Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-faith-effort dept.

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."

27 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Now that's a concept by lphuberdeau · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Now that's a concept by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They should revive their "Open Windows" trademark to issue a open source operating system distro - be it Solaris or Linux. That would be a perfect revenge for Microsofts litigation against Lindows.

    2. Re:Now that's a concept by kin_korn_karn · · Score: 3, Funny

      now they can all merge with a financial services company and be iOpenING.org . har har har

  2. Hot-Swappable by jon_oner · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Hot-Swappable by DShard · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Merging solaris code into the linux kernel is a lot more difficult then implementing the feature from scratch. This is largely due to the codebases being wildly different but other difficulties contribute to the problem.

      On the bright side, hot swappable processors, memory and pci cards are already in linux. enjoy!

    2. Re:Hot-Swappable by superpulpsicle · · Score: 3, Funny

      Sun has an aweful track record of maintaining anything on the web. That includes their external website. A small example, you can't even find sun's Burlington Mass address on the site. Trust me, the list is a mile long. I expect this .org site to be well maintained for about a year at most.

    3. Re:Hot-Swappable by Octorian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, one thing I really like about Solaris is a forwards-compatable interface for kernel modules (i.e. drivers and such). This is something that Linux feels downright embarassing at (heck, they're not even compatable from one build to another, yet alone a point version), and I'm really not sure how FreeBSD is at this (havn't checked).

      I can take a device driver written for Solaris version X, and chances are pretty good that it "will just work" on Solaris X+1 and maybe even X+2. (heck, I've even seen a single device driver module "supported" on multiple versions by a HW vendor) The only real requirement is that the module be built for the same architecture as the kernel (i.e. a 32-bit module won't work on a 64-bit kernel, and vice versa).

  3. Too busy to post by keester · · Score: 4, Funny
    Is everyone so busy downloading that they don't have time to post their anti/pro solaris comments?

    Shocking, I tell you.

    --
    Take it easy? I'll take it anyway I can get it . . .
  4. Re:Dynamic Tracing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Basically, it's a way of debugging programs. A VERY cool way of debugging programs.

  5. Thank you to the folks at Sun... by illumin8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun... by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Informative

      The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.

      That's not a question; it is not compatible.

    2. Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun... by acg6764 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      On a personal level, I agree. On an investor level, your comment scares me a bit. Sun still makes up for a decent percentage of my tech portfolio. I would like to understand what Sun is hoping to achieve through this investment.

      They are continuing to face declining market shares. They could have used the money to build better hardware and marketing campaigns. They could have also provided enhancements to the existing Linux infrastructure to be better compatible with their hardware.

      Still, the geek in me is happy with Sun and I guess that's a start.

      --
      Discount Cartridges
    3. Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun... by illumin8 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
  6. Re:Dynamic Tracing by nbert · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the link provided in the article:
    DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.
    So the answer to your question is: no, it's not useful for a "normal" user.
    --
    I don't read replies by ACs.
  7. Re:Dynamic Tracing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
    I would guess not. Most of those weird-named technologies are only useful on multi-processor systems and servers where CPU cycles are really an issue.

    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.

  8. More than 1,600 patents by finkployd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  9. Re:Dynamic Tracing by illumin8 · · Score: 4, Informative
    The best place to go for this information is the well documented Dtrace FAQs.

    From it, I shamelessly lifted the following brief synopsis:

    Q. What is DTrace?

    A. DTrace is a new facility in the Solaris Operating System that adds dynamic instrumentation and tracing to the kernel and can be used on production systems. It's a power tool that can be used by both the entry-level and experienced system administrators to diagnose and resolve problems in hours or minutes that might have previously taken days.


    Q. What are the benefits of DTrace?

    A. Faster resolution of performance problems for system administrators
    Quicker time to market and higher quality product for developers
    Greater utilization of existing system resources for IT managers


    Q. What are the key highlights of DTrace?

    A. Comprehensive coverage: over 30,000 instrumentation points in even the smallest system; integrated access to both application and kernel data
    Always available: built-in with no need to reboot or otherwise reconfigure system, disable or alter applications, or disable user/client access
    Safe: cannot panic system and has no impact on the system when not being used
    Enable only the trace points you need
    Analyzes data in real time on production systems
    Extensible as new analysis routines can be built for re-use using the D programming language


    Q. What is the performance overhead of DTrace?

    A. When not in use, DTrace has no impact on system performance or other behavior. When being used, DTrace overhead is dependent on the number of probe points being observed.


    Q. How does Sun's DTrace compare with competitive offerings?

    A. DTrace is the only dynamic tracing tool available that eliminates the need for collecting and processing event data. With DTrace a system administrator can query the system experiencing the problem in real time, while in production, and get accurate and precise information regarding the source of the problem. No log files are generated, and there is no data to analyze. This reduces the time it takes to identify and resolve problems by orders of magnitude! Literally from days to minutes.

    Containers are based on software. They offer logical separation with the same OS in each Container. Containers offer enormous scalabilty: while there is no hard coded limit, upto 4000 per OS image are available and is beyond normal requirements today.


    Q. Can DTrace be used without knowing the D language?

    A. You can leverage scripts developed by others (such as those available on the Sun BigAdmin portal). However, it is not difficult to learn D which is very similar to the ANSI C programming language with a special set of functions and variables to make tracing easy.
    --
    "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
  10. Re:webpage running on linux? by dme · · Score: 4, Informative

    Check the machine itself. It says:

    Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1

  11. Blogs on souce code and DTrace by ChrisRijk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  12. Is Solaris based on BSD or SysV? by Rob+Y. · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...
  13. Re:Dynamic Tracing by burns210 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:Sun Compiler and Tools by Darren.Moffat · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  15. Well, there's a little problem with those patents. by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The press releases say those patents are only for software under the CDDL license and the OpenSolaris process.

    They can be enforced against GPL software including the Linux kernel.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  16. OpenJava.org? by Glomek · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wake me when Java goes Open Source...

  17. Re:Now that's a concept Uh oh by Octorian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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".

  18. Re:Well, there's a little problem with those paten by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful
    We're not talking about lifting code. That is covered by copyright law. Software patents cover applications of mathematical principles.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  19. IBM vs. Sun Patent Pledges by augustz · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is a big difference between the IBM and SUN patent pledges.

    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 :) Fun stuff though, and I think pragmatism will win the day if there good stuff is delivered.