Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Oracle Linux?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the could-be dept.

eldavojohn writes "There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"

3 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OpenSolaris? by Doctor+Memory · · Score: 3, Informative

    If they want their own OS, they're probably going to want something that'll support clustering and a fast file system. Currently GPFS is the top dog in that area, and it's only available (currently) for AIX and Linux. It'd probably make more sense to put effort into improving this than porting it to Solaris.

    Agreed that Solaris would provide more enterprise-grade (<—marketing term) features than Linux, although zones are becoming less compelling given the rise of virtualization, and I hear that ZFS doesn't provide the performance boost on SANs that it does on JBODs.

    --
    Just junk food for thought...
  2. Re:OpenSolaris? by atbarboz · · Score: 4, Informative

    I work at Oracle right now - and all base development happens on RHEL 3. We are in fact upgrading all developer and QA machines to RHEL 4 over the next couple of months. Solaris used to be the base development platform around 2 years back, but it's just a porting platform as of today.

  3. Re:Definitely has uses but.. by djbckr · · Score: 3, Informative

    Uh sorry, but you're wrong on most of your points.

    Oracle runs on Red Hat Enterprise or SUSE Enterprise (I might have the names mangled a bit) both with relatively straight-forward settings. Everything is included in the distributions. Yes, Oracle donated some of the code that makes it into those distros.

    Furthermore, Oracle provides *full* support for the Linux OS itself when you have a properly licensed copy of Oracle.