Slashdot Mirror


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."

39 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Let me guess by SpanishInquisition · · Score: 3, Funny

    More SCO IP?

    --
    Je t'aime Stéphanie
  2. I do believe that the industry standard... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...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!

    1. Re:I do believe that the industry standard... by Dunkelzahn · · Score: 5, Funny

      SolariX?

      Then they could start the numbering all over again, like with SunOS.

      --
      .
  3. Security? by coolmacdude · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  4. Military grade security? by TimboJones · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?!

  5. Re:Pay through nose by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
    > "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail".

    When your only tool is an axe, every problem starts to look like hours of fun.

  6. It's spooky by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 5, Funny
    I ran a beta here at work, and an ex-girlfriend and a couple dead grandparents appeared. Then I saw George Clooney. It was wild, man.

    It was beta, though, so I couldn't talk to them.

    --
    --- Ban humanity.
  7. What we'd all like to see: by BigDumbAnimal · · Score: 3, Funny

    Profitablity?

  8. Re:Pay through nose by glwtta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    hmm... possibly because this article is entirely about features that you will not find on kernel.org?

    --
    sic transit gloria mundi
  9. Dear Sun by Letter · · Score: 4, Funny
    Dear Sun,

    Can I run the ZFS (Zebra file system) in a RAID-0 configuration?

    Thanks,
    Stripes

  10. sorry i'm a cynic by happyfrogcow · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  11. Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris by illumin8 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris by WatertonMan · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Actually I believe the advantage Suns brings to hardware is in a lot of thoroughput. That's partially why they can offer slow CPUs. Their main market is servers which aren't typically CPU bound as much as I/O bound. They have very nice multiprocessor systems. I was harping on them earlier, but they definitely do have their place. However they are being pressured on the low end by Linux and so forth. Their lowend offerings are primarily development workstations to get code ready for servers. But they've shot themselves in the leg to a degree there by making it somewhat unattractive to develop for them. (Yes people do it of course but it isn't always nice)

      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.

  12. There really WILL be an "10"? by mcrbids · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  13. Interesting business strategy by mackman · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  14. What a COUNTRY! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    In Soviet Russia, old jokes get tired of YOU !

  15. Re:Pay through nose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  16. Re:Pay through nose by elmegil · · Score: 4, Informative
    I like to feed trolls.

    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
  17. Still playing catch-up by darkcompanion · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Still playing catch-up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Soft partitioning is for grown ups who use big computers. It has nothing to do with disks. It is dynamically changing a "virtual" machine within a piece of hardware that is visible to an os. For example you could take a 6800, and have 3 different instances of solaris running on it. If you needed more cpu in one of the "partitions", you can shrink one of the other partitions, and add cpu's to the one in need. Its the same thing as a domain on a e10k, except its at a software level instead of hardware.

  18. SUN Hardware Co. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:SUN Hardware Co. by RevRa · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

      Because if customers want to use Sun systems for their shop, but there isn't an office product that runs on it they still have to have PC's lying around. If Sun supplies them with the hardware, OS, and decent office tools, it's yet another reason the customer can use Sun.

      suddenly SUN was a wee bit worried. They tried Solaris 9 for x86, then pulled it back later on

      Uhm. I've got a copy of Solaris 2.6 x86 downstairs in my software library. If you think that Solaris 9 was the first x86 release of Solaris, you're not very educated on Sun products/offerings. The reason Sun "pulled back" from x86 is because they were ready to relinquish the x86 market to Linux. Customers SCREAMED at Sun NOT to do this. They WANTED Solaris reliability and functionality on x86 CPU's and didn't trust Linux completely. Sun happily obliged.

      Does anyone else think that they're competing with themselves?

      Huh?

      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).

      Yes. Your one-stop-shopping place for all of your workplace needs. You need the hardware? Got that. You need an OS that offers seamless integration with the hardware? Here 'ya go. Want a built-in filesystem with the features of VXFS without having to pay a license fee to Veritas? ZFS comes in 10. Want to write your code in one language and run it on all of your other systems? Use Java. OS Desktop? That's just icing designed to take more $ from Bill G's pocket.

      When Linux pulls through

      Linux is a good OS and I am no stranger to it whatsoever, but it has a long way to go to catch up to Solaris. This announcement about Solaris 10 is demonstrating just that.

      Oh, and by the way. Some of us in my office are playing with the internal-only betas of Solaris 10. Very sexy IMNSHO. For the heck of it, I started calling it SunOS X as a parody of MacOS X. The rest of the engineers on my team have followed suit, though as of yet none of us know what the "official" release name will be. :-)

      ***
      Disclaimer
      ***
      I DO work for Sun but this is my PERSONAL opinion. It is NOT intended in any way, shape, or form to be construed as an official Sun position.

      --
      - Kate
      "DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
    2. Re:SUN Hardware Co. by RevRa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, and didn't someone once say "Nobody will ever need more than 640K of memory." ? Or as I recall an IBM ad that I saw in the early/mid 1980's that read something to the effect of, "The new FIVE MEGABYTE hard drive, all the storage space you'll ever need!"

      Just one of my customer accounts has a single Enterprise 10,000 cluster with ~20 TB of disk attached. Don't tell me that nobody will ever need a ZB of storage. Maybe not tomorrow, but in 20 years? Yea.

      Your problem [1] is that you're too short sighted; You don't see the big picture. Companies with billion-dollar applications, Government agencies that need a reliable computer to launch rockets, companies who do molecular 3d modeling and research, those who build dams, nuclear power systems, design skyscrapers, build bridges, chemical engineering, and companies who handle emergency medical response systems, etc.

      These are a few applications where companies want five 9's, and where they pay $500,000 a month to know that when they make a phone call, 30 minutes later the nerdy girl with the tool kit and the laptop are going to show up at the door with an entire company behind her. They want to know that if I can't fix it, Sun will fly someone in right-goddamned-NOW to find out why if they have to.

      CIO's, stock holders, and someone with their life on the line doesn't want to hear about Linux and how it's open source and how you coded this in your spare time and blah, blah blah. All they wanna' hear is [3], "You ain't got no problem [customer], I'm on the mother**cker, go back in there, chill them [people] out, and wait for the calvary who'll be comin' directly."

      Backbone of real supercomputers my ass. IBM still does most of the high-power processing in the world on their mainframes anyway.

      [1] And the problem of most Linux fanatics[2]

      [2] Not every Linux user or advocate is a fanatic. I use the term to refer to the more rabid zealots.

      [3] To borrow a line from Pulp Fiction

      Again. My own personal opinions. Not those of Sun.

      -

      --
      - Kate
      "DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
  19. Re:Price? by illumin8 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  20. Fire Engine TCP/IP stack by Alomex · · Score: 3, Interesting



    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?

  21. ok see... by JoeLinux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  22. Holy crap by Saint+Aardvark · · Score: 5, Informative
    Take a look at the link to the Usenet posting on Dtrace. Jesus Christ almighty, it's like they saw inside my head and gave me The One True Tool.

    [puts on tin foil cap]

    1. Re:Holy crap by ChrisRijk · · Score: 3, Informative

      Get the November edition of Solaris Express.

      It has DTrace. Free download. For SPARC and x86.

  23. Zetta != Zeta by slavemowgli · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  24. My abandon ship station by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  25. Re:Price? by illumin8 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  26. Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful? by moof1138 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  27. ARRRRGGHHHH!!!! by pr0ntab · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  28. Re:Pay through nose by dubious9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?
  29. Re:Cost... by sharkey · · Score: 5, Funny
    cost your left nutsack

    You have more than one nutsack?

    --

    --
    "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
  30. Re:Cost... by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is a Solaris discussion, Every competent Solaris admin has a spare nutsack as a hotswap.

    --
    Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
  31. Sun is giving me a little SGI deja-vu by TempusMagus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    -_-
  32. Military Grade? by TempusMagus · · Score: 5, Funny

    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".

    --
    -_-
  33. Re:Price? by acoopersmith · · Score: 3, Informative
    "Sun will never sell a $2000 computer - that's not the space they want to be in. - they make servers and workstations."

    You mean except for the $995 workstations and servers they've been selling the past three years?