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.

Comments

Re:Gnome ?

[zz99]

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 :)

DTrace

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Solaris doesn't suck...

[dbIII]

The market for Solaris is very different from Linux, it's datacentre-land, not home user.

Linux is still a long way behind Solaris with things like NFS - massive speed differences. A home user isn't going to care much about NFS, which is probably the main reason why NFS still sucks under linux (though not so much in 2.6). I'm sure there's other things as well.

One of the microsoft lines that really is true is that Linux is a larger threat to Unix than to MS

I disagree. Linux is a bigger threat in server space, you have to remember that even after a decade NT et al are the upstart operating systems that have steadily been getting commodity PC hardware into server space - linux challenges that head on by providing a solid multiuser OS that runs on PC hardware, and does it much better than the steadily improving NT operating systems. You only run a Microsoft operating system if you want to run the programs that come with that platform or if you want to use cheap PC hardware as a server. Linux does threaten Microsoft in that way, and I suspect that has contibuted to them improving their software (security patches when they didn't care about them before, and the numerous new features in longhorn).

Re:Solaris doesn't suck...

[__past__]

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.

Fire Engine

[zz99]

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.

cool feature i am using

[Anonymous Coward]

i try with solaris express and I find a cool feature called "ppriv" like this:

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: /usr/sbin/rpcbind
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 /etc/shadow
cat[100619]: missing privilege "file_dac_read" (euid = 77293, syscall = 225) needed at ufs_iaccess+0xd2
cat: cannot open /etc/shadow

not sure what this means?

Another intro to Solaris 10

[ChrisRijk]

Ace's Hardware had a post about Solaris 10 back in November.

There is an alternative introduction on the main Solaris 10 page too. Eg:

N1 Grid Containers is a breakthrough approach to virtualization with multiple software partitions per single instance of the OS. N1 Grid Containers make consolidation simple, safe and secure.

* Superior Resource Utilization. N1 Grid Containers dynamically adjust resources to business goals within and across the container. With little management overhead (less than 1%), it offers over 4,000 containers per system.
* Increased Uptime. With N1 Grid Containers, applications are isolated from each other and from system faults. Using Instant Restart, each Container can be restarted in just seconds. Boot time in large systems can be reduced by as much as 70%.
* Reduced Costs. N1 Grid Containers simplifies and accelerates consolidation. It also significantly reduces system, admin and maintenance overhead.

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

[haggar]

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.

Re:Solaris doesn't suck...

[chthon]

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.

Re:Solaris doesn't suck...

[4of12]

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.