Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Who cares?
it's picky about its hardware
So choose your hardware carefully. I like my Mac because the OS and hardware fit each other perfectly. Buy the hardware from Sun and it'll fit perfectly too.
Linux compatibility limited to i686 RHEL3 compatibility
Uh. So?
it's proprietry, stick to Linux
Again, what's wrong with proprietary?
as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver.
Am I the only person who finds this statement insanely hilarious? Maybe it's just my time spent as a sysadmin, but it seems to me that just a few/several years ago Linux was said to not deliver as an alternative to Solaris. A statement like that has got to really sting Sun.
My, my how times change.
Ender-
Nothing to see here
When/if.... if wishes were horses etc etc
Sun are notoriously full of shit. *When* the source code for the Solaris kernel is released, and *IF* iy has a license that isn't full of curiously worded patent-bombs and tricks to ensure that there are no forks (and no, the CDDL doesn't count), *THEN* we can congratulate them.
*UNTIL* then, I don't believe a word Sun says. I've been saying for a while that there's a smell of desperation about Sun... and the company has shown time and time again that it has no fucking idea about how to deal with the open source community (hence its myriad bullshit licenses designed to keep everything nicely walled-off from each other and firmly under the control of Sun) and its here-you-go-no-I've-changed-my-mind games with both Java and Solaris.
That I agree with. I have used Solaris and it is a very powerful OS. My only quibble was with the 'Linux alternative' part.
;)
By the time Solaris gets to the point where it is open and has all sorts of drivers available, will Sun even still be a player though? Linux adoption is growing by leaps and bounds along with it's capabilities. Solaris adoption is at best static and is probably in decline.
Then again, Sun could always pull a SCO after they open everything up. Wait a few months then claim 'Look! Those Linux hippies are stealing our code and ideas!'. Yes that's a joke and not a likely scenario
That 512 CPU setup is a custom fork of Linux made by SGI. Also, measuring scalability in number of CPUs is like measuring speed in MHz.
....and most of it is already in 2.6, and the rest is being integrated, so what's your point?
See all the benchmarks done during the 2.5 development to decide if linux "scales" or not.
Solaris is not meant to be a used in the same vein as Linux.
/realistically/ scale in the same fasion as Solaris does on things like the E25K's and other large iron systems.
I'd like to see linux
No doubt solaris scores as "badly" in some areas relative to linux as linux does relative to solaris in others.
Nothing to see here, usual hippie fanatics at work.
How can you say they aren't providing leadership in LDAP/Directory Services? The Sun DS kicks butt. I've been at many sites with 5M - 15M entries in Sun LDAP servers. I haven't really heard of OpenLDAP deployments that were this big, but feel free to enlighten me.
In other areas of the OS, things like the Service Management Facility (SMF), DTrace, and Zones are fantastic. Have you looked at the resource manager capabilities that are built into Solaris 10? The features available like processor sets, pools, fair share scheduler are amazing AND very well documented. Speaking of documentation, have you seen how much quality documentation is available on docs.sun.com ?
In the sysadmin troubleshooting arena, I admit I like the Linux strace better than Solaris' truss, but Solaris also has tools like pstack, mdb, pmap, etc which make debugging certain problems much easier.
People have a perception of Solaris as old-skool since the SPARC processor hasn't kept up with single-thread performance, and you used to only be able to run it on expensive machines. With Solaris 10, they have much better x86 support (although I agree the driver situation is much better on Linux, but OpenSolaris will bridge some of that gap). Personally, I'm probably going to be running the blastwave distro (Solaris Kernel + Blastwave.org packages) once OpenSolaris hits the streets.
For the life of me I can't understand the alien Solaris/Gnome naming convention (computer:///, start-here: etc). THREE slashes? What was wrong with just 'start'? And what was wrong with / and ~ ? To replace a one-letter convetion established for decades with fancy non-intuitive long options (what the heck is 'start-here' anyway) looks completely brain-dead to me.
It's worth pointing out that the need for features such as the ones you point out is extremely minimal and constricted to the highest echelons of computing.
We have a Solaris box at work, running Oracle. It's got about 80GB of data. I imagine this is fairly common in the lower end Sun shops.
I'd ditch it for Linux in a SECOND if the program it was running wasn't being phased out anyways. 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. (Yeah I know you can install Cups on it, I'm just saying, *by default*)
I'm guessing a large majority of Sun users are in a similar siutation... and a smaller minority has need for features such as dtrace.
Although, I admit, those features are cool. So cool in fact that I bet you linux will have them in a year.
I'd like to say that running Solaris 10 on a homegrown AMD XP 1800+ with a VIA chipset is a great advance for the OS. Of course you still need a specific NIC (3Com), but it has made advances in its compatibilty with X86 hardware. Take a look at this http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ if you are interested in running 10 on a X86 machine. It's still pretty rigourous and you'll more than likely have more success running it on a Dell/HP workstation but 10 has opened the doors for better X86 hardware support.
Wow. Although I am a died in the wool linux advocate and user for about 10 years now, I think the Linux community does itself a tremendous disservice when such a "content free" review is put out.
Sun may be the devil, but it seems that at least they are one of the few large corporations making strides toward more open licensing models, if not perhaps GLP. They have also put out quite a bit of software into the open source community. I would like to see reviews based on technical merit and capabilities, not warmed over propaganda (even if Linux friendly).
Technical readers deserve more informative reviews. The review as written is a disservice to the Linux community.
BTW, IBM's SAN File System appears to do more or less everything that ZFS does, and it's available for Linux.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac