Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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 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.