OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective

MSa writes "How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go."

Comments

Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective

[igb]

I run a mixed Linux and Solaris shop, but having replaced some Solaris boxes with Linux we're swinging massively back to Solaris 10.

• ZFS, of course.
• SMF. Being able to start services in a dependency tree is excellent if you have a multi-processor machine. And having services self-heal, including restarting any dependencies, is good for things like mail servers that use a lot of flakey milters.
• FMA. Hardware self-healing (admittedly, this is essentially Sun hardware only, and in my experience better on Sparc than on AMD) is good.
• Zones. Because sometimes full-blown virtualisation is too much like hard work.
• Binary compatibility. I've got some SunOS 4.1.1 binaries from 1989, for which the source is long lost, running fine.
• There's probably a Linux equivalent of rcapd, to limit the physical memory use of particular groups of processes, but I've never found one.
• There's probably a Linux equivalent of processor sets, CPU shares and the Fair Shares Scheduler, but again I've never found one.

Horses for courses, but Solaris has much to offer even for shops that aren't traditionally tied to Sun. Hell, even my private ``1U box in someone else's datacentre'' server for my family is now a Solaris machine.

ian

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[alancdavis]

The review didn't address desktop vs. server and as a "lightweight" review doesn't look any deeper than the distro package for answers to the questions and objections raised.
OpenSolaris works well as a server OS - that /is/ it's heritage. It's easier to run OpenSolaris headless and on a serial console than any of the *BSD and Linux distros that I've used over the years. All of the "standard" server packages are available to run web and net services out of the box. For truly lights-out server rooms it's still necessary to choose hardware that implements some sort of remote power cycle or remote system monitor capability.
The ZFS filesystem is interesting for desktop installations - it does allow seamless use of the 1-2 terabyte desktop disk configurations that are now possible. ZFS was designed for the datacenter - eliminating the need for the time-honored but fragile combination of journaling filesystem over software volume manager (usually over HW RAID). It's the first real innovation in filesystem architecture since journaling filesystems were developed.
Additional software packages are available from 3 well-known (in the Solaris community, at least) sites. Sun has it's own freeware site, blastwave.org and sunfreeware.com
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/s10pkgs_download.xml
http://www.blastwave.org/
http://sunfreeware.com/

The package manager for blastwave.org is their own, the others use the standard Solaris pkgadd commands. The package naming convention is a long-standing convention - each vendor uses a different prefix, making it easy to differentiate the source of packages.
OpenSolaris commands, where Sun hasn't replaced stock UNIX commands with their own, reflect SVR5 standard rather than the more Linux-ish BSD syntax.
One of the places where Sun has replaced "normal" functionality is the init process. SMF is Sun's attempt at fixing the long-standing problems and in-efficiencies of the BSD or SVR5 init process. Apple has launchd, there's openrc and gentoo's baselayout that all have similar goals. SMF works well and there's a fair amount of support on the net for integrating non-distro apps.
One of the "why OpenSolaris" answers is that there is value in running the same OS on the desktop as on the server. For Solaris shops OpenSolaris on the x86* servers provides a common platform that enables system management efficiencies to be extended.

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[Kent Recal]

I'd like to give Znork some credit here.
ZFS is really, really nice but it does have some warts and the biggest for many would be that arcane operating system that's dangling off its nutsack. Yes the solaris kernel is great, scales like a champ etc. but the userland and the lack of centralized package management (in 2008, no less!) are bad joke.