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Debian GNU/Solaris
An anonymous reader writes "Today "Nexenta" announced an initial pilot program of GNU/Solaris. Initial trials are limited to "Ubuntu developers and the entire Debian community". From the announcement: "As you might know, Sun Microsystems just opened Solaris kernel under CDDL license, which allows one to build custom Operating Systems. Which we did...created a new Debian based GNU/Solaris distribution with (the latest bits of) Solaris kernel & core userland inside. We'll open Nexenta web developer portal completely for the general public by mid-November. Today we are launching a Pilot Program. Ubuntu developers and the entire Debian community - you are welcome to participate in the Pilot!"
It is not the Debian team who is starting this pilot. If I am not mistaken this new project just happens to be compatible with Debian and Ubuntu package management.
GNU/Solaris sounds like only the kernel is not linux.
Uhh, linux is a kernel, and nothing more.
Besides the kernel it looks like it also uses the Solaris userland. That would include common commands (ps, ftp, m4, etc.) as well as Solaris-specific commands (psrinfo, prtconf, etc.). Also Solaris libc, as well as some other libraries. It will be interesting to see how much of the "original" Solaris userland will need to be replaced with, or supplemented with GNU tools. Some of Solaris' default tools are pretty bare in functionality.
Apt and Solaris should be pretty cool, though Solaris has had BlastWave for a while, which works pretty similar to apt.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
I believe what the GP poster was refering to is that according to Sun the name of the base OS is SunOS (do a "uname -a" on a solaris box). Solaris supposedly inially refered to SunOS + OpenWindows 2.X + some other stuff... in other words it was the full distro. In fact, they retroactively renamed the complete SunOS 4.X distros as "Solaris 1.X" So if a project is dumping the GNU/Debian userland on top of the kernel/basic-OS from Solaris it would be more proper to call it "GNU/SunOS" rather than "GNU/Solaris"
Of course, almost noone refers to it as SunOS anymore so "GNU/Solaris" is probably less confusing.
SunOS has been known as Solaris since version 2.6, which is Solaris 6 (maybe even since SunOS 2.5/Solaris 5... I'm not sure). SunOS doesn't really exist anymore these days.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Before people comment on why Debian is doing this i suggest reading Debains core statement of what they are all about http://www.debian.org/intro/about
Esspecially this bit:
Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide.
However, work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd. The Hurd is a collection of servers that run on top of a microkernel (such as Mach) to implement different features. The Hurd is free software produced by the GNU project.
Dunno about this specifically, but Solaris has been freely available for developers since I was a student, at least 5 years. Hell, they even posted me the CDs. Still is, by the looks of things.
http://www.debian.org/ports/index#nonlinux
It's probably not the best choice for a notebook or a router. It might be a good choice for a server, depending on what you're doing with it.
I've done some Solaris administration, but I have never been even remotely expert. I did get an idea of just how much I don't know, however.
In many ways, Solaris makes Linux and the BSDs look like tinkertoys. There is a vast array of functionality inside. Solaris feels like it was designed 'down', by people who are used to working with mainframes; Linux and the BSDs are more designed 'up' by people inventing (and often re-inventing) things for the first time.
There's a fundamental expectation in Solaris that the server will stay up under virtually all circumstances. If the hardware you're running it on is expensive enough, it's apparently pretty easy to hotswap almost anything... even RAM and CPUs. I believe it supports multiple running instances of Solaris on the same hardware at the same time, even different versions. And I'm fairly sure that a recent feature will let you upgrade OSes 'on the fly', though I think there would have to be at least a brief interruption of service. Pay attention to replies, if any. My knowledge in this area is very sketchy.
It's highly optimized to scale to amazing degrees, given more CPUs to work with. But that means it's not very well optimized to work with only one, which was why it was called 'Slowlaris' in the early days of Linux. Running multiprocessor requires a lot of locking to make sure that different CPUs don't step on each others' toes. This locking takes time. So the first versions of Solaris/Intel were dogmeat slow in comparison to Linux. There was no chance of a conflict, because multi-CPU Intel boxes almost didn't exist, but Sun was and is more interested in having it run WELL than run FAST. Removing all that locking would have introduced bugs. So they left it slow. And most folks went with SPARC boxen or Linux instead, for better performance.
At the time, Linux screamed on the same hardware, because it didn't worry about any of that. Up through 2.2, Linux had just a Big Kernel Lock... only one CPU could be in kernel space at any given time, and the rest of the CPUs either ran user code or sat around idle. Most user code makes fairly frequent kernel calls, so the extra CPUs blocked a lot. Running on one CPU was very fast, but there wasn't much benefit to adding more. A second was a moderate plus, adding maybe 50% overall throughput. Adding further CPUs did very little for most workloads.
Solaris does exactly the opposite. It's slow on one CPU, though 'slow' is pretty relative on a multi-gigahertz processor, but as you add more, it scales almost linearly. 64-way Solaris boxes run very nicely. And they do it without crashing, too. That's an area where Linux, for instance, has had a huge amount of trouble... as they add in new locks and try to rearchitect to let more and more CPUs into kernel code at once, they introduce bugs, often at a furious rate. You don't see much of that in released versions of Solaris. A lot of what you're paying for with the expensive Sun equipment is their QA department, which must be just incredibly good. (if any of you are reading this, thanks!)
Basically, this is enterprise-grade software. It's designed to run things like banks and air traffic control and medical equipment...stuff that just can't ever break or go down. It's not actually USED for air traffic control, as far as I know, but I'm sure Sun would be happy to sell systems into that market. If your hardware is good, Solaris can take an unbelievable beating... you can have loads in the thousands and still be able to connect to the box with SSH (eventually) and rescue it. It'll be slow, but you'll get in. Linux, in contrast, will often still die from dumb stuff like fork bombs. Yes, ulimits can prevent that problem, but Solaris will survive without the extra help.
Basically, Solaris is the kind of OS that you can bet your job on, and remain employed. Linux remai
Who is Nexenta Systems, Inc. (gleaned from the HTML title attribute of http://www.nexenta.com/ anyway, and why do they feel the need to hide their identity (http://whois.sc/nexenta.com)? They're referring to this Debian port as 'Nexenta OS', but then using the domain gnusolaris.org (where they have also hidden their details behind a Domains by Proxy registration). They have this to say on 'the future': "We do hope that at some point, sooner rather than later, our changes (so far for the most part just cleanups to build the DEBs in the new Solaris-like environment) will be integrated with the upstream. At the end of the day - this would be the right thing to do." - presumably they mean that they intend for this to become an official Debian port (eg Debian GNU/Solaris)?
Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: NEXENTA.COM
Created on: 15-Jul-05
Expires on: 15-Jul-08
Last Updated on: 11-Oct-05
A few corrections / notes:
/etc and everything else (or you can opt to share parts of the install with the 'global' zone), however there is still a single kernel running all of the zones on a given server. Applying a kernel patch, for example, still requires a reboot of the whole enchilada to take effect.
There is no provision for running multiple kernels on the same hardware, aside from 'domaining', which is more like IBM's LPARing (prior to P5 and 5.3, that is - splitting a single server into two or more hardware partitions). But, when you do this, each partition really is its own machine, with distinct and non-shared CPUs, memory, and IO buses. You can move hardware from one domain to another (even without shutting down applications), but a given kernel is only ever running on one machine at a time.
More recently, is the concept of 'Zones'. Here, you can install seperate copies of userland onto the same box, and when you are 'inside' of any one zone, you appear to have your very own box, complete with your own
Actually, I believe 'Slowaris' was coined in 93 or 94 or so, when admins started switching from SunOS 4.1.3/4.1.4 to Solaris on SMP boxes, and ran into bug where no matter how many CPUs, every thread was being scheduled on the same CPU. I forget what version this was - maybe 2.3? I remember logging onto my University's student shell machine (back then, SLIP and PPP were still not being used by home users - you'd dial up to terminal into a UNIX machine to check email, usenet, or IRC). Anyway, I remember logging in and seeing a load in the thousands, just after the upgrade.
You can "upgrade on the fly", in a way. The concept is you mirror your root disk, split the mirror, perform the upgrade against the inactive mirror, and finally reboot, this time off the upgraded side. It more or less works, but you do need to use your brain. Really what it gets you is the ability to immediately revert back to the pre-upgrade image with just a single reboot, and also shortens the outage window to one reboot. They've had this since Solaris 8, I believe, and you could use it to upgrade from say 2.6 to 8.
Over time, 'Slowaris' did come to refer to the performance disparity between Linux and Solaris on x86. Until Solaris 10, Linux pretty clearly outperformed Solaris on like-hardware (x86). I think in part, as you say, due to Sun's lack of effort in optimizing for x86 and small servers, but also because x86-based benchmarks tended to focus on things like web-serving, and Sun's networking stack was long overdue for an overhaul (the first phase of which was completed for Solaris 10, and returned enormous improvements).
Yes, I have, and ps supports -ef just fine.
Check your path. Solaris also has BSD tools for people who prefer a different version of ps.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
No, GNU/SunOS is appropriate. Linux is a kernel, not ls/grep/etc. Without the Linux kernel, there is no "Linux" involved.