OpenSolaris Code Released

njcoder writes "C|net's news.com.com has reported that Sun Microsystems is releasing parts of the OpenSolaris code today licensed under the OSI-approved CDDL . The release consistes of over 5 million lines of code for the base system OS/Net (kernel and networking). OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the current version of Sun's Unix Operating System. Back in January, Sun released the code for DTrace, a dynamic tracing tool for analyzing and debugging kernel and userland events. DTrace is one of the big features in Solaris 10. Some other highlights include the GRUB bootloader, SMF (Service Management Facility) which replaces init.d scripts, it starts up processes in parallel for faster boots (7 second boot on a dual opteron workstation I think that was the setup) as well as providing features for automatically restarting. OpenSolaris provides support for x86/x86-64 processors as well as Sparc. The Blastware guys are working on Polaris which is an OpenSolaris port to PowerPC. Sun has been working on opening Solaris for over a year now. The OpenSolaris project started with a pilot group of Sun and non-Sun users. During the pilot program a lot of info including screenshots could be found on various OpenSolaris member blogs. (My favorite is Ben Rockwood's blog). Teamware is the source code management system Sun uses for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Which was designed by Larry McVoy (now of BitKeeper) while he was at sun. No word yet on if Teamware will be available for OpenSolaris developers or not. Sun also uses CollabNet for it's Open Source project websites so that might be a possibility as well."

Comments

Rock on!

[AKAImBatman]

YES! This completely rocks! Check it out:

• Free Sun Compiler Tools!
  
• Torrent Downloads for Solaris (I've been wanting this for a LONG time.)
  
• Complete CVS Access
  
• Public Bug Database

Combined with an Open Source/Forkable license, what more could a Solaris Geek want? Get out the party hats people, because this has got to be THE most awesome thing Sun has ever done!

(I'm excited, can you tell? *Happy Dance* *Happy Dance*) :-P

Now for the bad news. Sun has taken the tack of encouraging users to build their own system. That is a good thing. Unfortuntely, all builds require a system to bootstrap the build. At the moment, the only option is Solaris Community Edition, a non-Torrented download. (Boo!) That being said, I don't think we'll have to wait too long for the OSS community to fix that little issue. :-D

Re:Rock on!

[elmegil]

So, tell me exactly which features are in Linux/FreeBSD/etc that I don't have or can't get for Solaris? Assertion that my statement is not true doesn't prove a damn thing.

Does Solaris want to be the hacker's desktop OS? I really doubt it. Does Solaris want to be an OSS player in the data center? Absolutely. And for data center features, Solaris does very well against the competitors. If you think Sun's OSS strategy is to get joe hacker to run his OS, of course you're going to be disappointed, because you just don't get it yourself.

Re:Rock on!

[kbmccarty]

Now for the bad news. Sun has taken the tack of encouraging users to build their own system.

Countdown to Debian GNU/Solaris in T minus 10... 9...

let the driver flood gates open!

[emptybody]

now maybe we will see some driver development for all the cool hardware that is out there?

Re:let the driver flood gates open!

[zzqzzq_zzq]

When things like the 'dad' & 'uata' (IDE drivers), and 'todsg' drivers are still in the closed source tarballs, I'm not hopeful for the 'open'ness of 'opensolaris' (Come on, they can't release drivers for their own hardware clocks?! (todsg))

Re:let the driver flood gates open!

[Nerant]

Believe it or not, there are numerous legal issues that Sun has to work through in order to ensure code that is open sourced doesn't get anyone in trouble.

Be patient. They're working on it. Or would you rather they open source some code they don't have the right to, and get people who see that code into trouble?

There is still alot of work to be done, but it is a huge first step.

For more, take a look at the roadmap at

http://opensolaris.org/os/about/roadmap/

Zfs?

[astrashe]

Is zfs included?

Re:Zfs?

[pedantic bore]

According to the feature list (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/documenta tion/opensolaris_guide/) ZFS is not part of the current release.

Justing reading the stuff that is released, however, is a joy.

I'm unfamiliar

[udderly]

Since I'm mostly unfamiliar with Solaris, what are the main advantages it has over Linux, BSD and Windows? Just curious.

Re:I'm unfamiliar

[Anonymous Coward]

what are the main advantages it has over Linux, BSD and Windows?

Well Solaris is +3 vs. undead, while Linux, BSD and Windows are: +1 icy blast, +2 flaming and -4 cursed respectively.

Re:I'm unfamiliar

[ahl_at_sun]

That answer depends on who you are. If you're a system administrator Predictive Self-Healing is going to raise the reliability of your systems and make management scads easier; SMF makes configuring the system a snap and lets you identify problems quickly and easily; Zones lets you partition the system without the management overhead of a bazillion OS instances; DTrace lets you understand everything that's happening on your system -- and who's responsible for the latest crap-up; Solaris Process Rights improve security and administrative overhead by splitting up the traditional binary notion of the super user. If you're a developer, you'll love DTrace -- I can't imagine developing with out it; the p-tools, truss(1) and mdb(1) are also great. If you're an end-user, well, Solaris's gnome sucks as much as anyone's gnome -- go use Mac OS.

Re:I'm unfamiliar

[rubycodez]

For Linux and FreeBSD and common packages/ports on opteron and ultrasparc there's still 64 bit cleanliness issues, and there's BSD issues running on Ultrasparc III and above chips (as in, can't do it). FreeBSD is still trying to implement fine grained SMP spinlocks which don't sieze up under heavy load & to get fine grained locks into tcp stack. Solaris builds backward compatibiity into libraries that Linux dosen't have, which is why when installing proprietary app binaries there's all kinds of neat patching and relinking that needs to be done (for example, installing Oracle on Sun is a breeze, but on Linux takes some care as to java and various library versions, and for another example enterprise SAN software such as veritas or Hitachi drivers only works with certain kernels). Solaris has the definitave and latest/greatest versions many services such as RPC and NFS (linux has some issues there)

Re:I'm unfamiliar

[bdgregg]

Probably the most clear and undenyable feature that is unique to OpenSolaris/Solaris is DTrace.

DTrace lets us examine just about anything, with minimal impact on the system. It's way cool, and other OSes have nothing that is close (for details covering the Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT), DProbes, K42 and Kerninst see the USENIX paper.

DTrace solves disk I/O by PID, network activity by PID, elapsed and on-cpu times for syscalls, libcalls and user funcs, and much more.

DTrace is great if you are a programmer with a little kernel knowledge, but if not you may find the DTraceToolkit helpful - it is a collection of ready-to-roll scripts.

For a list of many OpenSolaris features with screenshots, see the OpenSolaris Guide.

Re:I'm unfamiliar

[ahl_at_sun]

Yes! That was true, but not as of Solaris 10. The reason core files needed to be on the same machine that produced them was because they didn't include all the necessary information. In particular, they didn't include read-only data. Their genesis was around debugging on a given machine and in that case, dumping the read-only sections is kind of pointless. This was a frustration that affected every application developer who cared about post-mortem analysis; we in Solaris really care about debugging from first failure.

In Solaris 10, I did some work to make the content of core files adjustable and added text (aka code) to the default. Now when you get a core file, you can debug it on any other system regardless of the patch level, libraries installed or the version of your application that was running. Using coreadm(1M) you can adjust the content to, say, add the symbol table to the core dump or omit the gigantic ISM segment that you don't care about for.

So, yes, mdb(1) had some limitations in the past -- we've tried to address them in Solaris 10. If you have other issues preventing you from using mdb(1), post a comment on the OpenSolaris site.

I thought I was going to have to find a shill to ask that question... "Sir, we've never met before, have we?"

Solaris can't compete

[jhfry]

Solaris doesn't stand a chance against *BSD or Linux... their logo sucks! Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon?

so..

[brickballs]

automatically restarting

windows automaticay restarts for me all the time. I get a quick flash of blue and then bam! restart.

Re:Vaporware no more!

[njcoder]

You can search the source code online. I did a search for fuck, shit and a couple of other words. Within 5,000,000 lines of code no hits for fuck and only 1 for shit. I think I understand why it took them so long to get the code ready :)

Persona non-grata.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Teamware is the source code management system Sun uses for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Which was designed by Larry McVoy (now of BitKeeper) while he was at sun. No word yet on if Teamware will be available for OpenSolaris developers or not."

Remember folks. You hate Larry.

Re:Vaporware no more!

[mogrify]

heh... bet that gets taken out right quick. http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/cmd /volmgt/vold/dev_rmscsi.c thanks for the tip.

openoffice...

[torrents]

if this project is half as successful for sun as openoffice is i'm sure they'll be happy they decided to open it...

Great.

[Telastyn]

Perfect. An open source OS backed by a well known name. The perfect stepping stone to get hesitant PHBs to accept an open source OS without a big company behind it into their shops.

SMF vs InitNG?

[yerdaddie]

I'm curious about how the SMF boot parallelization code stacks up against the InitNG project, which does the same for Linux. Anyone had experience with both?

Q: does it run on Xen? A: Not yet but it will

[Lemming Mark]

Some Sun guys are doing a port to Xen. This'll give you near-native performance for Solaris apps, along with the comprehensive device support provided by a Linux (or NetBSD) "domain 0" (host virtual machine).

See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm/20050510#the_ xen_summit (it seems to be down right now).

Apps Here! Get Your Apps Here!

[Zemplar]

Ckeck out Blastwave.org http://www.blastwave.org/ for some torrents, apps, guides, and other goodies.

Additionally, SunFreeware http://www.sunfreeware.com/ is another great site for getting applications.

Can either an "Editor" or the Poster please RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

"7 second boot on a dual opteron workstation I think that was the setup"

You don't have to think, just RTFA, where you can see that it was a single AMD64 setup.
Still, I guess that would be too much trouble for the simple gain of being correct ?

Re:Parallel boot scripts

[Chyeld]

One. Big one comes to mind.

Don't know about the rest.

It is MS and Sun vs. Linux

[WindBourne]

MS moved to "Shared Source" sometime ago. It was done in hopes that Linux coders would borrow from MS. So far, it has not happened.

But this has potential to do what MS could not. Solaris is at least respected by the development world. This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux.

What is funny is how little ppl seem to remember from just 7 years ago. Sun actually ported to X86 once before AND "opened" their source code. Then when they thought that things were going well, they dropped it. If Sun ever feels like things are going in their favor, it is almost certain that they will do it again.

Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux

[starfishsystems]

This is simply another trap being laid by Sun and MS against Linux.

It may be. I know a very bright Microsoft zealot who thinks it is, and couldn't be more delighted at the prospect.

I don't think it is, myself. For one thing, the internal cultures of these two organizations, and the personalities they attract to senior positions, could not be more different. You just have to look at their past conduct to see this. Microsoft does lay traps, systematically, all the time. Sun is a corporate player too, thus in the game for profit, but its strategies are much more symbiotic in their essential character.

When Sun puts someone on a standards committee, it's to make the standard more valuable for everyone, on the express theory that it's better to share a growing market than have all of a stagnant one. When Microsoft puts someone on the same committee, it's to "embrace and extend" the standard so as to exclude competition, and the expressed goal is to eliminate all competition.

Another thing worth remembering is that an organization as big as Sun has substantial internal struggles from time to time. Such was the case with Solaris on X86. The project took off energetically at first, but it was a risky venture which happened to fall out of political favor just at the point when driver support was becoming most critical. The result was not a strategic withdrawl, it was a conspicuous fumble which cost Sun a lot of internal morale, hurt its reputation, and lost it a golden opportunity whose extent has only become more apparent in recent years.

So yes, it could all happen again, but not because of some nefarious strategy on the part of Sun Microsystems. Sun does not have a history of executing that way.

Re:It is MS and Sun vs. Linux

[justins]

What is funny is how little ppl seem to remember from just 7 years ago. Sun actually ported to X86 once before AND "opened" their source code. Then when they thought that things were going well, they dropped it. If Sun ever feels like things are going in their favor, it is almost certain that they will do it again.

I won't be the only one, but I just thought I'd point out that the license they are using this time around is quite different, and they literally cannot take away your right to use the code once you've got it. You might read the (OSI-approved) license before spouting off, although I know that is asking a lot.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing/

Re:Parallel boot scripts

[chegosaurus]

They aren't exactly parallel boot scripts. It's a part of something called the Service Management Facility. You write XML manifests describing how services should be started, stopped, restarted, refreshed, and what the SMF should do in the event of failure events. It intruduces the concept of dependencies between services, and makes a lot of things more coherent and logical. It also means you have to learn a lot of new stuff.

The SMF has a concept of milestones, which groups of scripts "belong" to. This is not unlike the principle of run levels, and when moving between milestones the SMF can fire off a whole bunch of services in parallel. It usually does this through scripts akin to the old init scripts, but doesn't have to.

That's not a very good description, but it might give someone who can't be bothered to RTFM some idea of one of the big new features.

Solaris 10 is great. IMHO there's no Unix (or clone) to touch it. That's just my opinion, and I CAN NOT be bothered to argue about it, so don't start!

Re:Finally!

[elmegil]

rc.d? I see those on my Solaris system too. Don't you mean "rc.boot" and "rc.local"?? The "init.d" method has a master that runs subscripts from rc*.d directories too, so I fail to see how that's any different.

SMF is going to be a head check for a lot of people who LIKE init.d/rc.d (though backward compatability with that has been retained so far). Myself, I like the fact that it's more robust and faster, and I don't like the fact that it's managed with a handful of different commands depending on what you want to do. And I'm not terribly thrilled that the backend is XML, but you'll have that.