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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!"
Actually, the naming story is more complicated than that.
The SunOS 4.x series was just "SunOS", and it was more BSD-based.
The SunOS 5.x series has always also been called Solaris. In the SunOS 5.x series, SunOS is the name of either just the kernel, or the kernel plus the very basics of the operating system, depending on who you listen to, whereas the Solaris brand name refers to the entire "Operating Environment", including SunOS 5.x and a lot of other add-ons like NIS+, LDAP services, CDE, etc, etc. I don't think they have ever sold a stripped down SunOS 5.x, only a Solaris Operating Environment 2.x which happens to contain SunOS 5.x.
And then with the release of Solaris 2.7 (SunOS 5.7) they began marketing it as "Solaris 7", presumably for some dumb marketing reason. Since then that's been the case, so for any given release from 2.7 onwards, the possible alternate namings are:
Solaris 2.X = SunOS 5.X = "Solaris X"
2.7 of course turned out to be an absymal failure of an operating environment, so it's quite fitting that it was the launching point of a marketing-driven renaming policy. Whereas 2.6 was a solid stable platform for many years, building on the successes of 2.4 and 2.5.1, the 2.7 release is where they introduced transitional 64-bit support, and poorly. It wasn't until 2.8 that things settled down again. Many customers unfortunately still have "Solaris 7" installed here and there in production, and it's a nightmare to support. What we can learn from this is never buy/install the first release of an OS right after a major overhaul of its guts to support a new architecture.
11*43+456^2
If they can keep virtually everything outside the kernel consistent with Debian, and replace only the kernel and drivers with Solaris versions, this would prove to be an interesting system for benchmarking and contrasting the two kernels.
As it is right now, you can benchmark entire systems, but it is difficult to do any meaningful kernel benchmarks.
If there is a significant difference in any particular area in either direction, I can forsee future server administrators choosing their kernel based on how well it performs in certain tasks. Perhaps the Linux kernels memory management is better, but the Solaris kernel's SMP scales better. Now you don't have to worry about changing your user or administrative environment, package management tools, or applications -- you can run the same on both, and just change the kernel architecture underneath in order to gain a benefit in an area important to you.
Heck, I can forsee a day when what kernel you want to use is queried as part of the install process, and where you might have a mix of machines that all appear to be running Debian, but which may be using different kernels based on the needs of the system.
We have competing web browsers that (generally) conform to the same interface standards (in terms of HTML rendering) -- why not have a choice in kernels, without having to sacrifice your user and administrative environment (or Open Source ideals)?
Yaz.