've had are integrating with other companies who are running the above. I spent two days at an IBM facility for a conference to design how we were going to communicate with a business partner user MQ Series, since that was their IBM influenced "standard". The end result was to use MQ for "small" messages and a DIFFERENT proprietary solution for "large" messages like image files. This all because they had an IBM AS/blah blah culture.

In contrast, we spent about 30 minutes each getting all the other partner companies setup with some SSH2/SCP2 scripts to communicate with our Solaris box (even if they were running NT/2000, just had to change the version of what we sent them) and they've proven to be much less of a headache.

In summary, simplicity and standardization in Solaris, Linux or *BSD, etc... enables a lot of time and cost savings that the AIX/HPUX/OS of the world have missed.