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Previewing the Next Solaris OS
Eric Boutilier writes "Amy Rich has written an excellent Solaris Express (Solaris 10) how-to and general overview. It covers how the program works, using the community web site, and what's new in Solaris Express." Among many new features, the TCP/IP stack has been redesigned, IPv6 support improved, and both NFSv4 and USB 2.0 support added.
I'm using Solaris at work, and I'm no fan of Gnome, but compared with CDE I'll pick it any day. ...in reality I'm actually running KDE 3.2, installed in my home directory :)
> SGI are turning to Linux, Sun will too. There'll be a few releases of both OS's first, though, IMHO.
There is the same story with the Sun hardware... the Ultrasparc architecture. It is hard for one company to keep up with development of their own CPU's for long. The latest word has been that they have put new core's on the ice, and instead try to spinn on the ones they already have.
It is hard to compete with the main stream hardware, and at the desktop it's definitely impossible to beat x86 at best bang for the buck. Soon it will be hard for Sun to beat them at best performance at all (performance regardess of price).
DTrace definitely seems to be worth checking out. As the article indicates, more info is available here.
As the article does not indicate -- but it seems to be worth mentioning -- DTrace was introduced in a comp.unix.solaris post here. Seems pretty damn cool...
There are rumors that Sun might join forces with Fujitsu Siemens, i.e. closer collaboration of the UltraSparc and SPARC64 design teams. This would seem like a pretty smart move - if you make your processor arch publicly available, you might as well try to benefit from it. Two independent groups developing 64bit sparcs for servers is a little wastefull, and maintaining an alternative architecture is hard enough.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
The register has an old story about the new TCP/IP stack in Solaris 10, that is good reading.
A quick summary of the story:
The new stack has:
- Efficient at handling multiple NICs
- Low CPU usage (30% lower than Linux)
- Build for targeting 10/100 Gbps in the future. Has a new construction where it is possible to offload the cpu by routing packet to dedicated packet processing processors.
The last part seems like a preparation for the Sun hardware of tomorrow.
i try with solaris express and I find a cool feature called "ppriv" like this:
/usr/sbin/rpcbind
/etc/shadow /etc/shadow
gta3# ppriv $$
1124: bash
flags = 0x0
E: all
I: basic
P: all
L: all
Ok, so I am root I have all privileges I think
but now look at rpcbind, it is runnign as daemon but has less priviliges even than normal processes
gta3# ppriv 100182
100182:
flags = 0x2
E: net_privaddr,proc_fork,sys_nfs
I: none
P: net_privaddr,proc_fork,sys_nfs
L: all
see, it does not have privilege to do 'exec'... there are 30 or more privileges and it has only 3. So i guess this means some stack attack will not work against it like exec shell
also i can run and see privileges like thids
gta3$ ppriv -D -e cat
cat[100619]: missing privilege "file_dac_read" (euid = 77293, syscall = 225) needed at ufs_iaccess+0xd2
cat: cannot open
not sure what this means?
There is an alternative introduction on the main Solaris 10 page too. Eg:
The containers (previous called Solaris Zones) can also each have their own root password and own IP address, as well as min/max/QoS resource settings.
Dtrace probes was be the most important factor for our decision to upgrade all development servers to Solaris 10. We'll mostly skip Solaris 9, actually.
The fact is that we need as much insight in our processes as we can possibly get, as every little performance increase helps. Plus, we get to inspect possible sources of instability.
Typically our products interact with several third-party products, and the DTrace probes will be very useful in tracking down memory leaks and utilization details in such complex environments.
Sigged!
Anyone needing more than 8 CPU's ? Seriously, go to IBM/HP/Dell and then try to configure a system that has the same capacity as something from Sun. When you reach the same specs, you will most probably have the same price.
The only place where Sun is really threatened is in the real low-end, and for that space they also have now x86 based systems.
Is the Unisys/W2000 a contender with Sun in the 8-32 CPU space ? Not really, because all W2000 processes run in their own small protected space, whereas one application on Sun can take advantage of all CPU's on the system if necessary.
A happy Linux user, which happens to work with Solaris on his job.
Linux is still a long way behind Solaris with things like NFS
Behind yes, but not a long way, and the gap has been closing over the past several years.
I'm really looking forward to performance and security of NFSv4, but am apprehensive that the setup appears to be more complicated than just editing a couple files in /etc.
BTW, given all the recent hoopla over Sun's commitment to free and open source software, they ought to be recognized for sponsoring the CITI group at UMich that had a lot to do with Linux NFSv4, and for sponsoring the Connectathon series of conferences that I'm hoping will make my Linux desktop NFS client interact better with my Sun NFS fileserver.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
BSD and Linux can use Systrace, which offers some similar process-level controls (can set execution system call profiles per application).
While Solaris has offered file level ACLs forever, they weren't used by default to protect critical system files and very few admins knew to enable them.
One of the things I like about Solaris (I still prefer OpenBSD) is the cool little security and debugging tools that are included in the default install -- when you don't have source, "truss" was a godsend, and "dtrace" takes debugging to a whole new level.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
True, it is pretty obvious most folks here have never actually been in a corporate data center for a medium to large sized company.
When you see what these guys are doing with big boxes (Sun 6500's up to the 15K) you realize how much of apples and oranges this dicussion really is. Anyobody who thinks that Linux on Intel is a threat to this type of a market is crazy.
That being said, Linux is making a little ground on other architectures, but to be honest I haven't seen a single customer yet who is actually doing it in production- to spite all the IBM commercials on TV. I was working at a client site this week where they are trying to get Linux set up under Z OS on the 390 (runs under Z OS similar to how Unix System Services runs, I believe.) I don't think they'll go with this solution though since Websphere comes well integrated into Unix System Services and is a well maintained and supported platform-stable as hell and not a change management nightmare. The only advantage to running Linux up there is the fact that it apparently uses ASCII encoding instead of EBCDIC- which can cause a nightmare porting Unix apps to Unix System Services.
Sun hardware can do linux and Solaris, at least. Even midrange Sun hardware (4800-6800, and smaller systems going forward) can be split into virtual independent systems.
I've worked with HP-UX, and the new hardware seems way better than their old crap (though it's hot and power hungry), but I don't like the O/S much. Too geared to their buggy sysadmin gui, and too flaky in the way it stores patches. I have repeatedly seen HP-UX boxes die to the point of tape recovery during patch installs, I've never seen a Sun die on patching, or reach as unrecoverable a software state for any reason.
HP support is really, really, bad compared to Sun, as well. The Sun guys know what they are doing fix hardware, and offer advice on software stuff. The HP guys have trouble with the hardware and flee if you ask about software (and no, I'm not just talking about one or two techs, it's a pattern).
I don't think HP knows where it is going in hardware or O/S, either. They've changed their minds a few times in the last few years. Intel, PA-RISC, HP-UX, Linux...
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling