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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."
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*)
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
now maybe we will see some driver development for all the cool hardware that is out there?
comment directly in my journal
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?
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
windows automaticay restarts for me all the time. I get a quick flash of blue and then bam! restart.
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
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 :)
Open Source Java DAO Generator
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).
_ xen_summit (it seems to be down right now).
See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm/20050510#the
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.
Justing reading the stuff that is released, however, is a joy.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
"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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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?"
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/
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga