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Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like

Posted by samzenpus on from the imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery dept.

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.""

9 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by koreth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by Greg+Koenig · · Score: 5, Informative

      I have recently been engaged in a serious effort to learn about Solaris 10, and have been very pleasantly surprised at what I have found. While there may be valid reasons that some Linux users may dislike Solaris, I cannot agree that the criticism you cite about the userland tools being "basically unmodified from the early 1990s" is one of the valid reasons. Most of the GNU userland tools that you describe as missing are actually installed under /usr/sfw/bin in the *default* Solaris 10 install that you get right from the standard DVD. This is in addition to the same non-GNU tools being present in other locations on the default install. You simply need to adjust your PATH accordingly if you want the GNU tools to be found first.

      If you want to prefer Linux over Solaris that's fine, but make sure that what you are criticizing is actually true. Otherwise you are misleading yourself and possibly missing out on some really cool technology. You point out the cool technology in ZFS and DTrace, and I agree that they are really fantastic reasons to use Solaris. In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch without giving up a lot of the characteristics that make Linux useful. Give it an honest chance and you might be surprised at what Solaris 10 can do!

    2. Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by uncreativ · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Have you used old versions of vi? There's a reason that linux old timers used to argue over who's text editor was better (i.e. emacs versus vi). I personally am a fan of vim, but once in a while run into using some crufty old version of vi that is just painful to use. I can't speak to changes in grep or make, but there have certainly been significant improvements in userland tools since the 90s. I remember first trying to install and use linux on a machine in the 90s and found using it to be a most painful experience. Today, I use linux all the time and fine that all the software tools have improved significantly.

    3. Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by SnowZero · · Score: 5, Informative

      Who cares? Do they work? In a 100% Solaris environment, sure. In a multi-platform environment with several *nix systems, with user account portability between machines, it most definitely does not work. At my university I used Linux, Solaris, IRIX, Tru64, and HP-UX. Linux and IRIX were nice to use Tru64 was decent, but Solaris required much tweaking to keep scripts running. The compiler was also a piece of crap in the 96-99 timeframe, though eventually it caught up. Admittedly, HP-UX was much worse, so I avoided it like the plague. Sun started beating out other vendors, so it was impossible to avoid using Sun boxes.

      I expect vi to be the same from platform to platform. grep as well. Make???? grep, and many other programs, would be missing lots of options, or have incompatible options. The shell would have lots of subtle differences requiring many "if solaris" options in my setup. I consider make unusable if it doesn't support gmake's extensions. If you don't have gmake, you need to use things like automake, but if you are going to install those why not just make gmake the default? Sun's cc was terrible when compared to the MIPS or Alpha compilers that came with their respective unices. On the bright side, the man pages were far and away the best IMO.

      I have always thought of Solaris as an awesome kernel paired with a userland that was only an afterthought. Kernel features are nice (low latency, scalability, etc), and the trend continues with ZFS and DTrace, but I wish they wouldn't neglect the userland. After all, where does a user spend his time?
    4. Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by koreth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Meantime, stop being a linux fanboy.

      Ha ha. That "don't add child directories' disk usage to the parents'" option in the Solaris "du"? Yeah. Um, I wrote that when I worked at Sun. Along with a bunch of other things, e.g. the first CD player app (WorkMan) that could pull track listings over the network. That existed on Solaris years before anyone ported it to Linux. I think I've earned my opinion on Solaris, thank you very much.

      Although you're right that one can install the companion disc (and then go to sunfreeware.com to pick up the stuff that's missing or out of date) it still remains the case that, e.g., if I log in as root on one of the random Solaris systems at work (where I have superuser privileges but not unilateral control over what root's environment looks like) I get a nasty old Bourne shell with no history, no completion, etc. If I were to change root's shell to bash or zsh, I'd run the risk of breaking system admin scripts that assume I'm using the default shell.

      If in your book it makes me a Linux fanboy to want Solaris to improve in the areas where it's currently behind Linux, then so be it, I don't really care what name you put to that. My interest is in seeing Solaris improve because I think it's fundamentally a pretty good piece of software.

    5. Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Solaris grep in particular is horrible.
      vi breaks every time you expand your console beyond 132 characters, and quite a few of the tools on the default PATH don't conform to any modern standard - including POSIX.
      Windows with SFU provides a more compatible UNIX environment than what you get out of the box with Solaris.

      Somewhere in Redmond, a demon just snorted gasoline and battery acid onto it's keyboard.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  2. Re:Err.... by this+great+guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    ZFS? DTrace? Zones?

    May I add: Fault Management Framework [1], Crossbow [2], pNFS [3], stable device driver interface (one of the biggest point driver developers complain about in Linux). Clearly the GP has no idea about the number of technological advances Sun is pushing in OpenSolaris.

    [1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/fm
    [2] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow
    [3] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/pnfsd emos/basics
  3. Re:Backward Compatibility?! by Anonymous+Sniper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Excuse me?

    I just migrated an entire system from Solaris 7 to a Solaris 10 Zone - How? I tarred up /home and /usr/local, and a few other directories, and copied the relevant entries from /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Copied whole applications, their environments, etc.

    Solaris 7 is from 1999, and this is 2007. Try that on an 8 year old redhat box and see what happens. Good luck with that.

  4. Re:Okay, call me a noob. by 5pp000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm using Solaris because the data mining application I'm building (in Lisp) brings the Linux kernel absolutely to its knees. Solaris runs it just fine on the same hardware. (We're talking 30+ GB of heap -- Linux is dead meat after 3 to 4 GB.)

    A friend of mine says this is because the Linux kernel hackers optimize for the common case, not for extreme cases. I suspect this is correct. To put it another way, they are more into cycle shaving than analyzing the time and space complexity of their algorithms -- just as one might expect from smart hackers with a relatively weak computer science background.

    The result is a kernel that does great on normal workloads, but just falls over when subjected to unusual stresses. Unless and until this is corrected, there will be a need for Solaris.

    --
    Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!