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What's Coming in Solaris 10
raptor21 writes "Ace's hardware has an article with feature list of technologies in Solaris 10 or whatever it is called today. Interesting stuff like DTrace, FireEngine, military grade security and a new filesystem called ZFS, Zetabyte File System."
enough with the sco remarks, granted some are funny, but they are definatly getting old.
Gee.. maybe the end users have a large Sun machine with dozens of CPUs and they need the scalability? There's nothing wrong with Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/MacOSX, etc etc but you should pick the best tool for the job.
"When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail".
Trolling is a art,
hmm... possibly because this article is entirely about features that you will not find on kernel.org?
sic transit gloria mundi
This was a big deal considering how overpriced their low end hardware is. I had to purchase a new workstation for a new project. We're talking almost $2000 for a 500 MHz machine. Yeah. You heard that right. And it only came with Solaris 8. (Which, for those of you who don't know, has CDE for its GUI which is basically the motif interface from more than 12 years ago largely unchanged!) I know that Apple has a huge Apple-tax. But damn, the Sun-tax makes Apple seem like they are selling Walmart prices.
Yeah, yeah. I know. They are competitive on the high end. However the expense at the low end certainly must have some effect upon what is developed for the high end. Sun is so far behind the times. Their prices are ridiculous. Their speeds embarrassing. Their software is embarrassing as well. No wonder they are losing billions.
Why not include a driver for say some 3Com cards on the pci models. I have installed Linux on sun boxes just because Linux can use the hardware I give it. Solaris Can't.
I remember going to a comdex eons ago and asking someone from the SUN booth about how they could afford giving away StarOffice (5.1, I think). I was told that SUN was primarily a hardware company, and that the more exposure they got, even from software, would create more hardware sales.
Then there was Linux (and BSD)...who pretty much popularized the *nix on x86 architecture and suddenly SUN was a wee bit worried. They tried Solaris 9 for x86, then pulled it back later on. They cozied up to Linux, then backpedaled by saying they're only offering it because customers asked for it. Then they ink a deal with China for oodles of their Java Desktop with Linux inside.
Now they have a feature list for Solaris 10 out. Does anyone else think that they're competing with themselves? If they're truly a hardware company, wouldn't they focus on Solaris 10, market their hardware for reliability, stability, yadda yadda, and just keep up the cobalt raqs for "low-end" servers?
They're not a software-as-a-service business model. They're not really even an OS Software "manufacturer" business. They're a hardware company who has tried their hand at everything from a programming language (Java), an office suite (staroffice), and OS/desktop (Solaris, Java Desktop).
When Linux pulls through, *nix systems that rely on non-x86 hardware are going to wither and die. So which is it, SUN? Are you with linux or against it? You can't keep talking out of both sides of your mouth for much longer.
I suspect that Sun can't afford the development costs of remaining competitive with IBM, Intel and perhaps even AMD. We'll see them shifting servers to AMD more and more. (Although I'd be surprised if the SPARC disappears anytime soon) This kind of strategic alliance with AMD makes a lot of sense.
As to non Sun made AMD systems, that's an interesting question. I'd think it would be in their interests to sell or perhaps even give away Solaris 10 for AMD. That'd get people using them instead of Linux but allow them to sell their high end servers. The problem is whether other companies start selling nice workstations and servers that would cut into Sun's hardware. It seems like they are still between a rock and a hard place in certain ways.
So what if we've not reached petabytes yet? Is there something wrong with not waiting till the last minute and trying to cram in a poorly tested feature without much time for testing? Get it in now and have it well bedded down for when its needed.
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
I think you're wrong. Solaris isn't the fastest OS around, Linux and BSD beat it most of the time. However, it's much more stable, more robust, and scales far better, as you said.
What I am saying is Linux is a nice car for daily commute, but Solaris is a better investment.
Sun and Solaris have more on Linux and BSD then just an OS. Sun provides great support, hardware, compatibilty with past versions of it's software, Java, and more.
It's apples to oranges.
Fortress of Insaniy
Blogzine
DTrace == Kernel Profiling!
"Fire Engine" TCP/IP stack == Linux's TCP/IP stack + hardware crypography drivers
Solaris Zones ("Project Kevlar") == User Mode Linux
"Military grade" security as standard == pluggable security policies.
ZFS (Zettabyte File System) =? This one might be new...
Infiniband, NFS v4, "Atomic Operations", NUMA optimisations yup yup yup yup
"Clustrex" single-node fail-over as standard, "FMA/Greenline" self-healing and fault management,
BART, and more security/authentication features.
too vague.
And all these features are available in Linux on more platforms than Solaris.
How many times does someone have to clarify the point that the linux kernel's TCP/IP stack has been rewritten AT LEAST once since it had BSD roots?
And we are to ignore VxWorks as well? It's stack is specially designed for embedded workloads.
Then there's Cisco's OS. Oh, and Windows NT 5.x stack is completely different than the BSD one. It's just the sockets interface that's grafted on top of it that carried some Berkerley copyrights.
Now that I think about it, it seems that only operating systems using the BSD TCP/IP stack are the BSDs themselves! (MacOSX included)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Who marked this as a troll? What's trollish about it? Solaris is the industry standard for high performance unix. I've worked on solaris, AIX,HP-UX, and Redhat, and I'd say that solaris gives me the least headaches. Any why did grandparent even mention support? No support in linux, aside from mailing lists. One can pay for support, a la Redhat, but that debunks that argument now doesn't it.
Sun makes money off of selling sun systems and support. I've found that they are as responsive as asking questions on a open source mailing list, without the RTFM comments. They make programming on their platform a really good experience. The documentation on their website is light years from microsoft and (though it is very dear to me) the linux documentation project.
As somebody else said, use the right tool for the job. I like linux alot. I run it at home. But it is not the catch-all solve-all operating system. I has its uses and weaknesses, but the reasons why to use solaris over linux are very numberous.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Windows also has a non-BSD TCP/IP stack. Originally Windows 3.1 used a third party stack based on BSD code, but Microsoft completely rewrote the core stack for Windows 95.
The Linux stack has also been modified and tuned to the point that it no longer resembles a BSD stack.
So, no, it won't be the first non-BSD TCP/IP stack.