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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.""
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,
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Or you could just run Linux on Sun hardware?
Sun is hemmoraging cash. Their hardware is fairly standard (in an enterprise way) and all the functionality of Linux has jumped ahead of Solaris... So what do they have to offer? Nothing. I can't see what they can do in this regard to gain back market share. making a "better linux" than Linux is not it.
There are probably other paths that they can take that would be more effective than this one. But I don't know what they are.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The only reason I might change is if Solaris was made open source (and free). Thats the reason Linux is superior. Better support, design etc. flows from that.
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.
What the hell are they talking about "...promise of backward compatibility."? I guess it depends on how you define backward compatibility... but I manage about 1500 SUN servers, from old Sparcstations to enterprise class servers, and they are about as backward compatible as putting a stone wheel on your Honda. Sure, it might fit, but you sure as hell don't want to drive anywhere with it.
Most of my users on various boxes are afraid to even apply Sun patches because it breaks applications left and right. Granted, we are development segment of my company, but still... the Solaris operating system is barely backward compatible within it's own major release, much less between versions. Simple tools will run just fine, of course, but the more complex the application, the less likely it is to run between major versions, and likely going to cause some sort of havoc between minor revisions within the same version. I see it happen daily.
They really don't need to worry about their "backward compatibility," when trying to make Solaris more Linux like... I'm glad they are doing this - I absolutely hate administrating a stock Solaris system. It feels so archaic and like something straight out of the late 80's or early 90's, back when I was logging into the beasts on my 300 baud modem. The only worse offender in this area is HP-UX... though I will admit that with Solaris 10 and HP-UX 11 there have been some minor inroads into the monolithic, archaic feel to both OS's, but they both have a very, very, very long way to go.
Just to clarify - I understand why those OS's are that way, but it doesn't mean I like it nor want to use them. If they can retain the stability of Solaris and make it more comfortable to use, I'm all for it.
...is like making caviar more vegemite-like.
Yeah, and OS/2 was a better Windows than Windows. Anyone remember how that worked out?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I'm currently struggling to implement a Solaris server right now. The user space is archaic, obscure, and seems to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Things like updates are still done the way they were done 15 years ago, often requiring a drop to single user mode (as bad as a reboot in my opinion), and often require a system reconfigure. Solaris' kernel is cutting edge and, in some ways, way ahead of Linux. But in the ways that count, Solaris lags far behind.
/usr/bin, usr/local/bin, /opt/sfw/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /usr/ucp, etc. I frequently find that I have to compile things from source just to get basic functionality. For example, Sun ships Samba with solaris, but it doesn't support LDAP. They also ship some hacked kerberos libraries, based on MIT, but if you need to build anything that depends on kerberos, you have to compile and install a separate set of MIT Kerberos libraries. Some apps are available in package form (solaris packages) from sunfreeware.com that you can pkgadd. But PKGs don't seem to be a complete packaging system like deb or rpm is. The pkg-get utility from the aforementioned site is very useful, though.
Just to make the system usable requires a ton of third-party software that sun does not ship nor support. In the end my path has nearly half a dozen bin folders in it, by the time you could
The init system is currently in a disorganized state. Most things are migrating to svcadm, which under the hood is very much like launchd. But there are still init.d scripts, but they don't always work right. Maybe Linux should move away from init.d, but at least on redhat, they are very full-featured and quite easy to work with.
Sun's biggest strengths right now are zones, zfs, and dtrace. However, if you don't specifically need these features, Linux is a better choice in many circumstances. And Linux is gaining features in these areas. xen can do a lot of what zones do, albeit much less efficiently. dtrace functionality is coming, I hear. ZFS, well the kernel developers seem to be suffering a bad case of NIH syndrome. The only reason I'm using solaris right now is ZFS. But I'm taking a big risk deploying it on a 12 TB disk. I have yet to hear of a failure, and Sun assures me that it's enterprise-ready. Sun's assurances do carry a lot of weight; they've had a lot of experience in these things. But I'm only a silver-level support customer. It's taken two weeks and some 20 phone calls to get issues sorted out with our sunsolve account and updatemanager. Our assigned support group only wants to talk over e-mail, which is annoying. Turnaround time on trying out their suggestions is hours if not days. This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days.
Anyway, talk to any Sun jocky and he'll tell you that none of my complaints about Solaris are weaknesses. They are strengths. Cryptic commands are second nature. Besides, they separate the real sysadmins from the wannabes. Sound familiar? I think I've talked the same way about Linux to my Windows friends. I'm glad that Ian is going to work to improve Solaris' user space (which is what he means when he says make Solaris more like Linux, right?). On the other hand, Solaris reminds me not to get complacent with the state of linux. Every complaint I have about Solaris could easily be echoed by a Windows refugee trying to make sense of Linux. Both Linux and Solaris are powerful, cryptic, and archaic OSes. They both have a lot of room for improvement. We'll have to see. I told my RedHat friend the other day that his company has nothing to worry about from Solaris. Hopefully Ian will change that.
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?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I am now reading the book Rebel Code and it is interesting to notice that exactly this was suggested years ago. If the heads at Sun listened to the "sourceware" suggestion back then, they could have been miles ahead by now...
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Anyone who has managed very high load webservers already knows that solaris has significant advantages. a much better effort would be a grass-roots effort to educate the Linux community of why 10+ years of professional development lead to significant performance benefits on multi-core, multi-processor systems.
Solaris serves a niche in the market that is growing like crazy now, and most web developers who are building apps today should look into it seriously, IMHO.
that's all we want... the current list of supported x86 hardware is ridiculously small... oh and put some effort into Gnu/Solaris... that project has effectively stagnated for ages now and nothing appears to be happening...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I thought they are transitioning off from cde to gnome. All our dev and production boxes already run on gnome as default wm(we are on Solaris 9).
They can start by making the man pages suck.
I've been using sunos and Solaris and sun hardware since '86. I can build a very security solaris 9 server that ends up with about 5 packages and a few things from a few other packages so it results in a nice simple stripped down system that is just enough to run the application and its great for systems that live in data centers.
Then sun comes along with Solaris 10 and adds in a ton of complexity with out providing any additional services. The new things like zones and zfs don't need all the new extra crud but its nearly impossible to build a lean system with solaris 10. There are also a number of issues that are just plain wrong and reeks of security the Microsoft way. Why does live update look inside zones? If its in a zone, its not to be trusted outside the zone. Thats covered in Security layers 101 so back to school guys. (you can purge one file inside a zone that breaks doing patches in the global zone). The new admin tools remove the rc scripts... except that most of them are just moved and hidden by layers of config files. Then it uses a binary file to figure out what to run at shutdown, and it keeps changing the file when servers start and stop and you can't get an accurate picture of the data its going to use when it shuts down the system. Since the file is a binary file, you can't checksum it and you can't dump it so you've got no clue if someone has put a Trojan in it. The data in the file could have just gone in a nice plane text file but I guess the coders missed the Windows registry too much. The appear to be handing the keys to the source castle to any old hack. Someone "fixed" telnetd and added a new feature in one of the worst security lapses I've seen in a long time.
I just bought 3 new netra 210 because 1) they run SPACR Solaris 9, 2) they fit in my racks and 3) are one RU. I'll stop buying Sun hardware the day I can't run Solaris 9 because there is no way I'm putting Sol 10 on a production machine.
Nexenta seems to be doing things the right way for Solaris to proceed as a viable operating system. A debian-like package system and a choice of easy installable GUIs, but still without the hardware support that linux has,
I am also curious about Solaris's desire to go GPL. If that ever happened, Solaris will most likely be cannibalized into Linux - and Solaris will die a slow death. Even as we speak, the most valuable assets for Solaris (Dtrace and ZFS) are being usurped by FreeBSD (thanks to a more permissive BSD license) - which means that some people may choose it over Solaris.
Sun really has to work hard to sell us on the benefits of Solaris, and why we would choose it over other things available at the moment.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
A better Linux than free Linux is a Linux they actually pay you to use. Are you listening, Sun?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
FreeBSD current has ZFS and DTrace now! Why wait? Run, don't walk, to your nearest FreeBSD dealer ( ftp.freebsd.org ). Let's face it, Sun just hasn't been the same since AT&T strong-armed them away from BSD into the void of System V.
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"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive."
If Solaris was compelling and competitive, they wouldn't be trying to make it more like Linux.
Solaris is something that we use as a legacy OS where I work. We have well over 700 Linux systems in the school of engineering. At last count we had maybe 35 systems running Solaris still lingering here and there in places where they either cannot be replaced or there is no economy in doing so. There has not been a NEW installation of Solaris deployed in at least two years. We've also got five Tru64 systems, two HP-UX systems, three Irix systems, and I think 4 VMS systems that a dedicated die-hard won't allow to expire.
The bottom line is that the unix wars are over, Linux has won, and whatever contender eventually does take the crown from it will NOT be one of the has-eens of the past.
I'm long past caring what Sun does or does not do with Solaris for the same reason that I don't care what E-com does with OS/2. Both OS's may or may not be configured with fancy new features in the future, but it doesn't matter because they've already lost.
Game over dude, and no you don't get your quarter back.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Oh please. Lay off the bash fanboyism already. I personally get sick and tired of scripts that assume bash to have been installed under /bin. At least use a more portable hash-bang sequence like #!/usr/bin/env bash to make them semi-portable. Make the default shell a normal bourne again shell and allow users to switch to their own preferred one.
Also if the bash manual page says this:
BUGS
It's too big and too slow.
Then you just know it is a bad choice beyond even other considerations.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
In short Sun is feeling the competition from the Open Source Linux. And Jeff's blog entry shows that pretty well
I don't know much about Sun but certainly they are not very happy with the way Linux is eating up Sun's share of servers.
At this juncture such an announcement does not come to me as a surprise.
~psr
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
At any rate, it's a very awkwardly constructed and confusing sentence, and if I was some kind of grammar Nazi, I'd fucking parse the author's ass.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
It has been said before, so this is kind of a me2 message.
I have seen solaris boxes being responsive to ssh login with an load of #proc * 20 in top.
This is worth every penny, especially if it is a productive webserver.
Using a different OS in your access layer as reverse proxy is great and makes you sleep
a bit better at night.
Not to speak of dtrace, zfs and the other nifty stuff, which I personally do not use, but
I know it's there in case I need to fly in an engineer to help me out.
But userland solaris is really annoying. I want to to feel like a standard unix
box and a standard unix box these days is a gnu/linux box and "gtar" and "ggrep" do
not feel standard. Solaris tools break my scripts and make me cry out loud for
decent debian box.
Solaris kernel rocks, solaris environment is poor.
Coming from a BSD background, the thing I dislike the most about Solaris is that it refuses to have a 'minimal install' that is actually usable. I can install *BSD in a few tens of MBs, and then add the packages I want easily. This makes it easy to secure and run the machine, because I know exactly what's on it. Last time I installed Solaris, the base system seemed to be about 4GB.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 . .
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.
I'm a full time Solaris admin, and getting paid well for it. If supply and demand changes to get idiots like you out of the field, then I'd be happy.
Good, professional admins will always command a premium. There are very VERY few good, professional Linux or Windows admins, but they're paid roughly as well as Solaris (or HP-UX, etc.) admins.
"any monkey thats run linux for a bit has the same skills?"
I suggest you upgrade your skills beyond those of a monkey. And your attitude, while you're at it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Well, I'm typing this from a Sun SPARC laptop, and the wireless drivers are there, as well as a gui from Tadpole for configuring/diagnosing them. They were available somewhere in the Solaris 9 lifetime.
For cards where there are only or primarily proprietary drivers, Solaris is actually a pretty good bet, as Sun made the effort to go out and buy them and make them available on both SPARC and x86. Breifly, there were more Solaris wireless drivers than Linux, but Linux and the BSDs have since mostly caught up (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
And so, the wheel turns full circle. As summer fades into autumn, then winter gives way to spring and summer returns again; so doth GNU depart from Unix, only to return again to Unix.
The GNU project was originally meant to be an alternative to the closed-source Unix implementations of the day. Like a heroin dealer relying on the twin pillars of illegality and addictive potential, closed-source Unix vendors had little incentive to improve their products; they just had to be different enough from the competition that you couldn't switch easily.
It really took for Linux to come on the scene to get GNU into a usable state; the BSD kernel (which had been favoured by the GNU developers prior to the advent Linux) already came with well-matched userland tools. And you've got to be serious about something to buy a whole car that already works just to rip out the engine and use it in a different chassis that looks identical to the first one from a distance. The GNU/Linux combination sparked interest in GNU. In turn, the BSDs diversified; today FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD all have their own respective market niches.
Closed-source Unix continues to stagnate and ultimately will grow irrelevant. The elephant in the room is that neither hardware nor software make up the bulk of the intrinsic value of a computer system; that value comes mainly from users' saved data.
Open Source pretty much forces you to implement Open Standards for saved files, which leads to transparent interoperability between programs that do the same sort of thing. In the end, AbiWord on GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org on Solaris and KWord on FreeBSD will all be able to open the same documents. The brand of tools used to shape the data is becoming less important than the result of using them. That's already how it is in other industries. After all, who ever asked what brand of cooking equipment a restaurant uses, or what make of tools a cabinet maker uses? The important thing is that chopping food with one make of knife doesn't block you from cooking it in a different manufacturer's pans, and rough-cutting a piece of wood with one make of power saw doesn't prevent you finishing it with a different manufacturer's chisel. Using one OS and application stack on your computer shouldn't preclude you from working with data manipulated using a different OS and stack. That's already the way it's heading, slowly but surely.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
That's pretty neat, thanks! I'd never heard of Nexenta before. So basically it's the kernel+libc from Solaris, with the Debian userland...
But, uhm, is there any real evidence that the Solaris kernel is actually *better* than the Linux kernel? The Linux kernel definitely supports a LOT more hardware. Although Solaris is seen as more heavy duty by a lot of IT folks, I'm not sure if there's a good reason for this besides long-time familiarity.
My bicyles
it's just a pain in the ass after using almost any Linux distro.
I know that's a troll comment. I don't mean to be a troll about it, but if I were to distill all of my experiences with Solaris, it really would come down to that. More than anything, it seems like Solaris consistently excelled at wasting large amounts of my time. And I don't think it was just because I was unfamiliar with it. I became familiar with it. I tweaked it until it almost looked and felt like Linux, and still it was a pain to use.
While ZFS is incredible, and DTrace amazing, there are so many other aspects of the system that are just horrendous. The package system, the userland, the complete (and intentional) lack of virtual terminals, the installer (this is a whole new world of pain). The installer is singularly the worst computing experience I've ever had, bar none. And don't lecture me about jumpstart. New users don't use jumpstart, they use that crappy-ass installer that is enough to put even the most devoted fanboy off Solaris. And this really tells the story about Solaris. While it has an amazing kernel, Sun has just completely ignored the critical features needed to recruit and retain new users.
Solaris needs community support, yet Solaris, even OpenSolaris, is still not self-hosting. Solaris is not open source in the way Linux is. The source is there, but for all practical purposes it is useless. There is no official OpenSolaris distro. You have to install Solaris Express, muck around with things, and then if you are lucky enough to get things compiled, you have this kind of hybrid, non-redistributable thing that sits in a legal gray area. Furthermore, even if you get this far, your "open" system is liable to be completely out of date in a month because there is no way to incrementally upgrade the kernel source. On "flag" days, you have to use a utility which is little more than a "this works in most cases but don't use it production" hack to install the new source and utilities. So to even get a system with the kernel source, you will not be able to reliably keep it up to date, or have any assurance that is even stable. Contrast this with having the source to the stable Linux kernel as a standard part of the OS. Forget the idea of having anything like 'make menuconfig.' So in many respects, Solaris being "open" is more marketing than practical reality.
And while there is Nexenta (Ubuntu with a Solaris kernel), which is an amazing feat, and already about as close to a Linux system running a Solaris kernel that you can get, they receive almost no support from Sun. As wonderful as Nexenta is, it still suffers from the fact that not all of OpenSolaris being completely open. That last I looked, it had no man pages, b/c Sun had not released them. They had to hack libm, as it was not available for a long time, and they had to hack their libc because Solaris' libc had strange dependencies on their (long broken) ksh implementation, which was not released as well. Furthermore, it, like every OpenSolaris distro is not self-hosting. And, rather than just embracing Nexenta's fabulous work in this area, Sun massive NIH complex demands that it make Solaris more Linux-like things it's own way.
There is little doubt in my mind that the Solaris kernel is one of the finest operating system kernels in existence, and is far superior to the Linux kernel. Sun's problem is that not only is everything surrounding that kernel stagnant, but that it really hasn't done the basic things needed to build a real community. Until OpenSolaris really is an open Solaris, with a stable, compilable kernel which can be incrementally upgraded and maintained by users, Solaris simply will not gain the support of the open source community. And that is what really matters today. I can Google "Ubuntu kidney" and find some informative post on how somebody configured Edgy to run a dialysis machine. That is, if I have a problem, I can get answers. Community support is more powerful than Sun support. I know, I've used both. And withou
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Ballmer
If you're as hardcore as I am, you realize that Sun OS hasn't been a true operating system since the day they unbundled the compiler. An OS without a compiler? What do they expect me to use? Stone Knives and bear skins?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Stop trolling, and though I shouldn't feed.. I will.
;). Corporate employees want acceptable code to get through that 9 - 5.
Where reliability isn't just important, it's critical. Where scalability isn't just important, it's critical. Where maintainability is valued over a hacker's OS because there aren't a bunch of free grad students to do all the damn work.
Hmm reliability, scalability, and critical workloads like perhaps with supercomputers? You'll note how Linux totally dominates this list with over 70% of all supercomputers. Where's Solaris.. oh that's right 1%. Also latest surveys have shown the majority of code commits to the Linux kernel as coming from major corporations like Novell, Red Hat, IBM. I will also say that you can't judge the code quality by the company behind it. I'd probably take most Hacker code over something written by some corporate drone who isn't passionate (as a hacker IS) any day. Grad Students want good code for thesis
Show me a Linux kernel that can handle multi-threaded apps running on 144 CPUs and using a terabyte of virtual memory.
What about this? 4096 Itanium2 Processors (64 Bit), 17TB of Ram. This system is multi-partitioned though, so it isn't all one kernel. However, they are using SUSE's Enterprise Server 9 bundled kernel which supports up to 512 Processors. So even there it's beaten your criteria for criticism.
Solaris has been fully 64-bit compliant for over a decade.
Linux has been 64bit for at least 7 years with Itanium and I'm assuming it has been 64 bit for over a decade with MIPS and Alpha architecture support. The majority of development was on i386 arch, however. I'm assuming this is now changing to x86_64 arch (like the majority of the world is running).
Check out apple's upcoming XAR file format (released for download at opendarwin, but the site is down). The format 1. keeps metadata about the files in a separate file, so you can know about the file without uncompressing it. and 2. compresses each file separately.