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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."
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.
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.
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?"