Linux Apps On Solaris

querencia writes "Sun has announced that Solaris 10 will comply with the Linux Standard Base specification, thus allowing Linux apps to run unchanged on Solaris. This isn't emulation -- they claim that it is 'kernel-integrated and supported as an operating system feature.' While I appreciate the benefits of the Solaris OS, I've considered them on the losing end of the battle until now. Will the power of Linux apps put Solaris back into the running?" Update: 08/04 15:50 GMT by J : At OSCON, Sun reaffirmed that Solaris 10 will be open-sourced. They said it would be one of the OSI licenses, not sure which yet; that this was approved at the highest levels of the company; and (with the expected "we're just guessing" language), it could happen as soon as year's end.

Comments

Interesting, but what about the other way round?

[hcdejong]

There's at least one Solaris application I'd like to run on Linux: Adobe FrameMaker.

Could this be

[Druss.the.legend]

The initial move of SUN towards an OpenSource OS, or even towards a linux based business model.

Linux APIs

[Sebby]

"Will the power of Linux apps put Solaris back into the running?"

I guess it can't hurt. Apple is also rumored to be integrating Linux API to future versions of OS X to help bring developers to the Mac side.

I doubt it

[metalac]

It seems that Solaris is having a real hard time getting trough no matter what. With the availability of so many BSDs and Linux distros Solaris is a lone wolf in the whole story. Also I don't think that people who are currently running Linux will be very eager to just jump up and switch since all of a sudden Solaris supports Linux binaries.

Re:I doubt it

[Neil Watson]

You've hit the nail on the head. The days of commercial Unix are numbered. It's sad and tragic. The big commercial Unix vendors have no one to blame but themselves. Unix was powering workstations and servers when Windows was still in its 3.1 days. That was a large lead that they petered away. Instead of spending that time improving their procduct (e.g. making their tools more functional like the GNU tools have become) big Unix sat back and did very little.

• Why didn't Sun fix their tar utility to properly strip '/'?
• Why didn't Sun fix their tar utility to add on the fly compression (-j -z anyone?)?
• Why didn't Sun ever develop a useful packet filtering application instead of relying on the ipfilter whose releases can often be worse than beta quality?
• Why are there so many different bin directories that the environment never pointed to (e.g. /usr/ucb/bin)?
• Sed, Awk, and Vi all had room for improvement. Why did they do nothing?

Re:I doubt it

[njcoder]

"Why didn't Sun fix their tar utility to properly strip '/'? "

A lot of the times, sun doesn't fix stuff so that they can maintain compatability between different versions which is one of their strong selling points. If you don't need that kind of compatability you can use the GNU version.

"Why didn't Sun fix their tar utility to add on the fly compression (-j -z anyone?)?"

I wouldn't call that a "fix" that's a feature that they chose not to implement. Why put it in when people are happy to pipe the compression tools in themselves. It gives them more flexibility to choose the versions they want and it makes it easier for tar by not having to worry about those things. Each utility serves it's purpose and you can use them together. That doesn't mean they should be integrated. So I wouldn't call it broken.

"Why didn't Sun ever develop a useful packet filtering application instead of relying on the ipfilter whose releases can often be worse than beta quality?"

What about SunScreen? In Solaris 10, they're going to have Solaris IP Filter which they claim to be enterprise class. From what I've read there is some shared code between SunScreen and ipfilter. Not sure which way it goes. I read the ipfilter guy licensed code from sun but couldn't confirm it. Also, Sun's main deployment areas are corporate data centers, telco's and isp's. These people use seperate firewalls to secure all their servers. Looks like sun has been coming around to smaller deployment users since at least Solaris 9.

"Why are there so many different bin directories that the environment never pointed to (e.g. /usr/ucb/bin)?"

Again, this is for compatability reasons. /usr/bin is the Sun versions, /usr/bin is the berkley tools, /usr/local/bin is usually where the gnu tools go. One of the best things about sun is their commitment to binary compatability. You can develop on your workstation and deploy on a e25k without making any changes. You can also deploy most applications written for prior versions on new os versions. To facilitate that and still allow people to use other tools, they set up different directories. They're not pointed to because you should only point to them if you need to.

"Sed, Awk, and Vi all had room for improvement. Why did they do nothing?"

Beats me. But you can download the gnu versions of them if you need them. Those three things have never been a bother to me in any work I've done on sun servers.

Re:I doubt it

[njcoder]

"The fact that Sun is abandoning it for IPfilter indicates that don't think SunScreen is very good either."

I've only used SunScreen to play with and I don't have any real opinions. I'm still of the mindset that packets should be filtered before they get to the host. Also just because it didn't come with ipfilter doesn't mean you couldn't put it on there afterwards. Remember, you always had the choice, everything doesn't have to come bundled. What's good is that now Sun is making improvements to IP Filter in their Solaris IP Filter.

"How well has that worked for them?"

You'd have to ask someone at sun. The type of development I do doesn't really make that an issue for me. Though I've seen reports of where it has paid off for the customers. Especially in regards to compatability between workstations and their refridgerator sized servers. One account I read said that he took the drives out of his workstation and put them in an e15k i believe and everything worked perfectly. A lot of the big apps that run on solaris cost many thousands of dollars. Solaris then becomes a good investment for customers. You start out on solaris x, you buy some massive app for 25k, when solaris x+1 comes out and has much better performance you can upgrade the os and still have the app you spent 25k for running. Just like by default the root shell is the bourne shell. scripts written a long time ago will still work in an upgrade.

It's not for people that need to be on the cutting edge. When you look at most corporate development though, they care about stability. They spend millions of dollars building their application. They want a reliable platform to run their apps. The platform doesn't make them money, it's just a place to put what does. It should get better without out requiring them to to change their code.

"How about improving the pager (more)?

I don't care, I like less better. "How about making sure the backspace key works?"

When does it not? I have some sparc boxes and one that runs solaris x86. I haven't had a problem with backspace. It might be the terminal software you're using. Or maybe it's the bourne shell. I like bash. It's been part of the supplemental software cd for a while, as have other shells. Since solaris 9 i beleive it's been installed though it may not be the default.

Re:I doubt it

[ZeekWatson]

I had backspace key issues with Sol 9, x86, out of the box, while sitting at the console.

This is true for HP-UX also. Plug in a HP-UX serial console to one of their "Enterprise" servers (they have no videocard or keyboard port) login and hit backspace. It doesn't work!!!

Sure you can install GNU utilities to get around this but I'll install my GNU utilities with linux, thanks!

Also, Solaris tar is busted in that paths longer than 255 characters are truncated. Solaris tar is a POS.

Re:I doubt it

[0x0d0a]

Btw, when will Linux finally get tools like

I haven't used any of these, but I think that you can get similar functionality for at least some of them (keep in mind I'm going off a quick Google for a description of each Solaris utility). Not familiar with how completely a replacement each is:

pmap

Linux pmap. If, for some reason, your system doesn't have it (can't imagine why; it's part of procps on Fedora Core 2), I imagine that you can get similar data from: /proc/<pid/maps

trapstat

oprofile

lockstat

SGI lockstat

ppgsz

I don't think that the functionality (variable page sizes) that this provides can be provided on x86 hardware, though I reckon if you're running Linux on SPARC, it's a pain.

libumem

There are a *ton* of Linux malloc() replacements and memory debugging tools. I generally use valgrind, but I've used ef, debauch, memprof, and a ton of other similar tools in the past. The standard glibc() malloc provides some basic debugging features as well.

Re:IOW...

[tekunokurato]

It's a good point, though. Linux will never have any application competitive advantage; only that of its core operating system's reliability, functionality, etc. Any application that will ever be developed for linux will be snatched up by anyone willing to implement a few relatively simple APIs in their OS.

The more *nix Software the better

[njcoder]

When linux first came out they had a Solaris emulation to be able to run apps made for Solaris. These days that are a lot more apps written for linux than there were back when linux first came out (not sure on the ration of software for linux vs solaris just linux then and now).

Open Source Software isn't just Linux and the GNU userland software. It covers a wide range of different software including software that runs on Linux. In the whole sea of OSS, Linux is just a one small part. This is good for OSS projects because they now have the potential for being run on a wider range of platforms without porting issues.

Solaris has always been a good operating system. You can tell the kernel devs know this as well because searching the mailing list you'll see that solaris is referenced more than any other commercial unix. There are comparisons of how the current kernel compares to the solaris kernel as well as trying to figure out how solaris does things.

Solaris 10 is going to have a lot of improvements to it as well. There are a lot of sun hardware out there and still a lot of sun hardware being sold so it helps OSS projects reach further with less work.

For the people that see open source software as only being about Linux, I don't think they'll respond as favorably.

News of the Weird

[Onimaru]

I find myself wondering what Sun's strategy is. I mean, they go to battle with MS, enter a closed room, and come out best buds. Then they rail against FOSS in favor of open standards and threaten to do a hostile takeover on a leading Linux company. So then you think they've gotten a big check and become a patsy, right?

And throughout this blustering, they put forward the idea that through buying Novell they can somehow "own" the OS IBM is married to, which is kind of missing the point of Linux, but right in line with SCO's claims

Then they come out with news like this. As far as I can tell, their reasoning goes like this:

1. Microsoft's business practices are bad
2. But Microsoft is good
3. Open source is bad, you should run software implementing open standards instead
4. Especially since someone could buy your open source and yank it out from under you (but not your open standard)
5. But hey, if you want to run FOSS, we'll support your doing that.

Has anyone checked for schizophrenia?

Re:News of the Weird

[Stinking Pig]

Their strategy is to be the Unix king again. They're slowly building up resources to make themselves an amenable home for all the FOSS geeks. Then when Microsoft comes out with all guns blazing in the patent litigation war, they'll be a safe haven because of the agreements signed.

OS/2 and Unixware anyone?

[M1FCJ]

Oh well, it didn't help OS/2 around 1995, it didn't hel Unixware around 2000. Why would such a move help Solaris in 2004/5? People never learn from other's mistakes and have to experience failure themselves all the time.

If you want your applications to run anywhere, use something truly portable. Java? PHP? Perl? ANSI C? Yes...

Re:you mean like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, you do realize that linux binaries will be officially released by id software in just a few days?

Oh, and wine is an implementation of a part of the Windows API on Linux. That's completely different from what this mentions. The OS actually operates in such a way that it will just work.

Re:Much like the way Wine works

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

You can think of this support for Linux apps on Solaris as the same way Wine works. It provides a layer of support by implementing the needed APIs without having to deal with a total emulation enviroment.

Score 1: informative? No you can not think of that as the way Wine works. The technical explanation was given they are complying with the LSB which is much like the POSIX. This is an inherent change to the Solaris Kernel not just an emulator or a set of libraries.

Re:Just LSB or ABI/API too?

[aphor]

Look at the FreeBSD Linux support: a kernel module and an ELF loader that support all the Linux syscalls and can decide at load time which flavor of syscall to implement. The runtime linker/loader knows to go to a certain directory tree to get Linux shared libraries, and Solaris will probably work much as the sparc 32/64 bit stuff works now.

Re:There was a beta version once !

[zz99]

Until Adobe started killing Framemaker, it was widely used as a word processor in multi os environments.

It didn't look great. It wasn't the most intuitive program. It wasn't the fastest. But it worked on all platforms, and the documents could be opened, edited, printed and saved on all platforms.

We put all our project documentation in it, due to our various OSes.

Now that Adobe no longer seems interested in supporting multiple platforms, we are migrating away.

Re:Note this is only for Solaris x86

[jgardner100]

Well, Solaris has actually allowed this for a long time via lxrun (all that's needed is to translate the linux system calls to Solaris, Xwindows etc remain the same) so all as they are doing is moving it into the kernel. It's a logical step as far as I can see. Does Wine mean that linux lost to Windows, of course not.

Re:Which apps, exactly?

[chegosaurus]

Absolutely. A couple of years ago Sun made a big song and dance about lxrun, which I guess is somewhere at the base of this thing, and in all my travels as a Solaris consultant I never happened across *anyone* who had used it.

I think maybe linux has a more up-to-date Acrobat reader than Solaris, so I might use it for that. Nothing else springs to mind though.

BTW,there's already a port of the flash plugin for Sol x86, and it works just fine.

Re:What about Fink?

[Sebby]

Right, but there might be some stuff that isn't - not all software is open source, though I really don't know of any Linux-only software not available on other platforms too, but I guess it could happen...

Just think of it as Wine for Linux apps.

This may be a new SUNrise.... or maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a presentation from SUN yesterday on Solaris 10.

Essentially Solaris 10 is going to be a huge change. SUN states they are aiming to be the best UNIX solution out there. With the amount of money they are spending/investing in developing Solaris 10 I believe they are making a very good attempt.

1. Linux apps will run on Solaris 10 on Intel/Sparc. Someone said this is just for X86.
2. DTrace a developer's sweetheart.
3. A new filesystem that will be much better than UFS
4. N1 Grid Containers. Making that purchase of the big iron more attractive. Equivalent to LPAR on mainframe.
5. Even better Multi-Processor efficiency. Linux is making good ground here but Solaris still is years ahead on many cpu's.
6. Of course, more efficient OS, better tcp/ip stack, security, etc. etc. The things you expect to improve with a new OS.

In my opinion, Solaris 10 if it meets what they
are marketing will prove itself. If not, watch
the SUN set.....

Conspiracy Theorist

[ylon]

I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but this seems a little interesting.

First the SCO/Microsoft connections, then the Microsoft/Sun settlement... Now this? It seems odd to me that they are running in this direction in light of all of the Linux hoopla that's going around. Just look at "City of Munich Freezes Its Linux Migration" posted a little bit ago here. It almost seems like they are trying to put themselves into the position of snatching up those who are wavering on the Linux/licensing front.

Re:So what has Solaris got?

[ArbitraryConstant]

How about a stable branch? Solaris actually has one.

The only up to date versions of Linux that can touch Solaris in scalability terms are now development versions. It's up to the distros to figure out how to make it stable.

Re:So what has Solaris got?

[stor]

Solaris is still a more stable platform that responds to load very well.

If I was asked what OS to run Oracle on in a large enterprise where rock-solid stability under load is the number one criteria, such as in a financial institution, I'd feel safer with Solaris but wouldn't see Linux as a particularly dangerous choice.

Solaris has had superior (in terms of stability) LVM and VM for instance. This stuff can be important in certain situations.

I have been very impressed thus far with Linux 2.6: it's the most stable and "polished" Linux Kernel series I've experienced. I haven't thrown it in production yet but plan to roll it out on a couple of the least business-critical machines in a few months time.

I think it's inevitable that Linux will surpass Solaris (and all other Operating Systems, for that matter) in almost every way but it's not there yet: Linux has evolved at a fast pace and often features have been merged that didn't turn out well at all, requiring band-aids, re-writes, bug fixes, etc. and causing unknown bugs, regressions and unmaintained code. This seems to have slowed down a lot though. Maybe it's just me but some of the Kernel devs seem a lot more quality-focused and critical now. Praise Andrew Morton.

If over the next year 2.6 keeps impressing me with it's stability, performance and responsiveness under load when I place it in production we could have a winner. Big time.

Cheers
Stor

The "GNU" part of GNU/Linux

[shatfield]

This is why the "GNU" part of "GNU/Linux" should NOT be forgotten. People in the Microsoft mind-set immediately think that "Linux" is what they see when they look at a screenshot of X11 running KDE. The situation really sinks in when you realize that Linux is just the kernel, and they could be looking at *BSD, or even Darwin (Mac OS X's base), running X11 and KDE. Why not Solaris? Solaris is going one further though -- how about not having to recompile those apps that have been compiled to run on Linux? Very cool stuff indeed... especially if/when they open source Solaris! If they do it right (meaning - GPL compatible), then we'll see "GNU/Solaris", and Stallman will have a whole new name to complain about...

Re:So what has Solaris got?

[pajs]

Thats certainly not my experience. Dell's service is awful in comparision to sun. We paid for gold sun support (4 hour call out), and a dell's 4 hour contract. Sun turned up with a replacement CPU within 3 hours when the sun system failed. Dell took 2 weeks to even accept that the motherboard was dead. And then took another 2 days before an engineer even turned up. They refused to send an engineeer to diagnose the problem. They also refused our own diagnosis.

(For those intrested, the machine locked solid whenever you tried to use the onboard network card. Dell gave us a program to run on the server that found no faults, but this program didn't even test the networking.)

Re:What about Fink?

[walt-sjc]

While it's fairly trivial to get stuff to run on OSX, getting it to run as a native OSX app is a whole different ballgame. OpenOffice is a great example of this.