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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."
Sun really seems to like the Open-.org naming convention. They are probably trying to oppose Steve Jobs' iNaming.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
I just want the cool features of solaris (such as hot-swappable processors on a multi-processor system) to be ported to Linux. Honestly, bot OS can and should merge into one entity. less fork, more merge.
Shocking, I tell you.
Take it easy? I'll take it anyway I can get it . . .
Basically, it's a way of debugging programs. A VERY cool way of debugging programs.
What a lot of Slashdotters might not realize is that Sun has spent literally millions of hours over the last couple of years "unencumbering" Solaris from patented code that was owned by other companies opposed to the open sourcing of their intellectual property. They did this for no reason other than to prove to the open source community that they are serious about open sourcing Solaris, and hopefully to sell some good Sun iron in the process.
It would be nice to see some Slashdotters give Sun their well deserved props for a change, instead of ripping on them.
"What? You gave us OpenOffice? That's not good enough..." I hoping this thread doesn't turn into another Sun bash fest because this time they deserve a little respect for giving away what I see as the crown jewels of their company.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
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.
Otherwise it will enjoy a slow death. Obviously maturing and growth of Linux, scared the hell out of Schwartz and his cohorts. Now they are trying to appeal to the OS community to give their precious operating system, which they locked up under layers of safes many many years and expect them to stop or slow down working on linux and make their solaris better instead, which they will be more than happy to incorporate the development and charge the corporations an arm and a leg.
I am not sure about you but I am not buying this half-hearted OpenSolaris movement.
Come, come to my web little fly, said spider...
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
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.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.open solaris.org
OS Server Last changed IP address
Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.6
Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)
Part of this release is the opening of more than 1,600 patents to the open source community.
:)
link
IBM just got outdone on their 500 patent release. Let's see them come back with 5,000! Come on, it can be a Sun/IBM "who can give away the most patents to open source" war
Finkployd
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
It doesn't matter nearly as much if they invented them or not, but it sounds like they're making an IBM-style pledge to use their patents as a shield for the open source community rather than a sword against it.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
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.
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
If Solaris is based on SCO's System 5 code, then wouldn't opening it's source (whether Sun has the right or not) potentially pollute other open source projects that borrowed from it?
If Solaris is based on BSD and has no SCO code in it, I guess that's not an issue. But then why did they take out a SCO license? I imagine some conspiracy theorists will say simply to hurt Linux, but that can't be the whole story, can it?
IBM had a SCO license too, but that's because AIX has SysV code in it. That's not the code they gave to Linux, but if they were to open-source all of AIX and pieces of SCO code migrated to Linux, that would be a problem, no?. So why not with Solaris too?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
You've got no idea what you're talking about.
Maybe for you - the geek in his parent's basement and a nervous caffine twitch preventing from typing properly - things like a $10k price gap between sun hardware and tigerdirect hardware is an issue. But not for anyone that needs reliability and support.
Yes, things like cooperation are a part of why various open-source based companies are doing well. You know why else they're doing well? They've got sound support, sound development, and a good record to back up their word.
Oh, and the first two lines of your post make about as much sense as this string: asdlfkj23ksdlds.
Thank you for your coherrent discertation. The citizens of slashdot salute you.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Basicly, I think of it as the Ultimate Packet Sniffer command line tool, being applied to processes and your system as a whole, along with a scripting language for your pleasure.
It lets you track/compare/analyze users and processes in real-time to basicly tell you what your computer is really doing and lets you pinpoint who/why it is doing it, system wide, without configuration changes or restarts..
Look forward to a lot of REALLY powerful scripts coming from this(there is an experimental rootkit coming out even, that used dtrace to sniff out passwords in system memory, etc). Very powerful, very dangerous.
I presume (though I don't really know) that Solaris needs to be built with Sun's C compiler. Is this compiler coming forth as an open source release too? If not, is it going to be freely available? If I remember correctly, you currently need to pay in order to get Sun's cc.
If it is coming, this is great news. A compiler highly optimized for Sparc may benefit all operating systems that run on it. Who knows, maybe their x86 compiler has some good features too. Sun's libc (probably highly optimized for Sparc) would be a nice thing to have. Anything else?
So, I downoad the code, and I take a look at it - the first thing through my mind, is "OMG - look at all the spagetti code!"
Then I realized I opened a C file with Unix returns with notepad.
Oops.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
They can be enforced against GPL software including the Linux kernel.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Wake me when Java goes Open Source...
There is a big world out there, and not one solution is always right for everything.
Outside of the knee-jerk reactions on /. , the whole world should not switch overnight to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. Sometimes, other systems are the right answer, for many complex reasons.
I happen to have a particular fondness for Solaris, having been a fan of their hardware for the last 15 years. It's the Devil I know, and I'm comfortable dancing with him.
I think it's amusingly disingenuous of the slashdot Linux-script-kiddie mentality to ignore that for ten years, SunOS Ruled The Roost in open software, for many good reasons. It is not without its warts (Solaris 2.0 through 2.4 being oozing pustules of lossage), but for an entire generation of sysadmins, Sun was the one system you had to know ... You could add on some of the other big players like Digital, AIX and HP-UX, and maybe one or two of the smaller also-rans like the BSD 4.4 cousins or Linux, but the 800 lb. gorilla was Sun.
Finally: any monoculture is a bad thing, whether it is BSD 4.3 on VAXen, SunOS 5.9 on US-IV , or Linux on Wintel hardware -- and it behooves anyone who wants to be taken seriously to study the differences between systems rather than put all of their energy into denegrating that which isn't their pet.
I think that last part really sums up what I find disheartening with the slashdot collective consciousness. It's that the slashborg will put an infinite amount of energy into defending their point of view, without investing any into analyzing the competition. And, sadly, that more than anything is the sign of ignorant zealotry.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
I would agree that any monoculture is bad. The thing you and those who share your view are missing is that of all those in your list, linux is the only one which is NOT a monoculture.
Just because it's all labeled linux doesn't mean it's all the same. If there are two opposing camps who disagree on how a component is best designed BOTH will be written and available for compilation. There isn't one linux, there are hundreds of linuxes. It may have the same name, but the linux you run on a wristwatch is NOT the same linux you run on an IBM mainframe.
There's a fox in the barn.
I don't like this one bit. Why this emphasis on Netbeans, OpenThis, OpenThat if these programs run on any hardware? Hardware that is normally cheaper than Sun(although admitedly not as cool)?
If every Sun software became open then Sun, the hardware company, will go the way of VA-Linux.
Have they given up and are now willing to die shooting (at Microsoft)? What is left in their magic hats now that Solaris is free?
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
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.
Linux doesn't have a buggy awk, sed or tar.
Solaris 8 does.
Most x86 hardware doesn't suffer from the transient error bug that the non-ECC cache of the ultrasparcII processor.
Linux works on parking meters.
Solaris doesn't work out of the box with an A1000.
Most quality nics work out of the box with linux.
Most netras and ultras have to either be hardset or vice versa, and won't work the other way.
Don't get me wrong, I like sun hardware (Love LOM), but it and it's software are not perfect.
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.
Sun's been using the term "Open" in their stuff forever. Remember, Sun's X environment was called "OpenWindows", and even though they've since discontinued the old OpenWindows window manager, their X server still resides in "/usr/openwin".
Though Sun's definition of "Open" has traditionally been "open standards", as opposed to the F/OSS definition which I believe to be "open implementations".
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Note also that IBM's grant came just in time to drown out news about 61 European Parliament members asking to restart the software patent debate there from zero. IBM is one of the main parties lobbying for European software patents. Their grant is part of a larger strategy to convince European legislators that Open Source and software patenting are compatible, that could indeed kill Open Source, because it would leave us vulnerable to many software patent lawsuits.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Ignoring for a moment the question of whether it's buggy, who gives a damn about Solaris 8? That was the 90s, man. OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the release of which is imminent. It's a boatload of new technology plus two full releases' worth of bug fixes removed from Solaris 8. If you had a bad experience, we're sorry, but please don't continue feeding people misinformation based on a badly outdated release. Should I talk about my experience with Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux (based on kernel 0.99!) in 1993 and pretend my difficulties then are reasons to avoid Debian GNU/Linux 3.0?
Next, pedantry.
Yes, sed and awk have bugs filed against them. Probably everything except maybe /usr/bin/true does. Since you didn't say what kind of bugs, it's hard to assess the legitimacy of your complaint. If you'd care to elaborate, there's a chance your problem can be fixed. Otherwise everyone just assumes you're a crank.
Most of the "bugs" in Solaris userland that draw a lot of complaints from GNU users are not bugs at all but rather artifacts of painstaking maintenance of compatibility with long-extant standards. The GNU tools you're familiar with follow different (or their own) standards, because backwards-compatibility is not a GNU priority. It's a constraint imposed on Solaris development by our customers, who seem pleased with the results. You can in some cases make the GNU tools behave similarly if you wish. Solaris also has several different versions of these tools, each of which matches different incompatible standards. You might just be using the wrong one.
Finally, Linux doesn't have awk, sed, or tar. It's a kernel. I've assumed here that you mean the GNU tools, though of course each distro ships its own version and combination of specific tools, but it's certainly possible to build a system with a Linux kernel and non-GNU userland. In fact, soon it will be possible, at least in theory, to make a system with a Linux kernel and a mostly-Solaris userland, if you really want to.
Ok, on to your other concerns.
Most x86 hardware doesn't suffer from the transient error bug that the non-ECC cache of the ultrasparcII processor.
What does this have to do with Solaris? If you think x86 systems are more reliable, you can run Solaris on those instead.
Linux works on parking meters.
So does Windows CE. Should we all start using that? Standard Linux won't run on less than about 4MB of memory, even if you're talking about Linux 2.0. Newer means bigger. Solaris as shipped today by Sun also requires more resources than would normally be found in a small embedded system. It's a safe bet that, like Linux, the SunOS kernel could be reduced sufficiently for such an application. It's just software and work. The fact that a highly modified version of Linux can run a parking meter is a curiosity and a testament to the effort of the hackers who did it, not evidence of inherent software superiority.
Solaris doesn't work out of the box with an A1000.
I can only assume this is yet another reference to some past bad experience you've had. Since you're not telling us what it is, it's impossible (a) to know if it's still a problem, and (b) to fix it if so. Please, be specific if you want to complain. Hint: referencing bug IDs is a good idea.
Most quality nics work out of the box with linux.
Which nics would you like to use on Solaris? In the 10/100 space there's iprb (Intel), elxl (3Com 3c9xx), dnet (Tulip/21xx0), and about a half dozen others. In the Gb/10Gb space there's e1000g (Intel), bge (Broadcom), sk98sol (SysKonnect), and xge (S2IO). See the reference manual for drivers if you want to participate in an informed discussion. The examples I gave don't include the various vendor-supplied drivers or any of the Sun-specific d
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
You're mistaken, AC. OpenSolaris can co-opt BSD code, because the BSD license specifically allows anyone to use their code for any purpose -- simply put, the BSD license is compatible with any license, as long as credit is given. It's as free, in that respect, as you can get (without going public domain).
The BSDs, however, cannot use any of OpenSolaris' code, because you cannot relicense CDDL code as BSD (if you could, it would be trivial to put it into Linux -- after all, BSD licensed code may be added to the Linux kernel, and in fact has been on several occasions.)
The BSDs will benefit no more from OpenSolaris using their code than they do from NT using their code.
This is essentially how BSD works -- everyone benefits from BSD, but no one is required to give back. The BSD people don't see any issues with this, so more power to them.
Linux can't benefit from OpenSolaris either -- but because of the GPL, this means that OpenSolaris also can't benefit from Linux. So it's a symmetric relationship in that respect.