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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."
An example is the two-level thread scheduling model, where thread scheduling happens both at user level and in the kernel. Although this approach had some theoretical advantages in terms of thread creation and context switch time, it turned out to be enormously complicated, particularly when dealing with traditional Unix process semantics like signals.
I'm glad to see that someone also thinks this was a bitch to work with.
AIX's best strength is (IMO) the volume management. It's a very good system, and is sensible and very very stable, and also system config on aix is much simpler than other commercial unixes, as there's just one tool (smit/smitty), and everything (even raid card tools) plug into the one tool.
Really though, these days, the unified config tool is the only thing that linux can't do out of the box (although webmin is a very capable alternative, if a bit slow on older kit), as the hardware support for the power3/4 systems is pretty good. Though there's some stuff that linux can't run on ( some dpx20 Bull kit, and some motorola stuff ), that older versions of aix do.
"You chose Unix as your network computing platform because you knew you were in it for the long haul," Sun said in an ad that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. "You'd expect your IT partner to show the same kind of commitment."
"Unfortunately, our friends in Blue have a problem with licensing contracts that could make things very expensive for anyone running AIX. Fortunately, Sun is ready to help."
Sun has certainly made a commitment to one side.
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