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Gentoo Announces OpenSolaris Port
A reader writes:"According to this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, Gentoo is planning a port to Sun's partially-announced OpenSolaris. Something interesting to look out for, or just more hype from a developer often criticized even by Gentoo people for not looking before he leaps?"
I use Gentoo. I have even donated money toward Gentoo? Why should I be interested in Sun/Solaris? Is Sun's execs still slamming Linux in their blogs? Is today "We sell Linux." or is today "Linux is no good, Solaris is better."
Isn't it all about being free and open anyhow? Solaris will be a great addition and we can try out yet another *nix. Some people cry that solaris is nothing good at all but I'd say its a step up from freebsd on the server side of things. It was the "best" commericial unix anyhow. Idea swapping will be the best thing about the 2 platforms. If only we did the same with bsd's.
Does portage support dependency checking when removing packages yet? That's the reason I stopped using gentoo...
You can always run `emerge depclean` to remove packages that aren't in your world file and aren't required by any packages that are. And there's `revdep-rebuild` in the gentoolkit which will rebuild any packages that might end up broken after a depclean. With those two commands, I've never had any problems keeping only the packages I want and need on the system with no extra cruft.
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
Something interesting to look out for, or just more hype from a developer often criticized even by Gentoo people for not looking before he leaps?
No, I don't think so. There's been a installer for Solaris avalible from this self same developer for some time. As this is just an incremental update rather than inventing a whole new wheel I don't think anyone can be seriously worried about him pulling this off.
>> Does portage support dependency checking when removing packages yet?
/dev/ROOT after doing it successfully for 3 days!)
I think it still does not support that.
(But then, I may be completely and stupid-ly wrong, as linux is completely new to me [or vice-versa], and I can not even configure why gentoo fails to mount
Well, if it's been running for months on Sol 9 and 10, it's more than vaporware. Whether anyone uses it remains to be seen. If it replaces/augments the pre-built packages at Sunfreeware, it'll be a great addition to the OpenSolaris community.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
no, we don't care about your funroll loops link.
I dunno, I'm a Gentoo ... user (avoid saying you love operating systems, you fool!) and I came across funroll-loops via the Gentoo forums t'other day. Loved it - good for a laugh, if you don't take your gentooing too seriously.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Are "gentoo people" ones that resequence their DNA every night to get 1% performance gains?
I knew I was a complete idiot. Got the answeres.
As for how it worked for 3 days, either something overwrote something else, or I indeed have superior luck^Wskill. After all, Rincewind - the Great Wizzard - did survive all of that!
Can't access http://www.opensolaris.org Connection times out....
www.blastwave.org is another, their not as /usr/local fixated as sunfreeware, for good and bad.
Add portage to the mix and i might be happy ; )
Can Sun run 'emerge from debt'?
Perhaps even cron 'profitability'??
YES. After 1000 days of 1% increases... my 486 smokes my AthlonXP. And we paint our computers red (cause red makes them faster), and I lean the CPU on a downhill slope with a fan blowing behind it.
Something interesting to look out for, or just more hype from a [developer] often [criticized] even by Gentoo people for not looking before he leaps?"
Both the above links are irrelevant. The "developer" link is currently redirected to the Gentoo distribution, while the "criticized" to a web interface to the gentoo-dev mailing list. I've scanned said mailing list and it looks like a normal discussion to me, the so-called "criticism" is just a difference of viewpoints. I am unwilling to read the whole gentoo-dev and/or learn about the finer points of gentoo's portage just to validate the poster's point of view.
IMHO, only the first sentence looks like news; second is just fingerpointing.
Just
the speed increase is a tiny part of what makes gentoo so nice for me.
It was a while after I'd installed Gentoo that I became aware of it's reputation as being for "ricers" - I installed it because (a) it worked with my slightly wierd set-up, and (b) I was interested in learning more about Linux than I could with a "regular" distro. That speed increase is nice, though ;)
This is where the serious fun begins.
I don't think it actually is for ricers, for the most part. It's just that on the website, it advertises that it is a bit faster. This leads an insane few to try and uncover every possible way of making it so. I'm a Gentoo user, and I can say that it's probably not the fastest. Sure I haven't tried my absolute hardest, but that's not what's important to me. I like Portage. It is robust for adding and removing packages, and it allows amazing control over what does and doesn't go into your compiled software. Do I want amaroK compiled with mysql support? Hmm, why not, I have a mysql database running. All these little things. I think Portage is the biggest thing that gentoo has contributed to the world, and, quite frankly, I'd like to see them port it to Linux at large, before they find other OSs.
Well, I'm not using Gentoo, but it's not just %10. I get _huge_ performance gains on my 3.2GHz Northwood if I use proper compiler optimizations. I'm using this workstation for audio related tasks. Ardour (Digital Audio Workstation software) and several plugin effects / audio encoders are 30-40% faster compared to precompiled i386 binaries.
11. First shalt thou try the Knoppix, for verily, it is a piece of cake to install, yea, even that thou intalleth it not.
12. Then shall thou try the RedHat, for it is eay to install, and it is said "In the site of the Amazon, in the city of Linux, are there books without end, and they mostly covereth the Redhat."
13. Or the SuSe, though it is the Devil's very own bugger to get the isos, but that thou payest.
14. Or Mandrake, if thou art French.
16: And the LORD spoke more saying: what happened to 15? Oh, never mind.
17. And when thou hast three score days uptime upone thine Redhat
18. Or SuSE.
19. Or Mandrake, if thou art French
20. Then canst thou try the Gentoo.
21. Or Debian.
Here endeth the lesson.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My personal record for CPU usage on x86 is 112%. This was on a Pentium IV with a hand-tuned assembler matrix-vector product program. TO get > 100% you need to keep 1 execution unit fully busy while occasionally using others. In my case, the FPU was maxed out, the memory-unit doing prefetchnta's accounted for most of the rest, and the final few % were the integer unit updating loop counters.
It's pretty hard to do this, and I doubt it's possible for many programs. Feel free to try tho...
Phil
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Please, you could at least try to add some substance to your trollish post. Sun has a pretty good record with opening their products overall. Look at nfs, openoffice.org, netbeans, gridengine, plus the work they do with other projects like gnome, mozilla, various apache projects.
They're the first company taking their commercial unix os and making it opensource.
The only problem they've had opening up their products has been with java. And most real java developers don't wannt an open source java.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Just visit google and search for define: phb
Pointy-Haired Boss. A creation of Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.
The did Gentoo for OSX, which certainly has a significant chunk of proprietary components. Think just like fink.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It seems to me that opening up Solaris might allow the good ideas from Solaris to seep into other open source trees, mainly Linux, but possibly also the BSDs as well.
Likewise, the odd device drivers and binary compatibility with Linux that would be valuable for Solaris/x86 could seep into the Solaris codebase.
In essence, this could reverse the 1980's schism in UNIX where every RISC hardware vendor created their own slightly different flavor of UNIX (SunOS, AIX, HP/UX, Irix, DG/UX, OSF/1, UNICOS, etc.)
But given how late Sun has opened up Solaris (they would have done much better doing this in 1995), I suspect the Linux codebase will be the larger Borg than Solaris.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Acronym finder is your friend! (7th entry)
The referred to developer is a tool. I just hope he doesn't come up with similar "solutions" for OpenSolaris.
- Hawkeye
"...The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." - Erwin Rommel
It's easy to use your P4 cpu more than 100% in this meaning. Just participate in the mersenne prime search. The P4 client is highly optimized assembly. When you look inside the source, you find comments like
However, how did you measure your 112% value?
Maik
"GNU's Not Unix" is a joke, because GNU definitely is a Unix, it's just not Unix(TM).
The whole aim of GNU was to create "a complete Unix-compatible software system", a free system that worked just like commercial Unices. Stallman himself stated something along the lines of innovation being unimportant compared to producing a totally free system. So a large part of early GNU work was replicating common unix utilities.
#define struct union
You implicitly suggest that Amazon runs Gentoo-flavour GNU/Linux on its servers. Can you back that up?
Does anyone know which Linux they have or if Amazon roll their own entirely?
Well, I'm not using Gentoo, but it's not just %10. I get _huge_ performance gains on my 3.2GHz Northwood if I use proper compiler optimizations. I'm using this workstation for audio related tasks. Ardour (Digital Audio Workstation software) and several plugin effects / audio encoders are 30-40% faster compared to precompiled i386 binaries.
See, for my money I much prefer to let the distribution prepackage binaries for the 98% of stuff that makes up the base system and doesn't really require speed gains (and won't really get any) because that's just easier. Then you can compile your own versions of whatever few applications and libraries you're using that desperately need that extra performance gain. So, for example, in your case I'd just use any old distro and then compile my own version of Ardour, and more importantly compile all the plugins as well, using every trick I can to squeeze the extra performance.
Really, do you get 40% speed gains out of KDE and GNOME? No, not really. So why not let them be prepackaged. How about Python, perl, libXML, Firefox, gettext and all those other bits and pieces? Again, for all it matters they may as well be prepackaged.
The truth is, for speed gains from compiler flags it varies from application to application. For some -ffast-math is a gain, for others not. Likewise with every other flag. Trying to set a bunch of flags for everything is as likely to provide inefficiencies in various bits as gains. Besides, for the majority of applications the speed just isn't that important. KDE spends most of its time idle waiting for input..
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Adds version control for the config file replacement system, and lets you see what changes are going to be made.
It's much nicer than etc-update
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've been willing to forgive a lot of editorial inconsistencies on the part of the /. editors (dupes, etc)... Overall they've done a good job, it's hard to manage such a large site with so much traffic.
But please, stop posting all this unsubstantiated slander and bashing in the stories. First there was the bashing of Six Apart when they were purchasing LiveJournal, without ANY evidence WHY Six Apart was bad or even why the author didn't like them. (Which directly conflicts with everything I've heard from personal friends on LJ's staff, who were all extremely happy about the buyout - Many of them who were contractors with LJ were promoted to full time when SA purchased LJ.)
Now there is a story directly bashing a person, not just a company, with no real evidence as to why that person would deserve such bashing. The mailing list looks to ME like the developer in question politely handling complaints from a rather whiny user.
Really, it's getting out of hand...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It is the good old 90/10 rule for optimization, 90% of the time is spent in 10% of the code, there is pretty much nothing to be gained from optimizing most stuff since the bottlenecks are always very local.
pvd is not only known for the MacOS-X mess (when he brough in a bunch of unexperienced and mostly incompetent developers), but also for the basc problems (which is a statistics client for some website... but was full of security problems and is a never ending source of policy breakage)...
At least, OpenSolaris is Open Source software unlike MacOS-X (There is also a Gentoo/Darwin project... but no one is taking it seriously).
I wrote a response to this article in my blog
That was my idea initially.
Portaris
Linux and GNU software truly are open. I can go and create foobar-Linux tomorrow if I wanted to. Linus has granted pretty much open access to his trademark on Linux.
I honestly would really like to know just how open OpenSolaris really is. If is is as "open" as Java, well, than that is not very open IMO. I can't go and modify Java and still call it Java. I can't go and enhance Java and still call it Java. I need permission first. I don't really consider that "open".
From my perspective, it looks as if OpenSolaris is really nothing more then a marketing ploy to try to undermine GNU/Linux.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I worked for some dickhead that said "Gentoo is not a production ready operating system and never will be." This moron also insisted on standardizing on Red Hat. We ended up having more trouble with the Red Hat boxes than the small farm of Gentoo servers that I managed. (web/mail, 500,000 emails per day average)
I wouldn't blame the OS. It's just how to manage it, that's all.
It didn't load yesterday either, well before this article was posted. A link to it came out in the Gentoo Newsletter.
Google doesn't have those phrases... do you know where I could find the full text?
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
pkgsrc from netbsd is virtually the same, and has long been available on most every flavor of bsd and linux...and unix.
once you go slack, you never go back
Umm, yeah. That's why all the daemons are yp*. Sun Yellow Pages.
I think they had to drop that naming convention because of legal hassles from the phone company.
So that's not really Gentoo for OSX...just portage. As for Sun open-sourcing their OS...I just happen to think it will be a lot like the open-sourcing of Java - very confused.
BTW -> Subjective as this may be: Most Java devs would welcome Java being opened!
Check out www.pkgsrc.org and http://www.feyrer.de/Texts/Own/21c3-pkgsrc-paper.p df
pkgsrc is a portable packages collection similar to portage, which works on Solaris, Linux, *BSD and some others today, with several thousand applications readily available.
- Hubert