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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."
More SCO IP?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
...is to refer to it as "Solaris X" or "Solaris OS X". That way it can join the ranks of:
Mac OS X
JBuilder X
MegaMan X
And others!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I thought it already had military grade security. After all Solaris was the first OS to earn Common Criteria certification.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
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,
Buzzwords like "DTrace" and "Fire Engine TCP/IP" don't sound very useful, they sound like bloat. And who needs a zetabyte filesystem? We haven't even reached petyabytes, for $DEITY's sake!
Did you read the article? These things are specifically addressed.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
A hook into Phoenix's DRM BIOS on the x86 ports ?
Just kidding.
wbs.
Huh?
Isn't that where the case is internally wired to explosives so that all the hardware and data will be incinerated if an unauthorized user tries to crack it open?
Maybe the military has various grades of security. They shouldn't, though -- everything should explode. What good is the military if nothing explodes?!
When your only tool is an axe, every problem starts to look like hours of fun.
It was beta, though, so I couldn't talk to them.
--- Ban humanity.
don't know Fire Engine TCP/IP, it's way better then the Honda Civic IPX/SPX we use at work.
...and when your only tool is a screwdriver, someone ends up getting screwed...
Profitablity?
hmm... possibly because this article is entirely about features that you will not find on kernel.org?
sic transit gloria mundi
Can I run the ZFS (Zebra file system) in a RAID-0 configuration?
Thanks,
Stripes
Not all of these features will be available with the initial release
Yes, I too am releasing an operating system. It will have the ability to run buggy code without compromising any other part of the system(*). It will improve performance of buggy code as well, rewritting it to accomodate your Bugless Needs(TM)(*).
* Not all of these features will be available with the initial release
Some of the military IS using Trusted Solaris. Right now, however, it's a seperate Solaris release. In Solaris 10 or whatever the name is going to be, it is supposed to be integrated.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Wait until you see what is coming down the pipe from Sun. The new Athlon 64 workstations and servers will breathe new life into Solaris. For the first time you will be able to run a fully 64-bit kernel with all of the stability and reliability of Solaris, along with all of the advanced features of Solaris. Features like this won't even make their way into Linux for another 5 years or so.
Solaris 10 will be the first release of Solaris that supports native 64-bit mode on the new AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 processors.
Not to mention the ability to address terabytes of memory without using PAE hacks.
The only question in my mind is: Will you be able to run the IA-64 port of Solaris 10 on a home-built Athlon 64 box, or will it require Sun hardware to run?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
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.
Pay how much for Solaris? It is a free download for SPARC and $10 for x86
Apple couldn't do it. Instead they call it "OS/X". (See "Oh Sex" for a pronunciation guide)
RedHat couldn't do it. Instead they call it "Fedora Core 1". (Pronunciation? Don't bother)
but Sun can do it! Think of the possibilities, though...
They could have "Solaris X" as the Unix system, and "Solarux" as their Linux distro! What a way to leverage their brand name onto something that's unrelated, and works even better!
I mean.. talk about SEXY... you'd pronounce it "Solari-Sex"...
Well? Why couldn't they?
Wait.... Maybe, just maybe.... who could say "Solaris X" without saying "Solaris-Sucks"????
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It looks like Sun is adding compelling new features that make Solaris 10 a more powerful alternative than Linux. I wonder if offering a better product is a valid business model. Seems like suing your competitors and their customers is cheaper (no pesky high-paid engineers) and ,uch better for the stock price. I'd suggest anyone investing SUNW should instead buy into a company with a proven business model like SCOX.
In Soviet Russia, old jokes get tired of YOU !
People don't pay through the nose for the software. They pay through the nose for the hardware which is second to none IMHO. Where I work the AC went out in the datacenter over a weekend. Unfortunately, the first box to go down was the intel box that monitors everything else. On Monday the only boxes still running were the Sun boxes. It was over 120 degrees in the datacenter. It was approaching 200 degrees inside some of those Sun boxes.
Why would you want to pay through nose for a proprietary,
I suppose conforming to open API's doesn't count?
no-support,
I daresay Sun's support is broader and better than Red Hat's any day.
closed source *nix
So your real problem is that Sun doesn't give away all of their IP for free then, right? Sorry, but not everyone believes that the communal ideal of share and share alike is a viable business model.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Lots of cool sounding projects names, but I still don't see a lot of exciting features. I'm under the impression that Sun is still playing catch up with other major Unix players. Dtrace, a new monitoring tool ? Sheesh, these things are already implemented by most sysadmins. Oh, and we can now dynamically create soft partitions? God, LVM had this for years. Just try increasing a partition size under Solaris8 (or 9) with Disksuite, without switching to single user mode. In HP/UX or Linux, that's just 3 or 4 commands.
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 wonder what they will charge for the upgrade. Sun wisely made the Solaris 8 -> Solaris 9 move free for developers and home users. (They have home users?)
Your comment shows a huge lack of knowledge about Sun and Solaris licensing. If you purchase a system from Sun you have a right-to-use license for any version of Solaris you want to put on it. If you bought your system from some other vendor (aka Intel), then you have a right-to-use license for only 1 CPU. Any more than that you must purchase licenses. Sun doesn't charge for upgrades, other than the media price itself. When Solaris 10 is released, go ahead and put it on your Ultra 5 or Sun Blade 150, or whatever you have. No worries there.
Also, unless you are just trolling, you should be aware that Sun has shipped the Gnome 2.0 desktop environment with Solaris 8 for the last year or so. KDE also comes on the Open Source software CD included with Solaris 8.
No wonder they are losing billions.
Last I checked, Sun was merely losing millions, not billions. While this is still a bad thing, they do have ~$5 billion in the bank and won't be going away any time soon.
Go back to your bridge and quit spreading FUD, troll.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
According to the related article, it includes a complete rewrite of the TCP/IP stack. Conventional wisdom has it that all TCP/IP stacks out there borrowed heavily from the BSD code.
Will Fire Engine then be the first non-BSD TCP/IP stack?
Solaris's problems are not in robustness or scalability--it already handles those very well. Trouble is, so do Linux and BSD and a lot of other systems. Arguably, not as well as Solaris, but well enough.
By analogy, sure, a Ferrari is a nice car, but for a daily commute, a Honda Civic is both cheaper and more practical, and it really doesn't matter that it doesn't go as fast as the Ferrari in theory. With software like Solaris 10, Sun is creating ever more expensive Ferraris.
Yah and it's going to cost your left nutsack, or ovary if your a woman.
75% of all statistics are made up!
Then the question is, did you follow the links that were provided in the article...like to the Register article? I think a compleate re-write of the Solaris TCP/IP stack to allow offloading of CPU intensive work to third party hardware is a big deal. And what's the problem with being proactive about features in a new FS? Would you prefer then to handle it like M$'s NTFS and wait until the last minute?
--AC
This is a case of people actually providing a product that gives the customers something new and exciting.
Bravo SUN. And they recognize Linux as having a place.
To be honest, I'd rather have a SUN monopoly than a MS monopoly. At least the software would be a bit more stable.
[puts on tin foil cap]
Carousel is a lie!
So Solaris gets capabilies. Only, what, five years after Linux? And they finally abandon that obsolete slow-as-molasses file system of theirs? The level of technology leadership they are displaying is nothing short if breathtaking!1!!
On a lighter node, the article says their current partitioning scheme is software based. Good to know. Fits well in the general impression I got from them, with their shell script based "high availability" solution, and their industry leading "backup" solutions. There really is no need to know more than this about Sun and their software.
Long live admintool!
That's "Zettabyte", guys, not "Zetabyte", as the referenced article correctly states, too. Now go and write down the SI prefixes 100 times.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I was a computer operator on a carrier long long ago. The computer room was two decks under the flight deck, right under the arresting gear ... pretty high up. My abandon ship station was to take a fire ax and whack the computer. I guess that old supply computer had too much vital technology. It wasn't the data in the computer, because it had no permanent storage, it was a tape operating system, and my job did not include whacking the tapes. So they were more concerned with the enemy capturing our carrier and recovering the computer technology than recovering the records of how much toilet paper we used. Must have been the water tight seals around the tape drive doors -- they claimed it could operate under water, tho how deep I never heard. And being so high up, 40 or so feet above the waterline ... if that had ever gotten under water, I wasn't planning on being the duty operator.
Infuriate left and right
Look. I just got a Sun Blade 150. I guarantee Gnome is not in there nor is there an option to use it. I searched the help files and there is nothing about Gnome. This is a brand new system.
Ok, I'm going to walk you through this since you're obviously new to Solaris. Open up your Solaris 8 media kit (you know, the big box you got with Solaris 8). Hopefully you purchased a media kit along with your system or you might be screwed. Find a plastic binder called "Bonus Software". In there there is a CD called "Exploring the Gnome Desktop". Pop that in your CD-ROM and install it. Gnome is now installed and you can choose it from the login screen. There's another CD in that same Bonus Software pack called "Software Companion" that has tons of Open Source software, including KDE. If you install that you'll have GCC and a bunch of other great GNU and open source stuff. I highly recommend you do that.
I hope Solaris 10 is free. The last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free.
Solaris 10 will be free in the same way that Solaris 8 and 9 are. If you bought a system from Sun, you already purchased a Right-to-Use license (it's bundled into the cost of the hardware). All you have to pay for is a media kit. When you said "last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free." I think you're talking about paying $70 for a media kit. This seems like a lot but look at how big those boxes of media are. It probably costs close to that amount to manufacture all of the CDs and manuals in there.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Exactly where can you download Solaris 9 x86 from?
e t. html
I'd love to play with it but I can't seem to find a FREE download link on their site. They want either $20 or $95 for a media kit by mail.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/g
Are you an open source warrior?
You're right, zetabyte is clearly a buzzword, while zettabyte is totally different. A zettabyte is 2^70 bytes or (in the notation of hard drive manufacturers) 10^21 bytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).
And for the record (biggest to smallest):
yottabyte (2^80 bytes)
zettabyte (2^70 bytes)
exabyte (2^60 bytes)
petabyte (2^50 bytes )
terabyte (2^40 bytes )
gigabyte (2^30 bytes)
You do not sound like you use Sun hardware. Rewriting an IP stack for greater scalability, and implementing a better trace are certainly useful to the market Sun is aiming at.
DTrace, provided it is well implemented, should be very useful for debugging the sorts of problems that one runs into in many enterprise settings, and I assume that folks who develop for Solaris, and the support folks at Sun are more pleased than anyone that it is in there.
How anyone could characterize an IP stack that handles multiple 10Gbit NICs bloat is beyond me. I realize that it would be absurd for home users or a small office setting, but that is not exactly the market Sun is in. The fact is that bandwidth can be high enough (100Gbit) that it was time to implement an IP stack that handled multiprocessor configs gracefully - that was where the bottleneck was. Sun was engineering a solution, not bloat.
"We haven't even reached petyabytes, for $DEITY's sake!" Which 'we' are we referring to here? While petabyte data stores are not common (yet), there are certainly a number of existing sites out there with petabyte SANs, especially in scientific research, and various gov't applications. Having a filesystem that scales past that is not bloat, it is foresight, and it is a selling point for that class of customers to know that Sun will be able to scale, and is doing the work of scaling in advance, rather than retrofitting some bolt-on solution.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
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?
Of course they want to be on the low end and desktop market. The thing is they've lost this battle with Wintel already, there is no way someone would use a SPARC Solaris workstation over Wintel box except for some proprietary software perhaps.
The price is high because of usual business rules. You don't produce enough of products (SPARC chips, SPARC chipsets), they get expencive (Sun doesn't even own hardware fabrics, their chips are manufactured on Texas Instruments fabrics). You produce a lot of chips (Pentiums, Pentium chipsets), they get cheapter just because of mass production.
On the other hand Solaris is very stable on its native hardware. True that Sun is slow on releasing security patches but other than security the system only fails becsuse of hardware (disk, memory) problems, never because of software (I don't want to give uptimes, but servers run for years). That's why Sun still has customers, customers that have _stability_ as their biggest priority.
The "Military Grade" security is an easy way to understand what Trusted Solaris is. TS has been developed in parallel with "Vanilla" Solaris since 2.5.1, with the goal of folding features into one code base. With Solaris 8 the Role Based Administration features was introduced, but so far not a lot of shops have figured out how to use it. The final phase that they are set to "unleash" into mainstream Solaris is the "Multi-Level" tagging, where filesystems, process, console X windows, and network packets all receive a Security Label. In the Military world, this would be Unclass, Secret, Top Secret, etc. For the Commercial world this would be Public, For Internal Use Only, Confidential, Confidential HR, Conf. Legal, Conf. Eng, etc. Actually a pretty good way to protect internal resources, but the administration overhead sucks!
you should really turn on logging... it increases the speed threefold. It's retarded that they don't shout it across the hills (you have to stumble across it in the manpages or newsgroups). just add "logging" to the mount options in vfstab.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
...and meanwhile the university I'm studying at is migrating 200+ Sun workstations to Linux at the end of the year.
Loads of commercial and open source software easily available, good security, stability and no price tag. Oh, did I mention that the hardware is so much cheaper... AND faster?
Ciryon
(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!)
When you buy Solaris, you do it for the kernel, the hardware support, and some of the tools, but not the GUI. GNOME will change this somewhat, but fundamentally, the nice things about Solaris are really invisible to the end-user (i.e., the user will probably take for granted the lack of crashes and the generally graceful degradation of performance as utilization approaches 100%).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
We haven't even reached petyabytes, for $DEITY's sake!
... in the world. Or that 640K of RAM ought to be enough for anyone.
Correction. Perhaps you haven't reached petabytes yet. There are however core Sun customers who do have that much data.
Your remark reminds me of certain visionaries who thought there would never be more than six or seven computers
Low end is last year's high end.
I'm looking at a 12CPU E4500 loaded with sub GHz Ultra2 chips. They paid a LOT of money for that 2 years ago. It's ok for databases, and has terrific IO (if you use non-Sun disk systems), but how long until a 4Way Opteron comes out and smokes it? For Looking at rows of V880s (a waste of money, IMHO - fiber channel disk? pure price inflation). About $1 million dollars worth. In two years people will roll their eyes when they have to use those.
Sun's got themselves in a bad situation.
Linux works on the desktop and that means that there are THOUSANDS of folks < 30 years old who know Linux (and BSD) pretty well. Moving up in seniority and skills in the decision trees of companies.
Moving to Solaris means giving up /usr/ports/ or pkgsrc (BSD), means giving up a userland with tools developed since 1992 ("df -h" is FAR more handy on a machine with 2 TB of disk attached from the SAN than Suns "df -k" and counting).
If someone strong in Open Source OSs can make a case that using a 4x3GHz Intel box for all but the MOST high end (and costly) services, then Sun loses MORE ground.
Shall we talk about SGI's far far superior hardware and OS features and how strong THEY are in the market place? Want an 8 CPU SGI? Take the 4CPU one you have, get another, join them. All the way up to 512 CPUs. Want to start with a 4CPU Sun and move up to a 64CPU Sun? Sorry, you buy a mostly empty chassis for several $100 thousand and hope that you can still get the CPUs later on.
(my 4800 with 800MHz CPUs won't work if I add the new 1200MHz CPUs - I either replace them all or scrounge for old ones. Nice. Almost a year old too).
Sun won, in large part, the Workstation wars - the high end desktops where PCs just couldn't compete. Built in Ethernet, graphics and SCSI, for around $15k. Hows the PC world going to compete with that?
"Sun will never sell a $2000 computer - that's not the space they want to be in. - they make servers and workstations."
They've lost the desktop.
They have to innovate to keep the server space.
Hardware partitioning is KEY - a 48 way machine is mainly useless to me, but being able to chunk it - dynamically - into (say) 30 or even 50 virtual machines in very attractive.
We have a big thing going on next month where we're building up a pair of boxes to handle a HUGE load that will be for just the month.
If I had a monster machine and could say: "Oh, give those servers 24 processors during the day, but only 8 at night so the other systems can run their stuff" then we'd save money. Now.
I'd free up 6-7 people's time for 2 weeks and that all factors into ROI.
- -
We're already throwing around terrabytes of disk on SANS from machine to machine as required. Why not with CPUs and memory?
Is it just me or does a lot of what Sun is doing remind you of what SGI went through in the high-end visualization market a few years back?
Obviously things are not DIRECTLY equatable but I can't stop thinking about the comparison.
Couldnt you say that in both cases that their niche erroded due to low or no cost competitors?
Both had some great software. Could Sun having Solaris and Java be somewhat equateble to SGI's OpenGL and Irix?
Both companies had hardware at the heart of their business models at one point.
Sun seems to be doing what SGI did in trying to do a bunch of different things to pull itself out while in the process losing focus and STILL having hardware at the heart of the business model.
SGI is obviously still around. If you look at their website now, you can see they are targetting a much smaller niche than they used to (supercomputers). The day of thinking that an o2 will be on the desk of every college student has long passed. I'm sure SGI never thought they would be promoting Linux-based supercomputers on their homepage 5 years ago - lord only knows what Sun will have on theirs homepage 5 years hence.
-_-
Fucking baby killer
Considering your maturity is that of a baby, I guess I somehow missed you, eh?
Infuriate left and right
When you order SUN hardware, be sure to pull down the selection box on the keyboard and select PC Style Keyboard. You will be happy you did. There are ALOT of lazy aquisition folks who screw their customers by not learning what options would best meet their needs.
Is there any official definition of what "Military Grade" means? Does the fact that it is used by the Military automatically mean it is "Military Grade".
I'm starting to think that "Military Grade" is about to join the ranks of such descriptors as "Low-Fat", "Broadcast Quality", "New and Improved" and "Internet Ready".
-_-
1) create a file system snapshot using fssnap and back that up.
/your/volume
2)
mount -o remount,ro,nologging
backup
then remount,rw,logging
The remount will cause the log to be finalized, buffers flushed. You are advised to remount ro if you want ufsdump to have the highest chance of success (it can still fail if logging is disable, but it still is mounted rw)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
You mean except for the $995 workstations and servers they've been selling the past three years?