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A Comprehensive Look at Solaris 10
sebFlyte writes "After linking to Mad Penguin's first look all seems to have gone quiet on the Solaris 10 front. ZDNet now has a comprehensive review up, and are cautiously positive about the OS, though, as they say: 'as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver.'"
'as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver
Does anyone actually think it will? It looks like a fine upgrade for shops that are already heavily invested in Solaris, but I highly doubt that Solaris 10 (or 11 or 12 or 25 for that matter) will ever really be a 'Linux alternative'. Why would anyone using Linux go for a closed, proprietary Unix flavor? They cattle are stampeding in the other direction and will continue to do so.
Actually, that is not an contradiction at all. Linux is no replacement for Solaris and vice versa. A 40ton truck is no replacement for a family car, but that does not mean they are obsolete.
I'm going to agree with the parent. The entire article pretty much says that it's proprietary and that's a bad thing. One can argue that this is true, but should that really be a total knock against the operating system?
I'm not exactly in favor of this new version of Solaris, but let's see if their review of Longhorn, whenever that may be, stresses that the OS is proprietary and therefore, not the best option.
Personally, I think the technical merits that an OS offers far outweighs its licensing model. The article does stress hardware and software problems, but I was put off by the whole "Solaris isn't Open Source so wait until it is" argument.
All they did was test out installing on sundry hardware platforms. Thats no real life test because people who use Solaris will match the hardware to the OS, and not the other way around.
They briefly mentioned Janus, ZFS, zones (maybe) and the improved tcp/ip stack.
They said it was faster than previous versions.
Thats it ?
Oh, and its not a good alternative for linux ? On the sole basis that you can't install it on any hardware ? Utter BS! Yes, its a true statement, but probably the worst basis for comparison.
Having worked side-by-side with thousands of CPUs of Linux and Solaris, its still Linux that isn't a good alternative to Solaris.
I remember cutting my teeth on SunOS and Solaris starting back in 93/94. They were amazing innovators and almost single-handedly brought Unix into the enterprise. Here is a short list of technologies that were developed largely by Sun:
o The name service switch (nsswitch)
o Network Information Service (NIS/NIS+)
o Network File System (NFS)
o Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM)
I know we make fun of NIS and NFS today as being old and insecure, but in 1993 it was the only way to provide single-sign-on and meet other enterprise requirements for scalability.
I ask Sun, where are you innovating now? Are you providing leadership in LDAP / Directory Services? Nope. Are you providing leadership in distributed computing? Nope, that would be Linux and Open Source. Are you providing leadership in software development? Well, you developed Java, but it took the Free / Open Source guys to make Ant, Junit, Jmeter and other tools to make it really usable.
If Sun wants to drive, it needs to stop complaining from the back seat. It needs to start acting like it did back in the 1990's by developing solutions to enterprise problems and then showing the rest of the market how its done. Leaders lead and right now Sun is like some crotchity old man complaining about "the damn kids". Well, "the damn kids" are too busy driving right now to care about your CDDL and Solaris 10.
DaGoodBoy
My God! It's full of Voids!
Let's face it. You can have the most unbelievable OS on the planet with the most advanced features, but if people can't get a hold of it and can't figure out how to use the features, why bother. As the article stated Solaris 10 is a no-brainer for existing Solaris customers.
.001 % of what one might want to do. Linux is getting better, but it is still severely lacking.
What Linux *represents* (and definitely does not yet provide), is ease of use combined with power. There are very high-end computing companies (like SGI) that are still in business but aren't really relevant to an "end user". But Linux, by virtue of running on commodity hardware, becomes much more available, and has a level of integration with the GUI and hardware that Solaris does not even come close to.
That said, on the point of GUI integration, Solaris->Linux as Linux->Windows. Windows makes everything intuitive and possible from the GUI, with the exception of perhaps
It seems overall that Linux has a GUI just for looks, just so that it doesn't look archaic, but it is not expected to run in entirely in such a manner. The developers need to take responsibility for this and make it a priority. Sit and watch someone try to do something, and then go fix it. Stop scratching their own itch and scratch someone elses for a while.
With Solaris, though, you really can't even begin to manage a system without the command line. It's at least 50 times worse than Linux in this regard. You can't add drivers, configure hardware, configuring networking, or do any of that from the GUI. It's really targeted more at the enterprise, which is fine. But don't represent it as something that I, as a small shop (that runs tons of Java development stuff) would bother with. I have five customers all running SuSE and I won't go near Solaris because it's such a pain to use from the GUI. I have enough to do without getting back into CLI system administration.
Yeah, we've been getting a slew of articles these days on Solaris 10 that "review" the product by simply reading the marketing materials. Also, yet another article on Solaris 10 that tries to only look at the x86 version, and then complains when it doesn't measure up. Well guess what? The x86 version of Solaris has NEVER measured up. Sol 10 is Sun's first attempt at changing that, and it truely won't go anywhere (beyond their approved-compatable hardware) until 3rd parties get more invested in development.
/etc files don't do anything," "oh, they use something called NetInfo," "back to babbling")
Solaris 10 is first and foremost an UltraSPARC-based OS. That's where it runs best, supports almost all the hardware, and is all around a good thing. (Though the x86-64 version should be interesting down the line, as I hear Sun is now working on Opteron servers entirely of their own motherboard design.)
I just wish, for once, someone would review the OS by actually USING IT on the proper hardware, and talk about new and interesting features that aren't blabbed about on the shiney sheets thrown around by marketing.
For example, one of the biggest and most obvious new features of Solaris 10 (that doesn't make the list of "Zones! Self-healing! ZFS, when we finish it!" would have to be the Service Management Facility. They've completely redone the entire framework of how services are managed (i.e. "init.d", "inetd", etc.), to even include service dependency tracking and allow non-dependent services to start in parallel (making big systems boot a lot faster).
At least all of the MacOS X articles by journals like this were the result of actually trying to use and explore the OS itself. (Even if they were formulaic, and pretty much involved saying "this is cool", "hey, the
"Doesn't yet deliver?".
On the basis that *gasp* it's proprietary? When was the last time you saw a ZDNet reviewer lambast Windows because it's proprietary? The reviewer sounds like some childish linux fanboy attempting to take cheap potshots at a sturdy, well-featured, commercial OS with a heck of a lot of new *useful* features (Dtrace, Janus, ZFS, all of which he either fails to mention, or writes some bogus statement showing he doesn't understand them).
Here's a quote from a osnews comment on the story:
Very Funny
By Smartpatrol (IP: ---.galileo.com) - Posted on 2005-04-21 22:34:38
I almost choked when he mentioned Solaris as a Linux alternative....What?
To begin with, it's important to understand that you're still dealing with a proprietary OS here.
So what! spoken like a true Linux zealot! Its a question of usability and picking the best tool to enable business. Not whether or not the product you choose supports the OSS religion or not...what a wanker this guy is.
Speaking of features, his comments are supreficial at best, and show a profound lack of knowledge. He never mentions what this magical hardware that doesn't work with the OS is, he is assumedly too lazy to see the DVD image download on the page he links to, and he whines childishly about the download - can ZDNet somehow not afford cable internet?
Also, last time I checked, many linux distros came on quite a few cds...let's see, Fedora comes on how many discs again? How about Suse? Mandrake? Even my beloved Slackware is two...
How about judging an OS on useability, features, stability, and how it fits the purposes it was designed for? Not some blatant rant on your own fanatical adherence to your pet ideology, and some idiotic statements on a product you probably haven't even actually tested...and reading comments on alt.linux doesn't count as testing it...
cya,
victor
Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris.
Er, that's because it doesn't. They're different OSs tuned for different goals.
Plain and simple, because they fear competition. By being GPL, it allows others to benefit from their work (and work that they received from others). By going with CDDL, only they become the all inclusive taker. It is similar to the MS shared source. But unlike MS, when SUN's shares start sinking (and they will), Sun will move over to the GPL, still have a losing market and then state that GPL does not work.
Somewhere down the road, companies will figure out that the time to move to Linux or even better to OSS, is when they are on TOP, not down by the bottom. Intuit, Adobe, and AOL are 3 companies that are joining Sun in losing market share, and would rather try to hold on to a monopoly than try to start a new path.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They could not use those drivers regardless. Porting UNIX drivers to Linux and vice versa is a little bit more involved than porting a shell script.
They can look at the drivers to learn what they need to know, which might be a good start.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
The reason that not being open source is billed by the reviewer as a bad thing is because the reviewer says it is trying to compete with linux for linux's users. It could be considered similar to packaging up a distro of linux and an incomplete version of Wine, charging the same price as Windows, and suggesting that Windows users change. Not quite the same, of course, but similar.
The review is one page long. There are two paragraphs that list new features, with damn close to zero explanation of what they actually are, and absolutely no indication that the author even tried them. There is no discussion of the benefits of those features, how well they work, how easy/hard they are to use, what the performance implications are, what applications the reviewer tried, or anything.
The review states:
Unfortunately it's at this point that the Solaris proposition starts to lose some of it lustre. Yes, you can download and install it just like Red Hat or SuSE Linux, but there the similarities end, making Solaris 10 far less of an obvious choice for companies looking for a Linux alternative.
What does that even mean? What "similarities" between Solaris and Linux is he looking for and what benefits do those similarities deliver to the customer? How does the absence of these unspecified similarities reduce the "lustre" on Solaris "proposition"? This may be the single dumbest sentence I've ever seen in a review of any product.
To begin with, it's important to understand that you're still dealing with a proprietary OS here.
And?
He then goes on to complain about the Linux compatibility feature's poor emulation. It's not clear how he is able to test this, since he admits that it's not even shipped as part of the product yet.
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't just making shit up, and that he actually does have super-special access to software that Sun hasn't shipped. Maybe there is a reason Sun chose not to ship that code yet? Why is the shipping product being criticized for the quality of code that was deliberately left out of it?
This review is just a shoddy piece of work. ZDnet should be embarrassed to have their name on it and Slashdot should be embarrassed that one of their editors believes that this is a "comprehensive" review.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Not so, they are very much directly competing in the same market for the same customers.
'Linux' covers a wide range of distributions, which are tailored for a wide range of uses. The primary competitor for Solaris is RedHat Enterprise Linux. This is not the same as 'Linux' in general. For example, Solaris is not aimed at the desktop, like Mandrake.
Why would anyone using Linux go for a closed, proprietary Unix flavor?
Because most of what is done on such systems uses the open, non-proprietary features.
Unix (and similar systems such as Linux) has been such a success over the years because they implement open standards: TCP/IP networking, POSIX, X-Windows etc. This use of open standards and APIs explains why it is so much easier to port programs between different versions of Unix than to other OSes.
To say that Solaris is a 'closed, proprietary Unix flavor' is self-contradictory. Unix is a set of open standards. What is proprietary is the implementation. If you use GNU tools on Solaris, you can even avoid most of that. Commercial Unix users usually don't care about whether or not the kernel source is available; all they care about is the quality of implementations and price.
Plain and simple, because they fear competition.
Nonsense. Sun helped pioneer competition in the OS market with their strong backing of open systems. Unix is about competition, as it is about providing implementation of open standards, which make the version of Unix you use a matter of choice, and not something you are tied to.
Quite obviously nobody here runs enterprise systems! Solaris 10 running on an 6800, or an F15K or F25K is so streets ahead of linux is not even comparable.
Containers, administration, threading model, on-line transfer of CPU betwen containers, healing capability, etc.
Solaris thread "context switching" is far superior to that found in linux. 64 bit support has been around for years.
Solaris might not have support for some dodgy no-brand cd-rom drive, but when you're using SRDF on Symmetrix systems thats not a massive concern.
Dont get me wrong, Linux is great, but for Oracle running on Fujitsu PrimePower, Solaris is where its at.
Similarly, for runing Apache, Weblogic, JBoss etc, Linux is a winner. (You might want to sit them behind a Foundry switch, though, so when the PSU goes your service is still up!).
which make the version of Unix you use a matter of choice, and not something you are tied to.
You must be young...
This post is awesome.
That's nonsense. I work in a commercial environment and zones, dtrace, and ZFS are all very attractive features. We're hardly in the "highest echelons". It doesn't sound like your career has lifted you from the lowest rungs, so perhaps you need to work a little longer before you go making these silly statements.
It's a piece of shit OS, seriously. It's a pain to get things done. It took me 2 hours to figure out the right command magic yesterday to get a local queue to a remote LPD.
I think you just don't know how to use Solaris.
'tis but a few paragraphs long and summarised thus:
No kidding. I written a few reviews (see my journal for some of them) and all I could think of when reading this was "weak". As in, "Where's all the content?" Ok, we said we had installation problems, we said it's proprietary, and then we spend the rest of the article on Linux compatibility?!? Do these people have any idea what they're reviewing?
Unfortunately, this seems to be a trend in Unix style OS reviews. Linux magazines in particular tend to be *really* bad about printing "reviews" that are nothing more than, "I couldn't get it to work, oh well." The worst one I ever saw was a review of an XPDE Linux Distro. "My screen went green after the install. Hope they fix this in the next version. Fin." WTF? What are they *paying* these people for?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ya, look how much alteration and Irix knowhow that took. Do you really think a vanilla kernel from www.kernel.org will run on a 256 processor Altix? On the other hand, I can download Solaris 10 and run it on my Ultra10 then use that same install disk with no other changes and bring up an E15K. Linux can't do that.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Plain and simple, because they fear competition. By being GPL, it allows others to benefit from their work (and work that they received from others). By going with CDDL, only they become the all inclusive taker. It is similar to the MS shared source. But unlike MS, when SUN's shares start sinking (and they will), Sun will move over to the GPL, still have a losing market and then state that GPL does not work.
/. and other "open source" community sites. If the Sun-haters were to have their way and see Sun fail then a good[1] number of open-source hackers would be out of work (including myself).
Rubbish. As already described several times on the blogs of important Sun people, they considered the GPL quite seriously, but found it wasn't suitable. One obvious reason is that the GPL is slightly too restrictive for OpenSolaris - not all hardware vendors want to have to release source, which coding to a GPL'd driver interface would almost certainly require. The CDDL allows ISVs to decide for themselves whether to open their code or not. Sun wrote and/or own Solaris, Sun wanted to allow others to be able to use it without having to release their modifications (remember, Sun has strong BSD roots), so Sun fixed the problems in the MPL to create the CDDL. Further, the GPL does not deal with the problem of patent litigation in any meaningful way (one of the goals for GPLv3 apparently is to do that - hopefully they'll draw from the CDDL approach to patents, which is quite nice.).
I fail to see how working towards releasing Solaris under a liberal licence such as the CDDL qualifies as trying to "hold on to a monopoly".
If you think this is bogus, consider that many many Linux users who are happy to bash the CDDL are using proprietary kernel drivers, particularly for graphics cards, which are in possibly in a grey legal area wrt GPL status of Linux - particularly the ATi drivers, which are (IIRC) based on DRI in some way (the NVidia drivers arent).
Note that Sun do not have a problem with the GPL. There are lots of GPL and LGPL projects out there whose ChangeLogs contain @sun.com addresses, eg GNOME and OpenOffice to name just two (Indeed, Sun bought out and then LGPL'd OpenOffice). And I'm very involved in a GPL project myself..
It's a real shame there is such anti-Sun hysteria on
Thanks.
1. And I dont include OpenSolaris hackers in that. Once OpenSolaris is out there, virtually every Sun engineer working on Solaris will be an open-source hacker too.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
It is pretty arrogant to assume that the GPL is the key to making or breaking a company.
"It's a real shame there is such anti-Sun hysteria on /. and other "open source" community sites. If the Sun-haters were to have their way and see Sun fail then a good[1] number of open-source hackers would be out of work (including myself)."
Sun will fail, not because the peanut gallery is yelling at them or making fun of them but because the management has no vision for the company and instead are flinging shit on the wall hoping something sticks. Just read the blogs of their top level execs. Either these people are manic depressive or they really do change their minds radically once a week.
As for sun being pro GPL I don't buy it. When they came out with their patent grant they excluded all licenses except their own. To me this says they reserve the right to sue GPLed projects for patent infringement. When pushed on the matter they just weasel and flip flop.
evil is as evil does
I just don't get it, when and operating system like Solaris 10 comes out it must be bad because it came from Sun. Solaris has been a good operating system for years. It may not fit into every category like desktop, workstation, sever but then again why should it. The unix admin's mentallity used to be the right tool for the right job, but now it seems "run Linux or get out of town". Then again I think that comment mainly comes from people who have never seen a commandline interface and love to right click. If solaris doesn't work for a desktop then don't use it but you must admit it rocks for mission critical severs. But I would guess that mose people here (Other than a few, so if this is you please excuse this) don't run mission critical stuff and think Linux is the god of everything. I like BSD and think Linux is just out of control. It seems like every week there is a new linux distro coming out and who wants to try every one of them, and hope the distro will still be around if the mission critical server needs help. If you don't like Solaris then don't use it, but keep your comments about using Solaris to yourself because it really shines where it needs to and that is in the Datacenter.