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Torvalds on Opening Solaris
An anonymous reader sent in a link to this interview with Linus Torvalds, where the questions center on Sun's movement toward the open source world (and Linus' dismissive view of the threat posed by Solaris), as well as a few questions about 2.7 and the future of Linux.
> I think Linus is being a bit too dismissive towards Solaris. Sure it's not going to completely
> crush Linux like McNealy wants to believe, but if it ends up being good enough it could slow down the
> growth of Linux and become a major competitor on x86.
I think Solaris has got an uphill battle in this one, but my attitude is the more the merrier. FreeBSD, Linux and an open Solaris, all competing against each other, bettering one another can only do the end-user good.
I'm not surprised that Linus is dismissive, but he should know better than anyone the peculiar way that underdogs and unknowns can burst on to the scene.
At some point I may take a look at Solaris, purely out of curiousity. That's how I started with Linux.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I would recommend other Slashdot members to read this article, probably one of the best interviews I've had the pleasure of reading about Linus. The comments he made would benefit any open source project leader and stress once again that a successful open source project is one where "People need to feel involved...If anybody feels like somebody is just a passenger, that's bad for everybody." Other comments about incremental improvements and Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome are worth reading too. Don't let the title about Solaris confuse you, and its nice to know Linus didn't resort to mud slinging, which is very common from the Sun camp...
This attitude is perfectly fine for any Solaris release prior to 10. However, Sun has made massive strides both in performance and hardware support, especially on the AMD64 platform.
Furthermore, he completely dodged the questions about containers, DTrace, and ZFS. While these are all fancy names for things which are also available in Linux, the truth of the matter is the Linux counterparts cannot hold a candle to any of these features in Solaris. Here's a quick run down:
Containers: Solaris's new virtualization mechanism. Containers have a special kernel image which is able to communicate with the main system kernel entirely in kernel space. This is somewhat similar to the approach taken by the Xen virtual machine, except that Xen does it at a much lower level. Solaris containers may be thought of as somewhere between a Linux kernel instance running in Xen on top of another Linux kernel and BSD jails. It certainly is nothing like UML, where the UML kernel is running in process context and thus performs rather pathetically.
ZFS: This integrates all the features of a high end filesystem and high end volume manager into a single package. Unfortunately, this will only be available a few months after Solaris 10 General Availability, but once it hits expect tools like VxFS and the Veritas Volume Manager to be rendered thoroughly obsolete on the Solaris side. Linux certainly has many interesting filesystems with cool whiz-bang features, many of which aren't implemented in ZFS, but on the flip side ZFS has many features tuned towards the enterprise market which are seen in very few Linux filesystems, most notably XFS.
DTrace: While a bit obtuse for the time being, a simple demonstration of its power must be seen. The main advantage DTrace has over Linux alternatives such as KProbes, besides being massively more powerful, is that there is no performance impact on the system when they are not in use. DTrace probes are inserted into the kernel when needed and removed when not, whereas KProbes require they statically be built into the kernel.
Conclusion: There is a considerable amount of feature parity between Linux and Solaris 10, but the Solaris features all have an edge over the Linux ones. Linus should not let his hubris cloud his judgement... I expect Solaris 10 to be a major competator to Linux in the low end SMP server market.
Right now running Linux (or FreeBSD) on AMD64 has you flying by the seat of your pants a bit... it's certainly not polished and there are a number of caveats and gotchas to watch out for. Contrarily Solaris 10/AMD64, especially on Sun's own hardware, runs like a dream. I expect Solaris 10 to thoroughly decimate Linux in the Opteron server market.
There are still a number of areas where Linux is still playing catch up to Solaris as well, most notably in the realm of schedulers. While Linux 2.6 now sports a constant time scheduler like Solaris has had for a half decade, Solaris still supports modular schedulers which can be swapped in and out, can be active simultaneously, and processes can be moved between them. One of the most notable ones fo
This, and some replies here seem to act like Solaris enters the OSS world as an enemy that we can now more fully pick apart and find the flaws of to mock them. Kinda disheartening, if that's the angle people are going to take on it.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Back in the halcyon days when Sun was bar none the biggest UNIX enterprise player, Sun probably said the same thing about some little upstart OS cobbled together by that one guy from Finland that only ran on 386 machines and was described by it's creator as a "just a hobby". So really, I think this can probably be filed under "turnabout is fair play."
Do not touch -Willie
Linus shows one more time that he's an intelligent and well spoken individual. A good spokesperson for open source, that's for sure.
Anybody can imagine Ballmer or Gates giving honest answers like that to an interviewer?
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Solaris/SPARC and Solaris/x86 are, last I was told, 99% percent idential.
/. knock Solaris just because his holiness Linus said that Linux was better. A lot of people here rip on Solaris and have clearly never actually used it, and even more declare it "the sucks" because it didn't recognize their crappy AC97 sound card. Truly infuriating sometimes... though I can see how it all starts when Linus goes on the record saying that he doesn't even think that the Solaris source code is worth even peeking at.
That said, the only problem with Solaris/Intel is it's driver support. If you have supported hardware, Solaris/Intel is the definition of production-ready.
At any rate, It still really bothers me whenever I see people on
Then again, Linus, though brilliant, is also rash, reactionary, highly defensive and an out-and-out ego-maniac sometimes... but like so many "rock-star" like figures, his fans don't ever notice this.
Solaris has been saving my (and a lot of other peoples) bacon for years and as much as I like Linux, Solaris is still my go-to operating system because it's just more reliable, regardless of what his majesty wants to think.
How much more reliable? We're talking, like, 99.9% reliable versus, say 99.1% percent... something so miniscule; irrelevant to most people, but paramount to me and the thousands of people who still prefer to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Solaris licenses for a very good reason.
Linux is improving steadily and someday I'll have no reason to buy Solaris... but it surprises me it's come this far sometimes when I see ignorant things like this from Linus.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Disclaimer: I am against patents.
From the article:
Surely if you like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, there might be some handy ideas in Solaris. Why ignore it?
Because I personally don't think they have anything left worth taking after I've applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.
But more importantly, if I'm wrong, that's OK. People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time. (emphasis mine)
In our patent driven world, isn't it dangerous to say such things? Since Linux was attacked with patent infrigement claims, Linus should be more careful about saying things which make the reader think about IP theft.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
It is a joke. It was a joke. I shall be a joke.
I have been forced to run the damn thing and it has always sucked rotten eggz.
1. Multicast broken on 60+ percent of the network drivers. Linux over the years has had a chance to accumulate workarounds for broken cards. Solaris has never had the mileage to do so and as a result even trivial cards like ne2k, rtl and even eepro100 and 1000 are broken. In some cases it simply does not work. In other your entire machine goes south the moment someone tries to use it.
2. DMA is broken and does not work or has corruption problems on many chipsets. As a result if you want to get anywhere you need to shell out money for SCSI.
3. Numerous small niggles all over the place. Video, IO devices, power management (or to be more exact lack of), ad naseum.
It may be better the moment they release 10, because sun has used the cheasiest and shittiest PC chipsets like ALI15xx in their servers so they have "appropriate experience" now. But it will still be a very mixed journey. I will recommend it only to someone who has a PC which has the same collection of hardware garbage as in a modern Sun: broadcom ethernet, ALI or Silicon Image IDE or an NCR/LSI SCSI. If you have classic "good" PC hardware like Serverworks + Intel you will be going up shit creek without a paddle all the way (possibly under water as well).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The problem Solaris x86 has is where to find supported hardware. I've tried Solaris 10 on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 and IBM xServer 206 -- both of which it refused to play nice with. I even tried it on a PC clone that was about as far to generic that I could find - still no dice.
So, while I would love to try out Solaris, I can't find to seem a reasonable hardware option to experiment with it on.
It seems that the only *supported* systems are built by Sun (surprise, surprise). So, I think it is totally valid to view Solaris x86 as a non-starter until they get more hardware support. Until then, most people in the x86 arena are going to continue to run Linux -- Solaris x86 in its present form is just another form of vendor lock-in.
One thing you can, uh, "admire" about Linus is his complete lack of fear about sounding like a complete ass when he goes off about things he knows nothing about. His comments on /dev/poll and Solaris's implementation of it (years before this open solaris thing) were really instructive. Then there's his initial attitude toward SMP. And of course, his really choice bits on microkernels. Those are just off the top of my head.
I guess what works is that he's surrounded (on lkml) by folks who do gladly tell him when he's full of shit.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Hmm... a code champion grounded by his karate champion wife? I don't know but there must be a fetish somewhere in there. ;)
The owls are not what they seem
Why did no one tell him that with the cd burning business then?
I am trolling