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OpenSolaris One Year On
daria42 writes "In June of last year, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code." From the article: "Sun is yet to release some aspects of Solaris as open source software, although that process is due for completion by the year's end. Meanwhile, non-Sun programmers have to date offered some 165 code contributions to the OpenSolaris project, said Eagleton. Of those, 70 have been accepted into the project's code base, while another 95 are still in the review process. To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long, Sun has a temporary buddy system whereby external contributors are partnered with Sun employees."
Why is this bit of "news" listed under Linix-category?
From the article: As an example, Eagleton cited recent cooperation between Sun and the wider programmer community that occurred at the LinuxWorld Australia conference.
That's as Linuxy as it gets. I think perhaps Sun has the idea that by going open source, they can tap into the Linux developer base. There may be more than one Linux developer that is thinking they could make vast improvements in how Solaris performs, while perhaps gleaning some new ideas for Linux . AN exchange of information couldn't hurt -- Sun needs to breathe new life into Solaris.
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Or you could say "Anything you can run on Solaris you can run on Linux to some extent (DNS, DHCP, LDAP, Firewall, Apache, MySQL)." seeing as Solaris is older than Linux. :-)
:-))
Though on the subject at hand, I run a cluster of Sun v20z's (and 2 v40z's) which run Solaris 10 x86_64. On the whole it's no different to running one with Linux other than the Sun system management tools for clusters are not as advanced as some of the Linux cluster tools sold (yes, sold for lots of money and are closed source) by the Linux cluster specialists.
The Sun compilers generally produce faster than GCC and are pretty bullet-proof and can also cope with automatic parallelisation (if you're lucky). The only problem is that the majority of open source software these days has a great deal of GCC+Linux code in it which makes compilation "interesting." (It used to be in the early-mid 90's that lots of code had SunOS-isms in it which meant compiling it on early versions of Linux was "interesting." How times have changed.
On the whole, though, once you have set up the login environment properly, have installed all the GNU utilities etc. a user won't see much, if any, difference at the shell or general scientific programming level.
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Uhm, "everything"? And BSD? And MIT? And X11? And LGPL? And a vast majority of free licenses in existence?
Among pieces of software that have significant use, are free according to the DFSG, and are not GPL compatible, I can name just openssl, old apache, core parts of TeX, and that's about it. (Before you correct me, read again the first clause of the previous sentence).
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Lets see..things Solaris could add to Linux:
1. Containers
2. Zones
3. Awesome fast TCP/IP Stack
4. Dtrace
5. ZFS
Those five alone would be the bump Linux needed to morph into a really solid Enterprise class O/S that is open source.
They already are. Most of the vital libraries in /usr/lib are softlinks back into /lib.
Sun and Apple both ship a proprietary OS based around an "open source" core. Sun's core is OpenSolaris, and Apple's is Darwin. Sun has done a far better job open sourcing their operating system. I do a 3rd party hardware device driver for both MacOSX and OpenSolaris. To compare Apple's to Solaris' "open source" OS
is quite interesting:
- Source code: Darwin: Must sign up for an Apple account to view source, source code for Intel kernel not even available. Solaris: Source code browseable on web, and available to anybody.
- Installable OS: Darwin was never updated from 8.0.1, which was released over a year ago. Solaris: Solaris Express is released at least monthly.
- Project direction: Darwin code appears after a MacOSX release. There is no way to see the source code of an upcoming MacOSX version, there is no way to even know what features will be present aside for signing up for a $500/yr ADC account. You are not allowed to talk about this in public. This is in stark contrast to OpenSolaris, where Sun engineers publically debate virtues of different features, and future directions on their forums/mailing lists, and anybody is welcome to contribute.
In short, OpenSolaris is a real open source project. Darwin is a sham, and would not survive without Apple.
Linux the kernel and GNU/Linux the operating system both have a bunch of things that OpenSolaris doesn't:
1) Vendor Neutrality. OpenSolaris is closely associated with Sun, but no company has a stranglehold over Linux.
2) Portability. Linux has been ported to an amazing array of hardware. Ubuntu runs on more architectures than OpenSolaris, even though they dropped most of the archs supported by Debian.
3) Scalability. Linux scales up to supercomputers and mainframes (where Solaris also has a respectable track record), and just as important, Linux scales down to wristwatches, cell phones, videorecorders, and all sorts of embedded processors.
4) Momentum and mindshare. There is a huge community committed to and invested in Linux. That hasn't yet happened with OpenSolaris.
I've been a Unix administrator for 9 years, 7 of which on Solaris. We use linux as work, as well. And I have a lot of linux stuff at home.
.. and on Solaris, the applications are hardly ever affected. It's a beautiful thing. Linux on the other hand gives us all sorts of problems with 3rd party applications when we do any major OS upgrade. Solaris has usually been a pleasure to work with, has given us 99.99% uptime most months, and has been a rock solid workhorse OS.
Solaris has its advantages in a big environment. Advantages you would never grasp by having it installed on your machine for an hour. One example is binary compatibility. If it worked on Solaris 2.6, 99% of the time it will work on versions 2.7, 2.8, 2.9 and 2.10. You may not care about that, but we're in a constant cycle of upgrading old systems
We're also starting to use zones pretty heavily. They save money on equipment and backup licenses (only need one license per physical box). And offer us some neat options. Veritas cluster is aware of zones. So you can have a zone as a cluster resource on shared san disk. If the machine dies, the cluster imports the disk on a different node, and brings up the zone there. How cool is that?
Linux has been fairly solid as well, though we've had the occasional glitch. But all of the big mission critical stuff goes on Solaris, and that's been proven to be a wise choice for us many times over.
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I use Solaris everyday on my desktop for reasons you might not have thought about.
1) The overall documentation is better than for Linux.
2) Changes are well documented between updates.
3) Compatibility between kernel revisions is pretty darn good (even guaranteed, IIRC).
4) I actually prefer a slightly more conservative system, with clearly staged releases (OpenSolaris/Solaris Express/official numbered releases/quarterly updates).
5) If using Sun hardware with Solaris, the combined documentation is often outstanding (SunSolve + docs.sun.com).
Sun gets a lot of things right, but I agree with you that their ultimate target market probably isn't the update-weekly-for-every-possible-tweak crowd.
Sun is new to open sourcing its proprietary products? That strange, because amongst other things, they open sourced their implementations of RPC and NFS years ago. Sun are by no means new to this open source thing and as well as their own stuff, they've acted as mentors to a number of outside projects. For instance, Sun provided John Ousterhout with an office to use while he worked on Tcl/Tk.
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/scm/
bottom left hand side are links to the evaluations
Don't forget Staroffice/openoffice, the GNOME bits (particularly i18n, A11Y and docs). Actually there are many opensource projects with contribution from Sun. Methinks the "propietary" label was assigned to Sun by less open competitors.