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Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org
An anonymous reader writes "Sun has launched the first version of opensolaris.org, featuring a small initial drop of source code. The idea is to make a display of good faith to the Solaris community while the rest of the source code due diligence is completed. The source code for Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available for download under the terms of the newly OSI-approved CDDL license."
that's not so much software as it is hardware. and merge the two? are you a moron?
I don't read replies by ACs.
Welcome to Dynamic Tracing in the Solaris Operating System! If you have ever wanted to understand the behavior of your system, DTrace is the tool for you. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that is built into Solaris that can be used by administrators and developers on live production systems to examine the behavior of both user programs and of the operating system itself. DTrace enables you to explore your system to understand how it works, track down performance problems across many layers of software, or locate the cause of aberrant behavior. As you'll see, DTrace lets you create your own custom programs to dynamically instrument the system and provide immediate, concise answers to arbitrary questions you can formulate using the DTrace D programming language. The first section of this chapter provides a quick introduction to DTrace and shows you how to write your very first D program. The rest of the chapter introduces the complete set of rules for programming in D as well as tips and techniques for performing in-depth analysis of your system. You can share your DTrace experiences and scripts with the rest of the DTrace community on the web at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/dtrace/. All of the example scripts presented in this guide can be found on your Solaris system in the directory /usr/demo/dtrace.
DTrace helps you understand a software system by enabling you to dynamically modify the operating system kernel and user processes to record additional data that you specify at locations of interest, called probes. A probe is a location or activity to which DTrace can bind a request to perform a set of actions, like recording a stack trace, a timestamp, or the argument to a function. Probes are like programmable sensors scattered all over your Solaris system in interesting places. If you want to figure out what's going on, you use DTrace to program the appropriate sensors to record the information that is of interest to you. Then, as each probe fires, DTrace gathers the data from your probes and reports it back to you. If you don't specify any actions for a probe, DTrace will just take note of each time the probe fires.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-6223
Their press release at sun.com said OpenSolaris via the CDDL will make 1,600 patents available to open source.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
False. DTrace can be used to analyze the operation of any system that runs Solaris 10, from 1 CPU to 100+. It can tell you useful information about a single thread's interaction with the system or 1000 threads' interactions with each other. It can even tell you about things that have nothing to do with either the number of CPUs or the number of threads.
One of the stories Bryan likes to tell has to do with fixing a performance bug in a piece of desktop software that has nothing whatever to do with servers at all.
It's useful.
From it, I shamelessly lifted the following brief synopsis:
Q. What is DTrace?
Q. What are the benefits of DTrace?
Q. What are the key highlights of DTrace?
Q. What is the performance overhead of DTrace?
Q. How does Sun's DTrace compare with competitive offerings?
Q. Can DTrace be used without knowing the D language?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.
That's not a question; it is not compatible.
Check the machine itself. It says:
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
$ wget -S --spider opensolaris.org
--00:32:30-- http://opensolaris.org/
=> `index.html'
Resolving opensolaris.org... done.
Connecting to opensolaris.org[209.249.116.220]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
2 Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
3 Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 23:32:31 GMT
4 Content-length: 12972
5 Content-type: text/html
6 Last-modified: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:46:16 GMT
7 Accept-ranges: bytes
8 Connection: keep-alive
200 OK
Bryan Cantrill, one of the DTrace developers wrote this blog entry as a general introduction to the source code layout and also to DTrace. This post by Adam Leventhal goes into some more detail.
82678 lines of C were made public. No registration, no click through license before download. The OpenSolaris FAQ is pretty good btw, and there's also a roadmap page.
According to this blog (the entry dated 15:43), those in the pilot program (more than 100 developers out side of Sun) have today gotten access to the entire Solaris source base, and have already built their own version - screen shot.
netcraft is often wrong.
nmap -O reports:
OS details: Sun Solaris 9 with TCP_STRONG_ISS set to 2
Yep, just completed a 1 day overview course on it on Monday. I work for Sun - although not in any dept that will find much use for DTrace, we are currently involved in a S10 training program. So I don't pretend to be an expert in DTrace or kernel debugging, I played with it for 3-4 hours on an Ultra 10 :p
... goodnight :|
DTrace uses a scripting/manipulating language similar in structure to awk which allows certain 'probes' embedded into kernel modules to be activated and read during the operation of your system.
The S10 build we were using had over 37,000 probes spread across all genunix/unix and related modules whcih can be used to look at things like I/O throughput. When the probes are 'fired' (switched on) they sit there returning information on the process to which the probe is embedded, showing for example what is initiating disk access or performing certain system calls.
There is also a pretty powerfull data handling and querying system which allows quick and fast interpretation of the probe results.
Apparently if used properly (i.e. a few dozen probes are fired and read) the is no noticable drop in system performance as the probes as 'passive'. If you try and fire all 37,000 probes at once
I thought Linux already had hot swap CPU support. It just depends on the right hardware.
The CDDL is based off of the Mozilla license.
There's a FAQ on the new OpenSolaris site about licensing here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/faq/licensing_faq.html
Along with a summary of the changes from the Mozilla license:
http://www.sun.com/cddl/CDDL_why_summary.html
And a redlined diff of what exactly has changed between the MPL and the CDDL (in a pdf file):
http://www.sun.com/cddl/CDDL_MPL_redline.pdf
You can (and infact Sun does) compile Solaris with gcc. Our production AMD64 kernel and a large number of the AMD64 libraries are compiled with gcc . However the makefile assume the Sun C compiler but the build environment has a wrapper around gcc to make it look like the Sun compiler.
> The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.
From my understanding it is similar (identical) in spirit, but not compatible, as each license enforces derived works under its own license, with no mixing of licenses allowed.
Points where GPL and CDDL seem similar in spirit:
* All source (changed and unchanged) must remain
available under the license (GPL#2, CDDL#3.1)
* Any modification must happen under the original
license (GPL#2b, CDDL #3.2).
My personal concern is that Sun who used BSD code for its fine operating system didn't make its new license compatible with the BSD license. Pity!
- Hubert
It's encumbered with Patents and a license which makes it non-free software.
Non-free? I doubt it. GPL-incompatible does not equal non-free; if you go to gnu.org and read the fucking list of the licenses that RMS himself considers Free Software licenses, you'll notice that about half of them are listed as being incompatible with the GPL.
The Sun CDDL is not yet listed there. It has, however, been approved by the OSI, meaning that this is OSI-Certified Open Source(tm). And since the difference between "open source" and "free software" is a matter of philosophy rather than law, that basically means it counts as free software.
Sun reserves the right to enforce the patents if you use code under a different license.
Although the terms of the license would allow you to fork under the gpl or contribute to a gpl'd project sun could still nail you with the patents.
They already make better products. Better than Linux, at any rate.
There are various types of better. If I have to deploy an e-commerce site that gets thousands of hits a day then perhaps Sun products are better. For anything that isn't scaled on that level the value proposition favors Linux.
I was kind of under the impression that this move was masterminded by Microsoft (via the multi-billion dollar deal they had with Sun) as an attempt to fragment the Open Source community. I could be very wrong, but it seems to make the most sense that way. The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.
Microsoft doesn't have any control over Sun at all. You might have thought this because MS paid Sun $2 billion as part of a settlement agreement, but really, they did this because they had to and because Sun was willing to do them a favor and let them off easy. If Sun had wanted to keep fighting that fight forever, they could have, and probably would have ended up with more cash, although they might have gone out of business before any damages were won.
Believe me, folks at Sun dislike MS business tactics as much as you do.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I'm not really sure how difficult it would be to figure out Solaris kernel code. (ok, maybe for Linux developers, but maybe not BSD ones) A couple years ago, I did some investigation into device driver code. One thing I found was that Solaris and FreeBSD device drivers looked VERY similar in structure. The main differences were the names of the callable kernel functions (names, more than functionality), and that Solaris strongly pushed the philosophy of using mutex locks for all data structures.
This is simply false. If you're referring to the Foundation Source program offered in Solaris 8, there's a FAQ entry that specifically addresses how OpenSolaris is different. In fact Foundation Source was never open source, it never had an open source license, and it was never intended as a community development project. Lockin had nothing to do with it. It wasn't open source, period. See also the FAQ about Sun taking the code away after it's released: they can't. End of discussion.
Sun has backed SCO with money and buying stocks. More importantly, SCO has some sort of USB code that Sun purchased from them(probably stolen from elsewhere).
Ignoring for a moment the fact that you've just libeled SCO - not what I'd call advisable - Sun has not stated what was purchased from SCO or why. As tough as it is, you might consider the benefit of the doubt here - has it ever occurred to you that they bought the right to open source some of the code in Solaris?
Sun has already opened sparc systems (solbourne) and then closed it after solbourne was killing them in sales.
SPARC has always been open and still is. The specifications are available and you can get a license to make SPARC gear for $99 from SPARC International. Not to mention that Solbourne was over 10 years ago.
Got any more FUD or lies?
There is a big difference between the IBM and SUN patent pledges.
:) Fun stuff though, and I think pragmatism will win the day if there good stuff is delivered.
IBM listed a broad range of software licenses, importantly including the GPL, which means linux is covered.
Sun's license so far is limited to Solaris, or at least it looks that way, where they have contributed code under the CDDL. This means if you take a method (or read about a method) that they use in Solaris and apply it elsewhere you can still get slammed.
Not a black and white issue though, as the discerning reader will note that the GPL has not patent clause at all, so the CDDL is stronger in one sense there. Not sure if Linux is any worse off.
But it will be interesting to see how Solaris comes out as open source, incredibly it has gotten to this point for those who remember the Sun of the past (and even some of the current ranting). Losing market share is an incredible motivator it seems
For starters the Mozilla license is not compatible with GPL, yet nobody makes silly comments about Firefox not being open enough.
The license Sun is using is just a variation of the Mozilla license.
There is more to Open Source than just Linux. The whole point is we now have two serious Open Source server OS competitiors to MS.
Linux is free as in speech, but the Enterprise distros are not free as in beer. Of course other non-certified distros are free as in beer Fedora, Mandrake, Debian etc.
Solaris is free as in speech and as in beer.
Many people seem so blinded by anti-UNIX rage that they don't even notice that Sun has contributed more lines of source code to Open Source than any other company. Virtually their entire software line will run on any OS including Linux. They are totally obsessed with crossplatform compatibility - hence there obsession with Java.