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Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down
JigSaw writes "Tony Bourke put together a long article, benchmarking File System, System, Compilation, OpenSSL and Web Performance for both Linux and Solaris on x86 hardware. While SPARC's Solaris is said to be more optimized than its x86 counterpart on the other hand so is Linux 2.6 compared to 2.4. Solaris-x86 performed well in the tests, but Linux 2.4 seems to win most of the tests and the overall impressions."
While SPARC's Solaris is said to be more optimized than its x86 counterpart on the other hand so is Linux 2.6 compared to 2.4.
Because both are unoptimized, these are suddenly comparable differences? You're comparing apples and oranges, and quite frankly, it's laughable. Why would you think the two are in any way related or would yield similar differences in benchmarking?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Guess that question will be asked, and to those to lazy to RTFA, here's his reply :
I chose RedHat 9 for the simple fact that it is a very popular distribution, and is ubiquitous in terms of corporate and personal deployment. Of course it is not the end-all be-all of Linux distributions, but it's both popular and effective, which makes it appropriate as an evaluation platBesides, most of what I evaluate has more to do with Linux itself, and not the distribution. The only significant affect RedHat has on this evaluation is the specific version of the kernel (2.4.20-20.9) and the use of RPMs (which some other Linux distributions use as well).form.
...from the distant past, there's this Slashdot thread from way back in 1999.
There's a "Summary of Points" post a ways down that page that nicely encapsulates most of the discussion.
The Army reading list
Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?
On and off, evidently back on again. I've heard that back in the mid 90's a decent amount of customers used Solaris x86 on Compaq's. After a while they dropped support and over the next few years. Anyone confirm or deny (I know the second part is true)?
Here is a recent press release about Solaris x86. Disregard the marketing garbage, there's a lot of it.
They name a decent amount of customers, a biomedical place is one of them. Perhaps a transition from SPARC to x86 for sheer speed would be cheaping going from Solaris to Solaris instead of Solaris to Linux, that is assuming Solaris on x86 meets their needs.
Also, according to this article they have Solaris x86 for Opteron. Perhaps this would help convince big graphics apps such as Photoshop make a port to Opteron since Linux and the BSD's are already there.
They also have a POWER4+'esqe chip coming out in the first half of the new year. Two UltraSPARC III cores with 8 megs of cache and each running at 1.2 GHz each.
Sun has good things going for them but they need to expand into new areas and take another look at the current situation.
Solaris's strength lies in scalabilitly.
Very true, it's because damn near everything is threaded. Threading is highly encouraged by Sun when programming for Solaris on SPARC.
Each process has threads, if it's a single threaded application it counts as one thread. Each thread is attached to a LWP or Light Weight Processor. The kernel then schedules the LWP time to run on the real CPU.
What's the end result of this? Solaris scales very well on boxes with tons of CPUs because everything is threaded, and some processes have tons.
actually freebsd does run on multiple processors. You can find more info at http://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMP.html
Evolution or ID?
"The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distribution."
They come with the Solaris distribution as well. Not Sun's fault if you don't install them.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
it's got the ancient vi
Solaris works for consistency and having a plane jane vi might be a good thing even if vim is better.
The awk/nawk are ancient
I don't use awk often, what's up with them?
and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked). Ditto for most of the Unix shell programs.
Yeah it ships with perl since Solaris 8, same with bash, tcsh and zsh.
The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distribution.
Yep, they're nice to have and don't take up much space if you pick and choose correctly. Here is everything you'll need as far as OSS utilities on SPARC/Solaris are concerned. They can be downloaded as a CD image or individually and are in Sun's package format.
= 9J =
Linux is an operating system. Like Windows, MS-DOS, OS/2, etc. There is no difference, in this sense, between Linux and other operating systems.
So WinXP is the same as DOS? Both can do the same thing and are as easy to use?
Linux is freely distributable, not free of charge.
Linux is not free, it's $4.99 at cheapbytes.com.
Because what one does verify, is that Linux is a hard-to-use operating system, at least in the install phase.
Step 1 - Buy Knoppix CD.
Step 2 - Insert on computer CDROM bay.
Step 3 - Turn on computer.
Step 4 - There is no step 4.
I guess he doesn't know that Sun generally releases a T-Patch relatively quickly so that admins can get immediately relief while testing out the real patch.
Solaris does have a few areas where they have done a fantastic job.
For example, when it comes to debugging threaded applications, and having a reliable debugger, they beat us every single time. This is a mix of debugger support, kernel support, libraries support and god knows what else.
Their thread implementation is also very robust. I have no clue about their performance, but I know that you can depend on their implementations being robust. On Linux plenty of thread-related issues are still flaky (big progress being made there), but today, I really wish I had Solaris to debug a few problems.
And there are tons of other little things they get right. My suggestion is that we should focus on what is wrong in our platform, and focus on what is good in their platform, to find out what needs to be solved.
Miguel.