Solaris 10 to be Open Source

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 14, 2004 @01:48AM from the here's-hoping-people dept.

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."

19 of 432 comments (clear)

Solaris Vs Linux? by Sanity · 2004-09-14 01:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

Can anyone explain why someone might choose to use Solaris over Linux other than for legacy reasons?
1. Re:Solaris Vs Linux? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-14 01:53 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Major commercial programs like Oracle, DB2, WebSphere MQ are supported on Solaris/sparc, but not Linux/sparc.
  
  If you've got sparc hardware, x86 stuff is a downgrade path you don't want to follow.
2. Re:Solaris Vs Linux? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-14 01:58 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Err, that's easy:
  
  It's faster (approx. 30% : Sun to challenge Linux to a benchmarking duel shortly with Solaris 10)
  It has N1 Grid Containers
  At $99 It's cheaper than any enterprise Linux distro.
  It scales better.
  *Even* More secure than Linux
  It's standard
  Solaris 10 runs RH Linux apps efficiently
  etc. etc. etc.
3. Re:Solaris Vs Linux? by Allen+Zadr · 2004-09-14 02:00 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  For most of the world... It's not one or the other, it's both. Solaris is a strong OS, despite losing some market share in the last 8 years. Open Source projects benefit from being listed on the solarisfreeware web site. As an admin I've always had a tendancy to use and support whatever project has the largest cross-platform capability.
  Well, how better to support a Solaris solution for your OSS project than to _run_ Solaris. More importantly, the issues in Solaris that have long dogged OSS projects (can only be compiled with gcc - must use OSS version of malloc, etc) can be found and fixed by debugging and recompiling now-open-sourced system libraries.
  
  --
  Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
4. Re:Solaris Vs Linux? by dunstan · 2004-09-14 02:21 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  There's more to implementing stuff in your kernel than just lifing a bit of source code from elsewhere.
  
  The way the Solaris kernel is so scaleable across over 100 processors is not some clever hack, it's taken years of refinement of the kernel. I'm not a kernel hacker, but you won't just be able to lift bits of Solaris kernel code and drop them into a Linux kernel.
  
  What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it. Couple this with the Niagara processors and you have an awesome edge appliance.
  
  --
  The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
5. Re:Solaris Vs Linux? by secolactico · 2004-09-14 02:29 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris" distribution, where (as many of us have been doing for years) you get a Solaris kernel and basic libraries, and then put a GNU based set of tools on top of it.
  
  Solaris is a sweet OS, but what I which the most is something like the FreeBSD port tree to be done for solaris. Sun already has niftly package tools, but a port collection would take care of dependencies and make updating easier.
  
  --
  No sig
6. Re:Solaris Vs Linux? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-14 02:44 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
7. Re:Solaris Vs Linux? by greed · 2004-09-14 02:56 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  If you've got sparc hardware, x86 stuff is a downgrade path you don't want to follow.
  
  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.
Open Source, AMD Processors...? by Nos. · 2004-09-14 01:52 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?
Except device Drivers... by CaptRespect · 2004-09-14 01:53 · Score: 5, Funny

"It seems to include eveything except some device drivers."

So like linux it will work great if you could only find the drivers for your printer.
Can they do this? by AnuradhaRatnaweera · 2004-09-14 01:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

Unlike Linux, Solaris is a derivative of UNIX. I am sure SCO will be keenly looking forward to the day when Solaris is open source. ;-)
1. Re:Can they do this? by dankrabach · 2004-09-14 02:04 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Exactly what I am wondering. Solaris is a descendent from the ATT/System V branch of the UNIX(tm) tree, not the BSD branch. They license the UNIX, not own the copyrights. Wouldn't they need permission from SCO (or Novell? ) and possibly a whole bunch of other people/corps/entities to really Open Source this stuff? Feels like heat, still looks dark.......
Unix(tm) code? by martin · 2004-09-14 01:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

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??????
Open source != GPL by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-14 01:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

Open source is one thing, but I'm wondering how useful to us Sun's move really is if the code will not be put out under a GPL-like or BSD-like license

... lately I sense that "open-sourcing" is more an attempt of big companies to get some work done for free and get some PR at the same time, BUT with little real use to the community as GPL'ing the code would provide. Am I right?
Uh huh by starseeker · 2004-09-14 02:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'm waiting to see the license terms before I celebrate.

--
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Vaporware wanring by linuxislandsucks · 2004-09-14 02:07 · Score: 5, Informative

Last announcement about this was proven false by Sun's own CEO statments..

This will be the saem way with this announcement..

--
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Re:Only good news, if it's really open by bonniot · 2004-09-14 02:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

Given these quotes from the previous article, there are reasons to doubt how much open the license will be:
Schwartz invoked the precedent set by Sun's popular Java programming language. [...] We need to now take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris.
A problem that Schwartz wants to avoid is having Solaris splintered into different distributions like Linux, which he said creates application incompatibilities. Going the way of Linux-type licensing, he suggested, creates open source but not open standards.

--
Watch great movie opening scenes!
Re:Don't get tainted by jpvlsmv · 2004-09-14 02:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

And if you ever plan to write the Great American Novel, make sure you never read any books, magazines, websites, or other written work.

And if you ever plan to write music, never listen to any CDs or recorded music from any other musician.

Because you'll get "tainted".

--Joe
Re:Stability by upsidedown_duck · 2004-09-14 03:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

They run out of swap space, and they crash.

What ancient mummified version of SunOS did you work with? Just recently, I had a program go wacko and suck up every bit of virtual memory it could. My Sun workstation slowed down, of course, but I eventually got to an xterm to kill the offending process. No crash.

The book, Solaris Internals, details exactly what Solaris does when resources become scarce. It is designed to degrade gracefully by speeding up page scanning, for example, at certain thresholds of memory usage.

I think the crashing you saw was due to a specific program that you depended on (not Solaris) that was very poorly written.

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-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak