Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down

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Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down

Posted by Hemos on Monday October 20, 2003 @03:44AM from the battle-to-the-finish dept.

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."

11 of 320 comments (clear)

Sun on x86 by devphaeton · 2003-10-20 03:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?

The fact that they simply "give away" the OS for cheap (i actually got my copy for free from Sun) kinda makes me think they've only released the x86 version to make it "available" to more poeple.

The more people that are familiar with Solaris, in theory, the more Admins/IT staff will end up recommending SUN hardware/software at their workplace. It's a marketing strategy. Not a pervasive strategy, but a strategy nonetheless.

If you take my meaning, mr. Frodo.

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do() || do_not(); // try();
1. Re:Sun on x86 by n3rd · 2003-10-20 04:23 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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.
For ramblings on "Oracle on Solaris or Linux?".... by tcopeland · 2003-10-20 03:49 · Score: 3, Informative

...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.

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The Army reading list
Why does this get put under developers? by bombadillo · 2003-10-20 03:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

In my experience the majority of Developers don't have an in depth knowledge of OS and Hardware performance. The System Administrators almost always have a much better understanding of OS performance. The majority of developers I have worked with are Java developers. Perhaps it is different for other languages. However, shouldn't this be under a Systems Admin category?
Surprisingly good article by sql*kitten · 2003-10-20 03:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

This is a surprisingly good article for OSNews. Usually their reviews are limited to utterly trivial things like what the reviewer thought of the default colour scheme, or how easy it was to change the desktop wallpaper. But this one actually has some useful quantitative data in, and refers to things that workstation users actually care about, such as compile times. Whoever this chap is he should take over doing all the reviews from the girl (can't remember her name offhand) who usually does them, because she is pretty much clueless.
Solaris: Time machine to the 1980s by GGardner · 2003-10-20 04:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

Running Solaris on X86 is like going back in time to the 1980s with all the ancient Unix utilities -- it's got the ancient vi, not VIM, which is annoying when you need things like multiple undo or multiple windows. The awk/nawk are ancient, and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked). Ditto for most of the Unix shell programs.
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.
bah by DNS-and-BIND · 2003-10-20 04:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

Who the heck runs Solaris on a crappy dual-processor machine? Solaris doesn't really even begin to show benefits until it gets at least 8 processors. It just keeps going up, and up, and up.
Solaris/Intel is just a toy that grabs a few extra customers that Sun would have lost otherwise. Boy, you should see it when linux noobs get their hands on it. They get really angry when you tell them "your hardware must be listed on the Hardware Compatibility List". I've seen venomous diatribes directed at "sucky" Sun and its "sucky" OS for not having video drivers for whatever the most expensive game-playing graphics board is these days. And if they actually get the system to install and they see CDE...oh man.
I don't hang on #solaris any more, but damn we would get the same reactions over, and over, and over about Solaris/Intel.

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Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Hi got to be kidding by iamacat · 2003-10-20 04:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

Processor (2) Intel Pentium IIIs at 600 MHz, 256 KB cache
Motherboard Intel L440GX+
RAM 512 MB PC133 ECC
DISK (1) 9 GB Maxtor SCSI

I bet Solaris is designed to run on more serious hardware. I bet DOS apps will run even faster than Linux on this box, even without taking advantage of dual processor.
Re:Huh, because both are unoptimized? by drinkypoo · 2003-10-20 04:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

He just mentioned it in passing. The reason he is comparing these two is not that they are both unoptimized, but that they are both standards. It's well known that Sun's "professional" compiler suite produces some of the best code around for assorted sparc-architecture processors, which makes sense on assorted obvious levels, but their lack of fine optimization on x86 may harm them, and this is (if amazingly vaguely) alluded to here.
Meanwhile Solaris 9 for x86 (aka SunOS 5.9, as the article says - it misses the point that Solaris simply means (in Sun nomenclature) SunOS plus the windowing environment, and it once means SunOS plus openwindows, and that Solaris 1.x is SunOS 4 (BSD-based, mentioned) and Solaris 2.x is SunOS 5 (SVR4--based, which is not mentioned directly that I recall)... Er, where the hell was I? Solaris 9 is not available in a version well-optimized for x86. Because you can only relink the kernel and not recompile it, since source code is not provided, it is doomed to this fate. Redhat 9 is also something of a standard, and it happens to come with (and only support) linux kernel 2.4.20. 2.6 has many optimizations but is new. So he mentioned it because it puts both distributions on somewhat equal footing, and in fact in most benchmarks (which are overly simple, but anyway) the systems came up with similar performance when realistic options were utilized.

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
PHP on Solaris isn't hard at all by green+pizza · 2003-10-20 05:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

Ugh, why does everyone assume installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL is so hard on Solaris (or IRIX or AIX for that matter)?

Once you have your GNU environment configured, it's a simple matter of compiling. I haven't run into a snag doing this in over 3 years on three different commerical unices.

Here's a good link for the total newbie:
http://ampubsvc.com/~meljr/AMPS.html

I suppose you could also go to sunfreeware.com (or for IRIX, freeware.sgi.com), but learn to build the stuff yourself and you'll know what's going on, have the latest versions, and have way more flexibility. Isn't this why you're using u*nix anyway? For the flexibility? Don't let the lack of a precompiled ready-to-install package get in your way, you're not stuck in the Windows world anymore.
(end rant)
Solaris advantages. by miguel · 2003-10-20 05:25 · Score: 3, Informative

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.