Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like

ramboando writes "In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of Linux's success. Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux. Sun wants to embrace some Linux elements so "we make Solaris a better Linux than Linux," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, quoting Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose latest start-up, Ning, uses Solaris. But it's a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility. "As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive.""

Comments

I'm frightened already.

[AKAImBatman]

Not to say that some of the Solaris tools couldn't use a good sprucing up with newer and fresher versions, but I tend to get nervous whenever Sun codenames something. It usually means that they're about to start on something that isn't a bad idea per se, but will be guaranteed to be aborted prior to any real commitment or follow-through. What state that will leave Solaris in is anyone's guess.

*shudder* I still remember Mad Hatter. Such promise. Such failure to follow up,

Re:I'm frightened already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that project codenamed Oak was pretty much a bust.
 
/sarcasm

First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

[koreth]

I've liked many aspects of Solaris for a long time, but the #1 thing that turns me off it is the userland tools.

Yes, I know they ship a DVD with lots of GNU tools, but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified from the early 1990s (if not longer) is not, to me, a feature. Those hoary old versions should be the ones on a supplementary DVD for those who need perfect backward compatibility with 15-year-old shell scripts and so forth.

It sounds like that's a focus of this project, so I say fabulous. If I can get ZFS and DTrace plus a modern toolset out of the box, Solaris will start to look much more attractive.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

[Coryoth]

"but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified"

Who cares? Do they work? That depends on your measure of "work". They do the raw bare minimum one would expect from such things, but the GNU versions tend to come with a lot of comforts that you start taking for granted after not very long. Its nothing you can't technically live without, but it does start to feel awfully spartan. A good comparison might be Solaris grep and GNU grep, or perhaps Solaris diff and GNU diff. Nothing wrong with the Solaris versions, but the GNU versions have some useful extra options, and more flexible regexps.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

[timmarhy]

solaris is REAL enterprise sector stuff. they don't give a shit about lastest and greatest, they care about stability and basic functionality.

try running ubuntu on a fortune 500 companys network and see how you fair.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

[Junta]

Well, to one part of your argument, I know at least one fortune 100 company that has a fair amount of ubuntu in place. I also know that a fortune 1 company uses linux extensively, though I do not have specifics on what architecture. With HP, Sun, IBM, et. al taking linux Damn seriously, you can consider linux *real enterprrise sector stuff*. Linux is popular because it implements the fundamental design of Unix systems in a development situation that largely precludes any sort of vendor lock-in. You buy AIX on IBM System p, you have committed that as time goes by your investment is tied to buying from IBM again. You buy RedHat on Dell, and Dell disappoints you can go try HP in a future upgrade with minimal changes (one x86 box is just like another for most fundamental ways that matter). If Red Hat pisses you off, you go to Novell (not quite as non-impact, but certainly well within the realm of possibility, better than, say, AIX to HP-UX). Technical people love the unix-like architecture and the ready availability for whatever they wish. Business loves linux because of the vendor freedom and because the technical guys who love it and know it well are plentiful. Any interview I conduct, I ask about home usage and what they are looking into outside the boundaries of commercial experience. Inevitably the answers are more technically advanced and prove qualifications beyond their commercial work. Being freely available has not hurt. Solaris absolutely will need to cede control and authority so that more than one healthy commercial vendor sells and can support Solaris 100% independent of Sun's help. Making it supported on non Sun systems and x86 didn't help, making it as free-as-in-beer for most people didn't help, and making it more BSD-like has yet to make significant progress. If they GPL the codebase I don't think that in and of itself will help, but if some company or two succeeds in becoming a prominent solaris vendor who doesn't have to go to Sun for any partnership or anything, then it could begin to work, but they still have the momentum of linux which is not a situation easily overcome. I do think if they succeeded in making Solaris a prominent platform, their commercial distribution of it would probably not be that popular (I don't think on many fronts Sun 'gets it' on some of the technical things not right out-of-the-box with their software, the core is good and a good system can be built on it, but I don't think Sun is capable). Admittedly a small market share of a linux-scale market is much better than their total market-share of a small market.

Now, even if your statement was 100% accurate in every sense of the word, Nexenta's lack of development does *not* represent a stable and basically functional system. It represents a stale Nevada build. Sun has done many better builds since the last Nexenta release. A pity, Nexenta debian-ified Solaris enough to have the package management and general interface strategy be bearable (No matter how you slice it, Nevada's UI may have better options, but it's still ugly and misses a lot of the point in my opinion.

Business model?

[Urusai]

Sun is a for-profit entity. How do they expect to make money off of their OS? They should GPL Solaris, let the code monkeys snatch the best bits for Linux, and forget about wasting their money developing Solaris. They can write a "shim layer" on Linux for people needing backward compatibility so they don't alienate long-time customers. They need to figure out where they plan on making money, and scrap the parts that lose money. Open sourcing Java was an indication of desperation; we saw plenty of companies open source their product during the dot-com bust, either because they didn't want their work to die, or because they thought it would magically boost market share and generate revenue. It doesn't.

Better Linux than Linux?

[misleb]

Yeah, and OS/2 was a better Windows than Windows. Anyone remember how that worked out?

-matthew

Okay, call me a noob.

[NeuroManson]

But what exactly makes Solaris worth using to begin with? What open source or commercial software makes it worth having? What makes it more than just a fringe system? Linux is finally approaching the point where it stands a chance at competing against Windows in the consumer market, does it really need competition from a fairly mainstream corporation?

For that matter, sure, the machines look cool on the outside, but why do so many people consider them worth buying (even models up to 10 years old) today, and for that matter, what makes them worth switching over to? Is it sheer geek chic, or do they actually provide some form of useful function, as opposed to Windows/Mac/Linux's growing trend towards multipurpose multimedia machines?

Re:Okay, call me a noob.

[Skrynesaver]

You should look at you kernel parameters ulimit -a As shipped Solaris is intended for big iron in a way that most Linux distros aren't

Re:Okay, call me a noob.

[Jon Peterson]

Although I'm not hands on now, I originally moved from Linux to Solaris (with some Irix stuff in the middle). I still prefer Solaris for the following reason:

Simple is better.

This single thought is perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned in my whole career, about almost any aspect of computing. Complexity is the enemy.

caveat: by 'Linux' I mean 'The particular distro your company has standardised on'
caveat: I'm only concerned with servers. Solaris may be the worst desktop OS in the world FAIK.

1. Less shovelware. Although a base Solaris install is still annoyingly large, it's not nearly as bad as most Linux distros. It infuriates me that operating systems think its useful to install entire database, programming languages, you name its 'just in case you need them'.
2. Better backward compatability. Upgrades to discreet parts of Solaris don't usually require upgrades to other parts of Solaris. This means that you aren't constantly trying to run the latest versions of everything.
3. Better hardware integration. When you are running a lot of servers, it's very useful to have a nice console, so you can talk to the things properly. I think Linux has improved a bit in this area, but I'm not aware that it has an equivalent to the OK prompt, and the various diagnostic tools therein.

Others have talked about various tools and kernel level stuff, but I wanted to make that point that while the Solaris userland might feel archaic to some, to me it feels pleasantly simple - devoid of hidden complexity, obscure features that badly written apps come to rely on, and all the other 'let's have another feature' attitude prevalent in much OS software.

To me, Solaris feels like HTTP, and Linux feels like SOAP.

Re:Okay, call me a noob.

[5pp000]

+5, Insightful? Oh, come on, mods.

This is not a problem that can be tuned away. I'll tell you exactly what's going on. The kernel has, for each process, a table which contains one entry for each contiguous region of address space with the same page protections. Since the Lisp implementation I'm using makes use of page protections to implement its GC write barrier -- a very useful technique for an SMP garbage collector -- it creates lots of small regions, so that this table gets quite large. And, there are algorithms in the kernel that are quadratic, or worse, in the size of the table.

The result is that as the Lisp heap grows past a couple of GB, one of the CPUs (I'm doing this, BTW, on a quad Opteron with 16GB of DRAM) comes to spend 100% of its time in the kernel, doing whatever this quadratic algorithm is doing, and the machine becomes pretty much unresponsive.

Solaris has no trace of this behavior. Clearly, it comes from a culture where the OS is expected to scale in many dimensions, and quadratic algorithms are strictly forbidden.

Re:Just give us more drivers....

[giarcgood]

oh and put some effort into Gnu/Solaris... that project has effectively stagnated for ages now and nothing appears to be happening...

Yes Sir! Anything else you would like for free?

Re:Err....

[Coryoth]

I thought you could already use DTrace on Linux, and if they GPL their stuff, it will all be ported to Linux. The article says that it would be hard, but you know it would happen. Linux does not have DTrace. You're right that it will probably happen. Eventually, after much work. And ZFS isn't looking like it'll be an easy addition either. There doesn't look to be an equivalent of Zones either -- Linux has some nice security module hook in the kernel thanks to work by the NSA, but right now it is largely unused (even distros that enable SELinux have very lax policies, and fairly basic management). Again, that might arrive, at some indeterminate time in the future. Considering that your original post was proclaiming:

...and all the functionality of Linux has jumped ahead of Solaris... arguing that Linux may eventually catch up with these powerful Solaris features is a little disingenuous don't you think? Linux and Solaris are both worth having, depending on what you need. I look forward to what this project, and the OpenSolaris project, can put together.

About Sun's Support - a view from the inside

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward for a reason: I'm a Sun TSE.

Caseih" is correct when he says "This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days", in regard to support and how it is delivered. It certainly isn't the same Sun for those of us who are tasked with delivering support. Management has implemented all sorts of programs to improve customer "sat" and bring down call hold times, programs that INTERFERE with the day to day support work; effective and seasoned TSEs are bailing out right and left and ARE NOT BEING REPLACED in many cases; the EDS "partners" have a large turnover rate (what do you want for $9 an hour?); more time on the phone taking live calls, meaning the TSE have less (or no) time to do followups, research, spend time in the lab . . .. . . . I could go on but you get the idea.

The "Dell-ization" of tech support is spreading like a virus; support is a commodity now. Even enterprise level tech support. Sold to the lowest bidder. Who cares if the person on the phone can't spell "LDAP", as long as the call is picked up in X minutes and keeps the manager's pager from going off? THAT is where Sun support is today.