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Solaris 10 to be Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "It looks as though Sun is going to open source their new Solaris 10 operating system. It seems to include eveything except some device drivers. They plan to model the Darwin and Fedora projects. Sounds very interesting."
If it's truly an open source license, this is only good news--Linux and/or the BSDs will be able to use the best bits. If it's just a "shared source" head-fake like Microsoft has tried to pull with some of their stuff, well, then Sun will solidify their position as Grand Moff Tarkin to Microsoft's Vader.
What does SUN do anymore? If they're open sourcing Solaris, obviously they're looking to get the community involved in developing it. They're also starting to ship some x86 servers (Opteron and Xeon), so are we eventually going to lose the Sparc processors as well? What does that leave Sun with? Java?
Won't many of the features that make Solaris great be ported to Linux before you can say "Holy GPL, Batman!" Or did I misunderstand Sun trying to model the Darwin/Fedora way?
I wonder how they'll handle the Unix(TM) code in there and all the various other contributed stuff from Samsung etc.
I guess it's easier if they forget about CDE/X11 etc but it will be interesting to see what open source licence they use and how they handle 'other peoples' code in SOlaris 10.
Of course they could have removed all the Sys V R5.4 code, but without doing this unsing clean room conditions SCO could have a wondrful time in court.
Just wondering??????
If this is indeed true, I don't see any real need for linux anymore. If solaris is going to run all linux apps and it is going to have features like dtrace and a 128-bit file system and it runs on x86 AND it's free, I'm moving.
at least for the x86 version it could solve one of the bigest problems: lack of device drivers. If they go OS in a proper manner many gpl drivers can be ported and they don't even have to pay developers to do this.
I don't read replies by ACs.
The article doesn't specify a license.
I suspect they're just going to let you see the code, but not necessarily copy IP from it.
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I predict that the main thing of interest in Solaris to most people is the thread model. The main thing about Irix, IIRC, was the graphics capabilities and XFS, and SGI's opened XFS up and it's now ported over.
On the other hand, isn't that part of why they call it Slowlaris?
1) Open Source 2) ???? 3) Profit! First Microsoft, now Sun. I never thought I'd see the day I had to compare Sun to Microsoft, in terms of gimmick...but it seems that I was wrong. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, incidentally. Unfortunately, most companies are too pigheaded to realize that, while open sourcing a project costs little and can reap great benefits, there's a difference between, let's say, a proprietary crap license that doesn't allow integration with other OSS, and a BSD or GPL variant. Microsoft's stance on the GPL, for any who were unaware: "The GPL's viral nature poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization that derives its products from GPL source..." - Craig Mundie, "senior vice president of advanced strategies at Microsoft" Source
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Just like Darwin, Sun will only open the parts that will ultimately benefit Sun. Just like Fedora, they hope to get a boost from loyal Solaris (RedHat desktop) users that have been using the "Solaris Free Binary License" (yes, I qualify here on both counts).
I hope this helps.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Because I (probably) signed up for something at a conferance sometime in the ninethies, Sun sent me a Solaris 7 package, which i tried out just for fun, and ended up using almost as much as my Linux and Windows boxes, because I just liked the feel and consistency of the whole thing.
If we're going to get pedantic, then it should be "GNU/SunOS," not "Solaris." To put it into Linux terms, Solaris is the distribution that's built on the SunOS kernel, just as Mandrake (for instance) is a distro that's built on the Linux kernel.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Let me explain Oracle's conversion to Linux.
You are right that until recently the "reference platform" for large Oracle installations was Solaris, and Oracle would run efficiently and scalably across tens of processors.
Then Oracle invented parallel databases. Their first attempt, Oracle Parallel Server in 8i was horrible, held together with string and bubble gum. Nobody used it.
Then they came out with the next version, 9i RAC, which was quite a lot better. But any attempt to run a read/write database across a number of servers is always going to be limitted by the speed of the interconnects, so it is still far preferable to run 9i non-RAC on a large server than RAC across multiple machines. So enter Oracle's love affair with Linux.
Oracle have taken to pitching 9i RAC solutions on Linux as being the "cheaper" alternative to running on a big Solaris box. The rational is simple: the customer either pays Oracle for 9i non-RAC and Sun for a big box, or they pay Oracle for 9i RAC and implement it on commodity x86 hardware running GNU/Linux - obviously they prefer the second solution because they get more money from a similar sized cake.
The snag is that 9i RAC doesn't scale well, because of the previously mentioned interconnect latency issue. They will quote you impressive figures which are the result of:
a) picking benchmark examples which are naturally going to scale well across boxes - where the data sets are already well partitioned
b) comparing RAC on two nodes to a single node running RAC - the true comparison would be with a single node running 9i non-RAC (which is loads faster).
So don't imagine that this is Oracle having been converted by any sort of technical merits - they are being driven simply by ways of maximising their revenue stream.
Sun has an excellent single place to search for all service calls on their equipment and OS, along with resolution information. So, it's a lot of information, yet more importantly, it's a single place for all of that information.
Personally, I have both Solaris AND Linux on my resume - and have to go with Solaris as the more impressive during interviews (less market share - more "serious").
I had a Solaris machine that ate itself running Solaris and Oracle. It turned out that one of the CPUs (StarFire E10000) was not torqued down properly. You should really have Sun take a look at your 450 - full tear down and rebuild if necessary. Otherwise, in my experience, Linux is slightly less stable, but I've been migrating to Linux because it's cheaper to run two Intel/Linux boxes (hot spare) than a single Solaris box with the same load capacity as one of the I/Linux boxes.
That's to say - you've both got valid points.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I would love to be able to practice more admin stuff on Solaris. With the exception of production servers -- which are not ideal "hey, i wonder what this does" testing conditions -- I don't have access to any Solaris boxes; I'd like to run it on a laptop but drivers are a fucking nightmare (yes, i know there are solaris sparc laptops like SPARCle but I don't have that kind of money to just toss around.)
My job at a university entails working with Solaris and migrating everything that's ON solaris OFF it, over to linux or BSD or windows or "anything but solaris". Management has lost faith in SUN in general and solaris specifically, and they want it gone gone gone. This is good for me, because I get to practice doing Cool Shit with linux and FreeBSD (FreeBSD being the only distro I've tried that doesn't require setting up stupid sunlabel partitions and lots of tweaking to get right: slap the CD in, install it, tweak it a bit and then forget about it. Even my beloved Debian wasn't that easy on a sparc arch machine.) At the same time, I'd still like to get more familiar with the Solaris way of doing things, for sundry reasons (more impressive skillset, more theory and better understanding of the internal workings of the OS, etc.)
I slapped the Sol10 beta on a single-proc netra that we found lying in a gutter begging for change, and it wasn't too bad. Of course, I haven't used it for more than 10 minutes, but that's the price you pay for having fun at work, I guess.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Depends a lot on what you're doing. SPARC might be OK at high-throughput jobs, but IA32 and PowerPC just smash it to little bits for things that are less sequential.
Also, Solaris' local filesystem (UFS) gets the pants beat off it by EXT3 (and, to a lesser extent, AIX JFS2). Even if you turn on journalling, which makes for a nice speed boost on Solaris 8 and up.
In fact, for local file I/O, you're better with Solaris on IA32 than Solaris on SPARC.
I'm not actually sure what SPARC hardware is good for these days. Every time I benchmark something, it loses. Granted, our best SPARC machine is an 8-way UltraSPARC-III 1.2 GHz. So maybe a faster SPARC chip might keep up with PowerPC and Intel a little better.
Hey didn't sun gave SCO couple of million bucks for something earlier...
So this is something sun probably asked as a part of the deal... And SCO migh have asked them to be quiet for this for certain period of time. And this announcement might have been planned a LONG time ago...
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Sorry sir, but your post was a crock of crap. Had to be said.
There's this thing called "fork and exec" which has been out for awhile, which very easily enables an application to scale to N CPUs. Apache for example, will nicely scale to lots of CPUs assuming the underlying OS efficiently does copy-on-write, thread/process management, etc. Solaris does.
If you believe "Oracle didn't scale on Sun E10Ks period", check out the site called eBay. It's the only way they are able to handle the massive workload...
Oracle is pushing clustering now for the reason a previous poster gave- Cheaper hardware means more $$ for licensing, with a static budget.
Lastly your claim about Oracle scaling effectively across 120-240 Linux CPUs appals me. Are you claiming that RAC can be deployed to 30-60 quad-CPU boxes? 15-30 8-CPU boxes? You may be interested to know that 9i RAC degrades in performance beyond 3 nodes- a 3 node cluster performs better than a 4 node cluster. Oracle themselves tout RAC more as an "accessibility" technology that removes single points of failure, rather than a scalability approach. Heck, there are even companies that sell third-party tools to make RAC more scalable...
In conclusion, I do not believe you have any clue with regards to the subjects you are addressing in your post.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.