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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."
Sun is new to Open Sourcing its proprietary products. Solaris is a good step and a few glitches here and there are likely to be minor youth problems. The important thing is to know whether Sun will find in this experience enough incentive to open source other stuff (Java anyone?)
--
Krazy Kat, George Herriman
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Why is this bit of "news" listed under Linix-category?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There is an awfull lot of commercial software written for Solaris or only supported on Solaris.
I've done a few console installs of Solaris 10 on some headless (and ancient) sparc netras. Here are some things that would make my life easier.
I've used Solaris since...well, since before it was named Solaris, and I've used Linux since not long after the first experimental releases, and BSD for nearly as long, and I think all three are great systems, but they're not interchangable. They each have different strengths and weaknesses. If I had to pick just one, I'd probably pick Linux, as it seems to be the most versatile overall, but I'm very glad I don't have to pick just one, and can instead use the one that's best for a specific job or role.
I used to work at Sun, and it's a company with a slow-moving internal culture. Pretty much any organisation that contains 30,000 people will necessarily not be zippy. The lack of speed says nothing about their intentions, though. For example, I've been talking to a number of Sun people over the past several months as they've been choosing a revision control system for OpenSolaris to use, and they've been keenly aware of the benefits of both doing things in an open manner and doing them carefully. They ended up choosing a wonderful revision control tool called Mercurial, but first they spent a few months evaluating the alternatives and, even better, writing up their evaluations and posting them in public. This is a very useful service to the open source community, as few people have time to evaluate tools in such depth, much less write in detail about why they did or not choose any of half a dozen alternatives.
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.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long,
You're kidding, right? Solaris is one of the most mature operating systems out there. It runs some of the most powerful servers on the face of the planet. It is the core for a number of institutions, especially in the financial sector. I am not over-dramatizing when I say that Solaris runs a hell of a lot of crucial systems that make our lives easier in a lot of different ways.
That being the case, do these people really think that Sun is just going to say, "Oh, I see. You tested it in a limited fashion and we tested it in a limited fashion in the matter of a few months. Okay, we'll release it to the customers who run massive databases and financial applications on our servers because of a few months of limited testing." I would much prefer Sun take a year if need be to make sure that any modifications will be completely compatible with as many of their customers and equipment as possible, particularly the higher-end systems and major corporate environments.
I understand and share a lot of the aggravation that people feel when it comes to the lack of features, particularly device drivers, in Solaris. This is the one of the main reasons wy I think that Solaris has become so niche, particularly on the x86 side of things. If we're talking about modification to a common tool or enhancements to a graphical interface, okay, I don't see why it would take a year. But if Sun needs a year to make sure that a new device driver doesn't crash a SunFire 25K running a clustered Oracle server during end-of-month, transaction processing, then I'll grant Sun that year.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Very good points. I for one don't want minimally tested extensions to Solaris (or any other O/S) to be on any system that controls my money! I wonder why no one mentions that IBM isn't doing ANYTHING to make AIX open source, nor is HP doing anything with HP-UX. And hell will freeze before MS does anything open-source with Windoze.
pkgadd, BTW, also supports quite a few URL constructs (e.g., pkgadd http://blah/blah). In this form, the other end of the pkgadd has to be a package stream, however, so that limits its usefulness with the DVD contents.
It's been a while since I've done the text install, but finer grain control has been there in the past. I'd be surprised if it was removed. That said, using Jumpstart combined with a profile will also get you finer grained control without having to do it manually for each install. Information on network-based installs and the like is available here and here.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.
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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Wow. The clue meter is reading zero.
One of the main reasons behind OpenSolaris is for people outside of Sun to make drivers, tools, utilities, etc. that can be included into future versions of (non-open) Solaris. Because of the nature of the systems that run on Solaris, it's critical for Sun to make sure that changes, regardless of how benign it might seem, have no impact on any kind of potential, mission-critical appliction. What one indeveloper might think is a great driver or enhancement for their partcular use could possibly break something else. Considering how much is riding on Sun -- not the least of which is rebuilding Sun's own reputation -- they have every reason in the world to make sure that everything that "everyone else on crack" submits will have zero impact on anything else in Solaris.
Sheesh. Get off your damned high horse.