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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."
Ever since the demise of SGI I haven't looked at anything but Linux / BSD, but this makes me wonder if there is maybe life for Solaris after all.
Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things, which is where I would expect you'd deploy solaris much sooner than on the desktop.
MP3 Search Engine
I'd try Nexenta, except I don't really want to use the Ubuntu repositories for my Linux packages. I'd prefer something with a good KDE desktop.
I'd consider it for a web-server box to test how the kernel handles I/O.
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I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's. The biggest issue I have with OpenSolaris is that it's still a single vendor OS. If it forks a few times and actually develops a culture and some competition between vendors than I think it will be more appealing.
That's actually what I hate and love about linux. It's a fragmented and ineffecient community, but because it's fragmented I don't have to worry that it's going away any time soon.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I thought the ZFS on the "free" version was crippled down to 1 TB.
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
I put up Sun's free VirtualBox VM environment on a MacBook Pro, and both OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 Intel were worthless. Both achieved speeds reminiscent of PearPC.
XP worked OK. Ubuntu was fine.
You'd think if you were going to release a VM, at least you'd make sure your flagship OS would run on it at speeds that would compare favorably to a 20-year-old Amiga.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
ZFS kicks ass. Sun really raised the bar with it. There are some other FSs in development (Hammer, btrfs, etc), but they don't have the full integration that ZFS does. Maybe eventually, someone will write a patch so ZFS is just a patch and recompile away in Linux (although that approach is what made minix suck back in the day). Heh, minix will probably have ZFS support before Linux does.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Ahem...
Actually the reverse is true...
Since release 10, Solaris has been pretty well stomping the competition in price, performance and throughput. With Solaris supporting pretty much every type of virtualization (including some not offered anywhere else), it's hard to beat.
Solaris as well as OpenSolaris are free, you can download and use either flavor with no cash outlay. Want support? It's cheaper to buy Solaris support from Sun than to buy Linux support from RedHat.
There's no *tying* with Solaris, it's all about choice. I personally choose Solaris over Linux for pretty much any task.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Sure, it's Open Source and everything. But the problem is that complex programs like this are often designed with a top-down instead of a bottom-up approach. I mean, this isn't a bazaar, it's a cathedral. Oh, and OpenSolaris is not GPL. *buzz*
There's still one company responsible and only that company will make the changes, because the codebase is so huge that it's a pain in the *** to maintain. Well, eventually many open source projects end up like that, with a huge codebase and with a company. BUT, this wasn't built by the community and it's not likely that it will get enough userbase so that a dev will become interested.
Compare this with the Linux Kernel. Linus message, which was more or less like "Hey guys, I'm making a unix-like kernel, anyone want to join?", was followed by a stampede of developers and testers like you can't imagine.
So, if we want competition, it's very improbable that a cathedral project such as OpenSolaris can compete with Linux, a 100% GPL'ed project built by the whole community.
Maybe it can compete with the bsd clones, but Linux? I don't think so.
It all depends on the skill-set your admins already have. If you have a shop of 100% Linux admins with no Solaris experience, stay away. If your shop already has some Solaris machines on Sparc, go for it - although you should double check the license.
From my own perspective, I've invested several hours getting it running. Granted, I was running the 200805 OpenSolaris installed on ZFS which had some bugs in the boot process which left my system unbootable a few times. Some follow up releases fixed those problems. But as a guy who's been using Linux since 1993, old habits are hard to break.
This is a boring sig
Stay away?
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Solaris just works and its made for servers. Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented. I would not trust my job to it unless its Debian or RHES which costs $$$ as cutting edge features are not needed on a mission critical server. Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Oh and the article discussed a scarcity of third party apps. I found the opposite as most server ERP and database apps are on Solaris than Linux.
http://saveie6.com/
Sun is battling hard to break into the open source operating system world with OpenSolaris. Juliet Kemp takes it for a test-drive, sampling its unique features and seeing how it fares against Linux...
OpenSolaris is an open-source project based on (some of) the Solaris operating system code, and sponsored by Sun, but being developed independently. The main aim of the project is to create a downloadable codebase. Currently, though, there's a Live CD/install image available which gives you a full OpenSolaris distro - a project which arose after Ian Murdoch (founder of Debian) was hired by Sun in 2007 to head "Project Indiana". OpenSolaris 2008.05 was released in May 2008. It is, as advertised, a full-featured distro, which includes the GNOME desktop and the ZFS filesystem (which does snapshots and some other interesting things - more on that below).
It's released under the CDDL (an open source copyleft license based on the Mozilla Public License), and can be downloaded from the OpenSolaris website. The majority of the source code is fully accessible, but some components are only available in binary form (under the OpenSolaris Binary License).
The OpenSolaris desktop (click for full size)
Installation
Installing OpenSolaris is pretty straightforward - it's a LiveCD (as is increasingly common in Linux distros these days), with standard click-to-install. You answer a couple of questions about your location, keyboard map, and time/date, and you're also asked about disk partitioning. Solaris uses ZFS rather than ext3, which is important in that Linux support for ZFS is still in the fairly early stages.
The rest of the install is handled for you, and worked fine for me. It picks up the network fine (at least, it does if you plug the cable in...). I didn't test it with wireless, but wireless support is supposed to be available.
In use
The first thing to note is that it's not lightweight. My test box is fairly old and slow, but I found OpenSolaris significantly slower than Ubuntu or OpenSUSE on the same box. So it's not really useful for putting that ageing hardware to work.
It comes with a Gnome 2.20.1 desktop by default, and consequently looks pretty similar to more or less any Linux Gnome desktop. The usual array of applications are in place to start off, including Firefox 2.0.0.14, Thunderbird, Rhythmbox, and so on. OpenOffice isn't installed, but version 2.4.0 is available via the package manager, which uses the Image Packaging System (IFS) software.
Is there really a need to have 'SUNW' before everything?
There is documentation available showing how this package manager compares with apt-get - there's also a graphical option if you prefer that to the command line. Both deal with dependencies for you, as with Debian's apt-get and aptitude. There are fewer packages available than for a mainstream Linux distro, although they do have over a thousand (and certainly enough for a fully-functioning system). The package naming is slightly odd; package names begin with a handful of capital letters (eg SUNW or FSW).
Networking works differently to Linux - ipconfig exists but has a different syntax, and eth0 isn't the standard interface. There's a graphical networking manager, but it gives an error message if started when the network management tool nwamd is configured, which is true by default. This seems wrong: either the graphical tool should play nicely with nwamd, or it shouldn't show up on the default config menu.
Services and the starting/stopping of them works differently from Linux, as well. Instead of /etc/init.d or similar, OpenSolaris uses smf, the Service Management Facility. Services are referred to as svc:/servicetype/servicename (where service types include network, system, and application, among others) and can be started/stopped via the svcadm command. The man page is helpful, as are the online docs, but it's something that you need to get used to, and as ever there's a learning curve before you'll be comfortable with it.
However I think this is probably a response to something I've noticed of late, in Asia and South America we don't sell support for Solaris installs any more, they've all moved to Linux, cheaper hardware, a pool of interested young (and therefore cheap) admins, and of course our wonderful software is available on Linux ;)
While Europe and to a lesser extent the US are almost exclusively Solaris (the odd godforsaken HP-UX or AIX box as well to keep me interested) the emerging markets, where the growth is, are moving en-mass to Linux/Open source.
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
Well, there are other more technical reasons for considering Solaris. I'm not sure how this applies exactly in detail to the OpenSolaris but Solaris handles threading a little differently than Linux and a few other minor things that can make a big difference depending on your application. When you get down to the fine technical details of each OS, there are differences that can make or break your application's efficiencies.
For the desktop, perhaps that kind of analysis is not needed but if you are planning on handling 10,000 bi-directional transactions per second, application performance is a big issue.
I am forced to use WinXP, Solaris 5.8-10, CentOS 5.x, Fedora Core 8/9, RedHat, and Ubuntu in my daily life. When it comes to desktops, it's more or less a choice of personal style, no more difficult than choosing a desktop background picture. OOorg and Mozilla have made them all function the same for me. My favorite text editor comes in win/nix flavors also. For the most part, they all function the same. Hard core performance is where they begin to vary a lot IMO.
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What about hardware support? I keep hearing that the openSolaris kernel just frankly doesn't have many drivers. If I can't install it on my hardware, it isn't doing me any good.
Also, I'd really like to see some basic benchmarks between the kernels. People benchmark the BSD kernel against the Linux kernel on IO, networking, etc.
Show me some quantifiable numbers on openSolaris.
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Excerpts from the article:
"... I found OpenSolaris significantly slower than Ubuntu or OpenSUSE..."
"There are fewer packages available than for a mainstream Linux distro, although they do have over a thousand (and certainly enough for a fully-functioning system). The package naming is slightly odd; package names begin with a handful of capital letters (eg SUNW or FSW)."
"ZFS is transactional, meaning that the filesystem is always consistent (so fsck or equivalent isn't used or needed), and snapshots are intentionally both easy and cheap in terms of disk space."
"I'm very impressed with the concepts behind ZFS, but I'm also concerned that cross-functionality with Linux is limited."
"I did find it frustrating to have to relearn commands that I've been using without thinking for years now (eg ifconfig), and right now I'm not convinced that for me it's worth the mental effort, especially given the relative scarcity of external software available."
There's probably a Linux equivalent of processor sets, CPU shares and the Fair Shares Scheduler, but again I've never found one.
Newer kernels allow you to put processes into a tree and assign priorities at each level, or assign priorities per user. Look for "CFS" or "Completely Fair Scheduler" and "group scheduling" or "fair user scheduling". Not sure how exactly this compares, my only run-in with it has been that various system cron jobs that used to run at nice 19 don't act like they're at nice 19 any more.
I had a box with a drive with an empty primary partition at the beginning and Linux on a few extended partitions at the end. The OpenSolaris install documentation and the installer itself promised not to touch the existing extended partitions. Which it didn't. It did, however, wipe the partition table so I could not find my extended partitions and had to restore from backups.
I will not be using OpenSolaris anytime soon.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
That's because the Linux folks were worried about the pending USG/CSRG lawsuit so they reimplemented TCP instead of using the BSD TCP stack and utilities like almost everyone else (including Microsoft) did.
Just about any non-Linux UNIX implementation is going to have the BSD TCP.
On the upside the lawsuit did set SCO up the bomb. Oh, it wasn't the only thing by any means (did they actually do ANYTHING right in that lawsuit?), but one of the side effects of the USG/CSRG lawsuit was that a lot of early UNIX code code was open-sourced. Including some of the SCO claimed were examples of "infringing code" in Linux. Come on, folks, wasn't it great to have Dennis Ritchie himself point that out?
I was a Solaris admin back in the early 90s. I preferred SYSV to BSD for a lot of things. But at this point, I'm just not seeing a compelling reason to go back. Sure, ZFS sounds nice, but I don't really want a system that's slower and more RAM-hungry than Linux, and I don't want an OS with a GPL-incompatible license.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This is a superficial review.
What, no mention of dtrace? Now that's been an excellent part of the Sol10/OpenSol movement IMO.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
If your main concern is whether or not it runs KDE? Then stick with Linux.
Awesome!
dtrace is great, but actually my experience as an administrator is that I use it less than I expect, because the kernel `just works'. I use it to attack badly behaved applications, but I've not used it for tuning anything like as much as I thought I would.
Trying to harden Solaris is a nightmare. Mostly because so many packages in the Solaris install are interdependent. It is either install 90% of the packages or install nothing. Why do they even bother breaking the software packages if this is the end result? Getting rid of RPC can create so many problems it isn't even funny. Both BSD and Linux offer the option of only installing the base package and only choose the services you want with little to no other packages to depend on. This however absolutely cannot be the case for solaris because a single needed software package will require you to install nearly all services.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
It doesn't matter how many drivers any given kernel supports. All that matters is if it has drivers for the hardware you want to run it on. If you're buying a server then you will typically buy one which comes with support for the OS you want to run and so you won't encounter driver difficulties (although you might pay a bit more).
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Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Yeah, you know, the roadrunner team would like a word with you, as would pretty much everyone in the Top 500. For some business loads Solaris scales better. But the claim the "it scales far better" in general is as absurd as it is patently untrue.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Ah, and no true scotsman^W UNIX admin would run a supercomputer, right?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
One of our Linux servers regularly copes with a load in excess of 100. Things slow down, but nothing breaks.
Solaris handles threading a little differently than Linux
It used to be that Solaris used an N:M model while Linux used an N:1 model. Now both use a 1:1 model. There are lots of reasons for this (Matt Dillon gave a really detailed description when explaining why Dragonfly BSD went 1:1 instead of N:M). Basically, it boils down to the fact that debugging threaded C code is such a bitch that people tend not to use high levels of parallelism in C code (which is where N:M really shines). If a language has better support for parallelism then it is easy build an N:M model on top of a 1:1 model (this is what Erlang does, and I believe Java does as well in some versions).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Since release 10, Solaris has been pretty well stomping the competition in price, performance and throughput. With Solaris supporting pretty much every type of virtualization (including some not offered anywhere else), it's hard to beat."
I think you have been drinking a bit too much of the marketing cool-aid. Well, you haven't ever been in my shop. I'm a Solaris guy - Admin, instructor, blah... These days our Sun boxes just don't cut it. They are being out performed by *AIX* machines!!! (yes, solaris 10)
"It's cheaper to buy Solaris support from Sun than to buy Linux support from RedHat."
You had better not rely on either. Sun support SUCKS!!!! (at least since 2003) RedHat doesn't do much better either. You need to have experienced admins. Platinum support means nothing when Sun doesn't know what to do.
"There's no *tying* with Solaris"
Oh yes there is. Once you start developing and using a platform in production, you are tied to it. Sure, you can always move off of it - at least in your utopia, not reality very easily.
Some suggestions for linux users. (Note, I'm not a solaris user, so I'm sure there are some differences between features.)
--OpenVZ or vservers should give something similar to zones
--They're working on memory resource controllers for the "cgroups" functionality. There have been out-of-tree patches for years now, but I think this may be included already, or will go into 2.6.27.
--cpusets and processor affinity masks are available, cpu shares are available as part of the cpu resource controller for cgroups, and the "completely fair scheduler" went in around 2.6.23 or so.
I just installed it a couple of weeks ago. Open Solaris starts in a GNOME shell and feels quite like Ubuntu in that way. Main difference is that the booting is much slower, but that's not unreasonable for a server OS that isn't supposed to get rebooted very often. I haven't really used it that much, but mostly it seemed to be okay. (Reference basis is that I'm a heavy Ubuntu user, though my company distro is a custom version of RHEL5, and I've experimented with about half a dozen of the live CD versions.)
However, overall I still have to rate it as rather betaish. The first major upgrade tends to be fatal when it tries to update GRUB, and I wound up reinstalling pending the fixes. It wasn't just the lack of basic testing that bothered me, but also the unhelpful attitude in the newsgroups: "That's a well known problem." Gee, thanks, so how about a hint of how to fix it? (Yes, I eventually found the description of the fixes, but by then had run out of motivation... I prefer to be virtuously lazy in the Perlish sense and just wait for a more mature product.)
Disclaimer or statement of limitations or something: I'm running it with the VMware Player, and it's only my fourth client OS, and I certainly can't claim to be an expert in that environment.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
As someone who uses Linux at home and work, and also uses Solaris at work, I'm very pleased to see what Sun are doing. Solaris is a great operating system and I'm a bit bemused by the attitude that some Slashdotters have of "Why bother when I've got Linux?". I thought we were supposed to be geeks here and fascinated by interesting technology!
The biggest grumble I usually hear is that the default Solaris commands are not as feature rich as the GNU equivalents. The easy answer is that the GNU tools are most probably already installed in /usr/sfw and that to use them requires nothing more than a minor tweak to /etc/profile.
The reality is that, while Linux is great, it's not the only decent open source operating system out there and there are plenty of reasons to look at the alternatives (try it and see for yourself).
I find quite interesting that the coool features are finding their way into FreeBSD but not linux. Makes you think which users really have more freedom.
Stay away?
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Yea, stay away. If you have a load of 80 on a 32 CPU system, you didn't design the hardware or software correctly.
Solaris just works and its made for servers. Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented. I would not trust my job to it unless its Debian or RHES which costs $$$ as cutting edge features are not needed on a mission critical server. Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Debian doesn't cost anything, and there's always CentOS if you want the RHEL reliability without the cost.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Yea, these were the same Unix admins who used to ask me if I installed the latest kernel patch while they were still using sendmail (and patching it about as frequently). I didn't put a lot of faith in their opinion.
Oh and the article discussed a scarcity of third party apps. I found the opposite as most server ERP and database apps are on Solaris than Linux.
For the big big things, probably. Oracle? Works perfectly fine. I'm building a RAC now using commodity hardware that will probably be 1/3 the price of what it would cost to get something from Sun.
To be fair, I haven't used much Sun equipment (hardware or OS) in the past 6 years or so. There's a number of things they get right, like the Open Firmware. But from an OS and maintenance perspective, does Sun still have patch clusters? Do I have to head over to SunFreeware.com to get useful applications installed? I can provision a Linux server literally in a few minutes, but it would take the better part of a day to get Solaris set up (have to remember to disable telnet, find the latest patch cluster, reboot, install gcc and other apps). Bleah.
Uptime?
Uptime is so 1997.
Anyone who needs serious uptime of "years" will have a high availability cluster implementation.
Or they'll use a *real* platform known for reliability like a mainframe, not some toy running on purple plastic hardware.
Having been a UNIX admin for 23 years and Solaris for 10 years, I'm not sure what you're drinking, but I'm staying away from it.
Solaris support has rocked. We've never had an issue that Sun hasn't been able to solve, and yes, we've thrown them some curves (and sliders for that matter). IBM's support has told us on multiple occasions to re-install the system as a fix for a problem. RedHat we've stumped more often than not. HP? Well - they still can't figure out how to handle more than 8 luns per target for scsi (as well as fibre)...
Solaris performance has been fantastic - outperforming Linux, AIX, HP-UX on modern equipment.
We've migrated workloads to and from Solaris - no big deal - as long as you know what you're doing.
(Our misguided DBA's started migrating from old SunOS 5.8 boxes to Linux - and are now migrating back.)
If you use tools that are available on multiple platforms, migrating isn't all that tough.
If you are developing native language apps, porting isn't terribly difficult although finding workarounds for pesky native quirks is troublesome at times.
So I guess it depends on what you call "experienced"...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Kubuntu is a poor KDE desktop compared to most of the other majors. Ubuntu is solid, but Kubuntu isn't quite up to par. OpenSUSE is certainly far superior.
ZFS - Are you really using your server for data storage? SAN or NAS should be a better option depending on your price point
SMF - while nice, i have experienced many different kinds of errors. If one of the dependencies has a problem, the chain breaks and it is a pain to discover the problem.
FMA - if hardware is broken, i would rather the machine be fully broken and out of service. Running on degraded hardware is too much of a risk. if a few bits get switched or some data is not written correctly, you could corrupt data.
Zones - I still have yet to see a reason to use this except for dedicated virtualization servers.
binary compatibility - if you are running custom code without the source, sounds like you have a setup for failure.
rcapd - ulimit can do this per process, and there are also multiple 3rd party open source resource limiters.
processor sets, cpu shares, fair share scheduler - Yes, there are.
I've been in many different places with Solaris, Linux, and a few other random UNIX environments. In almost every case, the Solaris and other random unix environments could be replaced with Linux at 1/10th the cost.
I manage some HPUX servers right now and just the hardware maintenance on each of the servers is more than a few brand new Linux servers each year.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
I guess you have never worked in supercomputing....where Linux is just about what everything runs.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
OK, you are free to doubt my reality (I am a 45-year-old old-timer when it comes to both Unix and Linux), but Linux isn't all about bleeding-edginess.
I would stack a nice solid Slackware distro against Solaris or BSD and expect sound results. Until very recently I used this for my desktop system too, but since my preference is for Gnome (for which development of the formerly excellent Dropline distribution appears to have stalled) I have had to go shopping.
I tried Ubuntu (again) and hated it (again), tried Gentoo for 3 weeks and not quite hated it, but found it frustrating enough to look elsewhere. Currently I'm playing with Arch linux, which is looking quite promising. Not quite as quick to set up as Slackware, but with all of its other (i.e. KISS) advantages.
Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented.... Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Get your head outta your ass. When even Wall Street firms use Linux on their grids/farms to crunch numbers using complex modeling on very very critical jobs ($$$$), reliability, scalability along with cutting-edgeness - everything comes into picture. And they are replacing their Sun boxes for last 3 years.
I have worked on these (as a developer, mind you), so at least I can attest Linux's readiness with its 'beta' quality. So, take your bullshit somewhere else.
You should try using it to debug applications. I use it a lot for this, and it's amazing. It's basically like a programmable debugger that can monitor a running process without really affecting its performance.
... between Solaris and Linux in the Enterprise is how they react to abuse - namely stupid people running ton of stupid memory hog applications.
Where I work we have Solaris 9 and 10 boxes running literally unattended for 600+ days - they are shared boxes, meaning lot many different applications run on the same OS/FS/Memory/CPUs .
When a particular app goes haywire and starts (many of them are 64-bit apps) - that particular app just gets a NULL back when there is no longer any memory available. The app can hopefully then calm itself down or release some of its caches etc. but the main point is that the other apps are unaffected and so is the OS.
I would not even begin to think how Linux could handle this. It has this insane notion of handing out virtually any amount of memory to applications whether or not there is actually that much memory and swap available. So when things get out of control the ugly and stupid OOM killer thinks it knows better which app to kill - depending on your luck you could end up with sshd or some other good behaving app being killed to give memory to this bad app.
That is scary. Arguably this is all fixable within the applications but ground reality is that App developers are incompetent - at least where I work, they are.
Plus the newer Solaris releases are close to Linux when it comes to performance. So the only incentive to run Linux is hardware support - if you are on non SPARC hardware that is.
Linux hopefully some day will have a good memory management subsystem soon - less fragmentation, more predictability, good accounting etc. But till that time Solaris for the stupid "Enterprise" .
I guess google have no "real" admins that look after 200,000 Linux servers. Obviously amateurs compared to monkeys like yourself. If you knew what you were doing, why would you be a lowly admin?
You forgot 'lsof -o'.
On the ZFS point, just what filesystem do you think I put on my 20TB SAN?
I'm not the original poster, but I agree with him wholeheartedly. In my experience, tasks that can be easily parallelized work well in Solaris (web servers, polling servers, etc). However, tasks that are serial in nature (dealing with a stream of events like IDS or syslog) work *horribly* on Solaris.
When we moved some of our log parsing from Solaris/SPARC hardware to similarly priced Debian/x86 hardware, we expected a 3x improvement in performance just due to the CPU...we actually saw a 10x improvement in performance. We attributed this largely to Solaris' aggressive reservation of CPU cycles for other threads...even when we only had one.
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Over 85% of the top 500 super computers in the world run Linux. http://www.top500.org/ as best I can tell almost none run Solaris as most of the Unix is AIX. So all you "Linux's uptime, stability and processing power sucks compared to Unix" old ass fanboys go back to your clubhouse and cry.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Wow...if you are a *real* Unix admin it is no wonder Linux came along and is so successful.
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
# 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.
Just starting to get added in the latest kernels.
Qxe4
A load of 80 on a 32 cpu system sounds like a poorly architected solution to me. :)
As for the rest, give me a break. One of the benefits Linux is that if you want cutting edgeness and desktop goodies you can have them, but if you're looking for stability and vendor support you can have that too. And it doesn't mean spending a ton of money either - RHEL is relatively cheap and Debian is free (no idea what you're smoking there), as are a number of other options (CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, etc).
We run hundreds of servers on Linux servicing millions of subscribers and have absolutely no stability issues whatsoever. Machines occasionally go down due to hardware faults, power incidents or kernel upgrades, but only a handful of kernel related failures over the years. We've actually had more failures with our Sparc/Solaris machines, generally exhibiting as spontaneous reboots.
I am with Linus on this one. Our community should shun Solaris
Shun the non-believer !!! Shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnn !!!
Squirrel!
It's not so much them believing that CLI is better, I think it's more a case of CLI tools being far easier to develop. Writing a good GUI is non-trivial, and writing a good GUI for something incredibly technical and involved will often result in a harder to use solution than just making the CLI.
Furthermore, admins are typically highly proficient with a keyboard, and can manipulate the CLI faster than they can a mouse.
It's a case of tool for the job. Many tasks are just better suited to CLI due to complexity, target audience and design experience of the developers.
I hate printers.
Not to mention that an uptime of years generally means someone hasn't been keeping their system patched properly. :)
Yeah, Linux has CFS and all... but does it have it /AT THE SAME TIME/ as other schedulers?
Solaris has 5 schedulers and they can all be running at the same time ( they all have different priorities ), no need to pick on boot or compile which algo. you want to use
Couple points:
"ZFS - Are you really using your server for data storage? SAN or NAS should be a better option depending on your price point"
Why not set up a server for data storage? Then you get all the ZFS checksum/auto-heal/snapshot goodness ?
"Zones - I still have yet to see a reason to use this except for dedicated virtualization servers."
Zones are so cheap, I run every single service in a zone so that they can be migrated between machines, any dependencies can be contained, etc. If you haven't seen a use for them it's because you haven't ever used them.
"rcapd - ulimit can do this per process, and there are also multiple 3rd party open source resource limiters."
And yanking the ram stick can do it per-machine. How coarse grained do you want to go before you look like a fool?
In almost every case, the Solaris and other random unix environments could be replaced with Linux at 1/10th the cost."
Solaris is free. Support is 1/3 the price of RHEL. It runs on cheap Dell/Supermicro whiteboxes.
dtrace and ZFS make me cream my jeans, but they'll probably just get ported to other unix-likes (or similar things like tux3 and kprobes will "get there") Not that I don't like opensolaris. After writing some D scripts, I'd like to use it in a few applications.
All spoken as if by a really naive person. You seem to think that Linux is not in competition with BSD, as if it were above BSD (and OpenSolaris). That's a strange position to take. Do you think that Linux' progress is a result of competition with itself or with Windows alone?
Both BSD and OpenSolaris are technically equivalent to Linux in many areas and superior in some others. By the way, Linux is also superior to the other two in some areas, too. You would be a fool to discount any of these operating systems, as each has pros and cons associated with different projects and needs.
Furthermore, if your hypothesis is that OpenSolaris won't be able to compete with Linux because of the "community" aspect, then why would you suggest that it may be able to compete with BSD which also is developed by the "community." That reeks of Linux fanboyism and illogical thinking.
I was not talking about the technical aspects, but about Market Share. It doesn't matter whether your product is superior or not, existing market share is a horrible obstacle to overcome.
OpenSolaris vs. Linux = Linux vs. Windows
I find quite interesting that the coool features are finding their way into FreeBSD but not linux. Makes you think which users really have more freedom.
Linux's kernel uses the GPL, and CDDL is GPL-incompatible. (But BSD and Apple's OS X open-source license (whatever it's called) compatible.) As a result, BSD and OS X have DTrace, and ZFS is in BSD and is coming to OS X. However, it's not really the fault of the Linux developers that it doesn't have it in the kernel, Sun made yet another open-source license that's incompatible with GPL. (It's pretty hard to make a license incompatible with BSD, the only conditions are, "here's some code, don't sue us".)
In either case, you're welcome to take the source code and start your own kernel. Try doing that with MS Shared Source 2008 (tm).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"Yea, stay away. If you have a load of 80 on a 32 CPU system, you didn't design the hardware or software correctly."
"it would take the better part of a day to get Solaris set up (have to remember to disable telnet, find the latest patch cluster, reboot, install gcc and other apps). Bleah."
All that stufff is included by default now. You being inexperienced is not a fault of the OS
Heavily modified Linux. Ship of Theseus style Linux ( Is it still linux if only the interfaces are the same? )
Unmodified Solaris scales to > 512 CPU's almost linear
Funny you should mention the "desktop orientation" of Linux, considering that any recent Solaris puts on a shiny Gnome suit...
Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
OK, I'll bite. I've been admin'ing Unix for 12 years, and a user for 20. I've maintained everything from an UltraSparc workstation to E10Ks. Lately (past five years) I've been doing AIX, maintaining over 150 OS instances.
For a test project I've been researching Linux and Solaris for an Oracle RAC installation. I will tell you that, hands down, the Linux network stack is faster. Raw i/o is close, but Linux wins small file writes and reads by a significant margin. BTW, the Sun.com site has a paper comparing Linux filesystems versus UFS, but take it with a grain of salt (look at the machine they use).
Now let's talk about scaling...
Up to the 8 processor machine that I tested (which is a *small* PC system), Linux continues to scale close to linearly for the Oracle/TomCat/Apache workload, as does Solaris. Beyond this I understand things can change, but so be it, that's not the platform I'm needing.
Now certainly you can build a workload requirement that will put Solaris on top, but in the vast majority of installations Linux will do just fine.
Of course there are other factors. RedHat doesn't have the most sterling support (compare it to IBM for example), but I can buy support through IBM (or Oracle or Sun for that matter) if I wanted. This may be the reason for a shop to go with Sun, but I wanted to correct the idea that Linux is not as technically valid as Solaris.
Those sound like the same complaints Windows users have of Linux, but which continually get dismissed by the Linux community as irrelevant.
"It's not Linux. I have to learn new commands and doesn't run my programs"
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
> being paid professionals, they're less
> likely to act like an asshole.
That statement is based on what data?
Could you please provide a reference?
"ZFS - Are you really using your server for data storage? SAN or NAS should be a better option depending on your price point"
Why not set up a server for data storage? Then you get all the ZFS checksum/auto-heal/snapshot goodness ?
That's why there is Thumper (aka Sun Fire X4500) that can hold 48TB in 4RU.
Considering that, it makes a 20TB SAN seem small.
Ok, I'll call you on this one. I'm a SCSA (Solaris Certified System Administrator) and a former Sun SSE. I've worked with Solaris systems going back to 1996 on original Sparcstations (not even Ultrasparcs). I've also worked on Enterprise 10000, 15000, and 25000. We also have a smattering of Sun Fire X4600s, the new AMD Opteron boxes.
I tested Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (64-bit) on the exact same hardware (X4600), and you know what? Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 performed better on massive storage I/O than Solaris 10. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it. We have over 50 LUNs carved from an HP EVA 8100 and presented to these X4600s, on 4x 4gb HBAs per server. They run Oracle RAC, have 4x quad core AMD Opterons, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Sorry, but Solaris used to be a good OS back in the 90s. They have fallen so far behind it's not even funny. The reality now is that I can run Red Hat and Oracle on a 32 core AMD Opteron box with a hundred LUNs on a fibre channel SAN and it outperforms Solaris now. ZFS is nice, but we use ASM (automated storage management) for Oracle anyway, so ZFS is unnecessary.
Solaris has unfortunately fallen far behind the performance curve, and I doubt they can ever catch up. Your BS about HP not supporting more than 8 LUNs per target is absolutely BS. I can do hundreds of LUNs, and I have systems like that in production.
On support, they all suck. Red Hat, HP, Sun, every one of them sucks. They have all been chasing the bottom and if it ever gets to the point where I'm stumped, they're going to be stumped as well.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Absolute bullshit. I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (64-bit) on a 4 node AMD Opteron cluster running Oracle RAC. Each server has 32 cores, 128GB of memory, and 8x 4gb HBAs, connected to an HP EVA 8100 SAN. I also tested Solaris 10 on this same hardware, and you know what? It outperforms Solaris 10 on the same hardware. I have the Oracle ORION benchmarks to prove it.
There was a time in the late 90s when Solaris was a far superior OS to Linux for use in the data center. I'm an SCSA, I know, because I started as a Solaris admin long before I worked on Linux. The reality is that now, Linux outperforms Solaris for I/O intensive applications like Oracle database. Why do you think Oracle themselves migrated to Linux a while back? Solaris and Sun have been losing their best and brightest engineers for a long time now, and the quality of their OS shows. It's getting dated. Sure, new features like ZFS are cool, but the core of the OS, where it really counts, hasn't been updated enough to take advantage of the large memory and CPU core footprint that new commodity servers have.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
You could also try SLES. Their init scripts are not the SYS V style, and do have dependency abilities. You don't get ZFS, but I have found that it is a finicky beast and needs lots of kernel tuning for certain roles (Databases especially, unless you don't care about system allocation and performance).
There are Linux virtualization tools that work like zones.
However, do what works for you. Just figured you could save some migration pains.
If you replace a few choice utils with their GNU counterparts, Solaris is just fine to use. You can have the best of both worlds.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
You should not put a filesystem on the SAN but rather the presented LUN. Also, if you are using a battery backed up SAN you should really turn fsync off for the ZFS filesystem and get some performance back. Also, research ARC buffer sizes as well as tuning the read block and write block size for your applications.
That being said, I love the x4600s for running VMware/Linux.
Actually - I'm in the middle of a nightmare because I need to get this system out the door and to a client like... YESTERDAY, and for some reason the pkg.opensolaris.org server is having problems and I can't get this thing updated.
Aside from my grief this morning, my experience with Indiana has been pretty nice. It seems like once things are working, for the most part they stay that way. However, I'd agree with your statement about it being "betaish". The system has some wierd quirks like:
1. Occasionally when rebooted it cant bring up SMB shares. Reboot again and they come up.
2. Network Auto Magic... uhhh.... huh? Why? First thing I disabled.
3. Changing DNS servers in the config and reloading = broken DNS. Reboot and it's fine.
Anyway, I'm glad Sun has done this. It's always nice to have more "free" alternatives.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
ZFS is at the top of so many folks' list that I figure I should throw this out just for reference:
ZFS is an available option in FreeNAS.
I'm guessing by extension that it's available in the general FreeBSD distribution too.
-Matt
What Sun needs to do is to educate young people by supporting user groups and presenting OpenSolaris to LUGs at Universities.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
sounds nice, and seems doable with scripts. i'll look around if there's something like that.
OpenVZ should be comparable, but i find KVM better suited to my needs. BTW, can Solaris Zones migrate from one box to another? i don't think OpenVZ can, but might be wrong.
don't know of any either, but i really think it should be some way to do it.
taskset works very nice with nice and ionice to manage KVM guests.
-Kz-
The replacement of Solaris with Linux for cost savings could, in most cases, be equally met by using Solaris on x86. If you're doing "real" production workloads, chances are you're running on fairly similar hardware to what you'd run Solaris x86 on and have support from Redhat/Suse.
There are patches to switch schedulers are boot, but Linus has fought to keep these from going upstream. He doesn't want the scheduler to be modular.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is such a sad thing to say now it's just not even funny, and I feel mighty sorry for the Sun reps and consultants who still have to deliver this very, very tired line of a 'beta' quality Linux and Solaris being a 'real' Unix OS. Sad. Plain sad. After the dot com boom at the turn of this century, and after cheaper x86 servers and Linux started delivering a lot more performance than Sun's 'quality' hardware, anyone who cared about their job and performance moved. I really don't know what it will take for those people to go back.
Certainly, if you were an admin running quite a bit of open source software such as Zope, Python etc., and you were *trying* to run it on Solaris, you switched to Linux years ago because developers didn't give a shit about a proprietary Unix running on proprietary hardware where they couldn't work out what was happening. Too expensive to develop for, too expensive to troubleshoot. These are the people OpenSolaris is trying to get back, and it has long since been too late. Many universities and educational establishments fitted that bill back then, and they moved.
Linux is simply a far better Unix. Open source developers develop for a Linux platform first, you find problems and solutions pretty much instantly when you run Linux as your platform, and that is the kind of 'support' Sun just cannot match. Any Linux distribution is also far less of a PITA to install, to admin and especially to install software for.
Solaris is a *real* Unix OS because you need a consultant to sit with it on site for several days to get it to do anything. That is how Solaris is designed, from the ludicrous time needed to install the OS itself to the time needed to install software. It is designed to eat $$$ and £££ in support costs. That's the bottom line.
Another sad and tired line from the Sun rep handbook. That's just not the experience that most people are getting, and 'scalability' so misused these days it's hilarious.
Sad. There's that 'real' word again that you get from Sun reps and consultants out there. Do you not think people are getting 'real' work done with their Linux systems? Is that so incredible? Do you not think 'real' Unix admins want to log into a shell that doesn't suck and has actually improved since about 1988?
Well that's why I admin Linux boxes instead of trying to pass myself off as a Sun admin, your snark notwithstanding.
I have had driver problems with Linux as well. Does it have such a site?
PS. You can also check the forums at http://opensolaris.org/os/
Patches are installed by default? Sweet!
Unless you mean things like getting the 6/08 media and install that which includes all patched up until then. Then you still have to install patches since 8/08 via descriptive names as 1-1854298.zip
I have been playing around with OpenSolaris since it came out in VirtualBox and it seems cool. But I have had some issues with it so I shall hold out till the next release which isn't too far away.
Nexenta has released an OpenSolaris based storage server platform which we're using as a storage virtualization head. It rocks.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
Very funny
"But the majority of web 2.0 style folks need a faster way to get going."
Uh Pooky the Web 2.0 thing just separates the morons from the merely slow. You figure out which group you belong in.
""it scales far better" in general is as absurd as it is patently untrue."
How so? With the exception of the SGI implementation, I don't don't of Linux distros out of the box that scale to 100+ processors well (indeed, the usual approach is to run multiple instances of the kernel on each processor or so on large ensembles). When discussing an OS, scalability is usually meant in terms of how the OS itself scales ... not how one's applications can be configured to scale.
So I think the poster's claim that Solaris scales far better is true FOR THE OS itself.
Now, whether THAT matters to your workload (or if your workload scales across many processors via multiple OS instances just fine) is another question entirely.
If 100% is the maximum load, how are you exceeding it? Unless you are using a higher value as the maximum percentage, your math troubles me.
The load average is the number of processes waiting to run, quite different from % CPU usage.
Cause anything which isn't GPL isn't open source, amirite?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
SMF - while nice, i have experienced many different kinds of errors. If one of the dependencies has a problem, the chain breaks and it is a pain to discover the problem.
SMF - The logging related to SMF is fairly robust. Any of the problems I've encountered have been easy to track (maybe not fix, but at least I find the problem quickly enough)
Zones - I still have yet to see a reason to use this except for dedicated virtualization servers.
Zones - Software licensed per CPU on the server may acknowledge zones as a valid way to segment the system. We've done it with Oracle and ArcSDE on a server with 4 CPUs where we only wanted those apps taking 2 CPUs.
Since June (OS 2008.05) with nary a complaint.
One of the cooler features that wasn't mentioned in the review is the snapshot ability of the ZFS. With OpenSolaris they have tied it into upgrade process so that a snapshot of old boot environment is created automatically (and placed in the GRUB menu) and you can switch between the two at boot time and manage which one takes priority via beadm pretty seamlessly.
Give it a whirl...you might like it.
OpenSolaris takes quite a bit of time getting used to IMHO coming from FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and many many versions of Linux. I used it because I wanted ZFS, virtulization, and also to try something new.
I did move back to FreeBSD after about a week or so since I thought OpenSolaris brought unnecessary learning curves for someone new. Things like 'ps' being different than every other distro, network interface setup and modification is annoying, the number of programs that you can compile outside of their package manager are slim, and overall not very friendly (I don't want to use the GUI, ever). However, I have 4gb of ram and ZFS really should only be run under 64-bit FreeBSD. Qemu doesn't seem to run, Xen isn't even an option for virtulization and WINE doesn't work under 64-bit (these are the main reasons I bought 4gb of ram in the first place).
ZFS has been running flawlessly on FreeBSD for me thus far, and even the maintainer says he's been using it since her ported it over without a hickup. FreeBSD runs version 6 of ZFS, while OpenSolaris currently runs version 11. It IS true, once you go ZFS you don't go back.
I refuse to run Linux, for personal and limiting reasons, and FreeBSD won't let me virtualize. It seems that in the next few days I'll be biting the bullet and moving back to OpenSolaris. It is very nice that ZFS is seamlessly integrated and snapshots are automatically created when updating the system. This ensures you can easily roll back or boot back into an older install to test different things.
All in all OpenSolaris HAS some potential, but their licensing is very wack and limiting. If Sun wants their OS to evolve and take on more users in the community, the licence will really need to be changed.
Sorry - but the "we" remains anonymous...
While the package management isn't the best, it's definitely not bad...
Able to manage the packages (and dependencies) of the global zone and all running containers with a single command...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I do prefer KDE over Gnome by a significant margin, but I sure don't like SUSE. Kubuntu is acceptable, but I usually use Debian. (Well, the SUSE info is now a few versions back, so things may be different, I suppose.)
OTOH, you said OpenSUSE. I can't really comment about that, as I don't know it. I don't really have any direct knowledge of SUSE in any dialect since Novell made their deal with MS. (And I'm not likely to unless I hear that they've released significant version upgrades into GPL3. Otherwise I don't trust their deal with MS. [They revealed parts, and they kept parts hidden, and we don't know WHAT the hidden parts say.])
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
99.999% of functions should be accessible from a GUI. Period. End. Of. Story.
Seriously? So when you're needing to do X, Y, or Z, that takes five programs and pipes data from one program to the other, do you put one GUI window on top of another one so that it can act as a filter, and then another filter on top of that ad nauseum? Even on MS Windows or MacOSX machines, my first action whenever I want to do any real admin work is to open up a command prompt.
GUIs are like rebuses; they're fun to use, and sometimes can be used by people who can't read, but when you want to get a complex idea across, text is sooooo much better.
One of our Linux servers regularly copes with a load in excess of 100. Things slow down, but nothing breaks.
Be careful with comparisons like these.
Linux lumps disk I/O into the load average, whereas most "other" Unixes don't. I've seen a Linux box with a load of 300+ and idle CPU, and a Sun with a load of 2 that was near unusable because the disks were being thrashed to death.
Comparing the two can be unfair to either side depending on the context. It's apples and laundry detergent.
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Well, Ill say I have been running Solaris since the 3/80. Sun support has never sucked and I have worked several problems with them. We also use Red Hat and the unfortunate thing is that Red Hat refuses to make changes to Red Hat 5 when the kernel is fixed in Red Hat 6 (unreleased). They simply will not back port. No, I have made a significant amount of use of Sun support over the years and have yet to find problems that I "stump" them on. Do I end up in back line support talking directly to engineers who wrote the stuff. Yes. But I have yet to get a Linux Kernel engineer on the phone at 3AM. Oh, and I was extremely impressed over the 4th of July weekend when a lot of us (System Admins) were upgrading our servers and Sun was there. In fact, I know I got the A team as far as support goes. That is just the way Sun rolls. At least that has been my experience since 1987.
there are regional OSUGs around the place supported by Sun , freebies and lectures, look them up and see if you're near one
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
If (closed source) NVidia can link into the kernel without issue, I'd like to hear the logic behind why (OSI-approved) ZFS cannot.
NVidia doesn't mind when you link their code to the kernel. ZFS is GPL3, which says you can only link to GPL3 or things that can be treated as GPL3.
Also, why cannot a shim layer (like NVidia?) be used if there are actual conflicts?
There's no need, ZFS is open source so the end user can just compile the entire thing. The final linking just has to be done by the end user, since the result can't be distributed.
As much as I love tru64, I think it really is time to put this myth to bed. AdvFS is a good solid filesystem and cluster aware too, but it's no ZFS. AdvFS doesn't do any form of RAID other than concatenating disks into disk pools (domains) which can then be populated by filesets (AdvFS speak for filesystems) that share the same domain space. Every enterprise implementation of AdvFS always always has AdvFS sitting on top of some form of hardware or software RAID. AdvFS itself doesn't provide any RAID like data protection or redundancy.
AdvFS doesn't come close to the flexibility and power of ZFS. That's just the plain truth.
Now if you're really interested in Linux's answer to ZFS, you should keep an eye on the development of Btrfs. I wouldn't expect it to be production ready for a couple of years yet, but when it is it should kick ZFS ass!
You mean the fact that md is completely broken
Okay you had me worried there for a sec.. I run an md rig of 4 disks (raid1 and raid5). I think it works beautifully. Never had any problems in 1.5 years since I installed it. So in what respect is md "completely broken"?
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
You didn't mention HP-UX in your previous post. I'm talking about Linux running on HP Proliant or Sun X4600 servers. So, apples -> oranges. I'm not sure of any LUN limitations on HP-UX.
We were using ASM and raw filesystems. ASM is Oracle's own volume manager. You present a bunch of raw LUNs and Oracle does a RAID 0 stripe across them. The data is protected on the storage array using RAID 1+0 or RAID 5.
On Linux, with hundreds of LUNs, you get /dev/sda - /dev/sdz, then you go to /dev/sdaa, /dev/sdab, etc... Very easy to manage. No need to format, label, partition, etc, all of that BS that Solaris requires you to do before you can write to a disk. Just start writing to the raw /dev/sda and you're good.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
This one goes to 110%. (apologies to Nigel Tufnel)
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
On Linux you get the same functionalty from OpenVZ or its commercial cousin Virtuozzo.
...the GUI vs. CLI war. 99.999% of functions should be accessible from a GUI. Period. End. Of. Story.
Okay, I'd really like you to tell me how something like that is even remotely possible.
The only way to give a GUI the same power as the CLI is to dumb down the CLI.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
I am looking for an excuse to try out Solaris, and I thought of using it as a media server. Can it work well as, say, either a MythTV backend or front end? Or perhaps the better question is, can you run MythTV (or any other similar app) on it at all?
Use taskset(1) to launch a program and tie them to cpu sets. or adjust them on the fly afterwards. As for your Fair Shares Scheduler, I've no idea what that does on Solaris (smells like a marketing term to me) but the Linux kernel has a FAIR_GROUP_SCHED option which likely does the same thing.
This is what started to kill Solaris in the first place.
Linux? Oh yeah it will support the hard drives you have and the cdrom you have.
Solairs? Sorry, you will need to replace all of your hard drives and your cdrom with
dramatically more expensive equivalents.
If you are really dying to run the x86 version of Solaris I am sure there is
a suitable x86 box that Sun is just dying to sell you. It will also simplify
things when it comes to support.
"You mean you wanted to use 3rd party RAM? I'm sorry but that just won't do."
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
When a particular app goes haywire and starts ... that particular app just gets a NULL back when there is no longer any memory available. ... I would not even begin to think how Linux could handle this
Ummm... forget about the OOM-tuning stuff the other people are preaching, how about the good old ulimit command? It's only been around since... System V Release 4, according to ulimit(3).
http://certcities.com/editorial/columns/story.asp?EditorialsID=214
Maybe Linux's handling of memory limits could be more intelligent (I have no idea), but that's no excuse to ignore basic Unix process accounting.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Ha, just turned up a Slashdot article about this from last year:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2335217&from=rss
Zones - I still have yet to see a reason to use this except for dedicated virtualization servers.
server consolidation is one use. if you have several small servers, and then decide to consolidate in a single, big one, having the services of each small machine on it's own zone can be a lot more flexible than hardware partitioning.
What ? Me, worry ?
if he's drinking the coolaid, you're smoking some serious shit.
compared to the kind of service we have from IBM here at work (a 3 letter acronym that just got bought by a 2 letter acronyn. check the news.) sun's support is AWESOME!!!
hell, last week IBM sent an "enginner" to our chilean site that didn't know how to use "sudo su -". then we all asked here: WTF ?!?
Sun even have dedicated engineers on two of our sites in US, and they're pretty quick to answer and solve our problems. a lot better than IBM in my experience.
What ? Me, worry ?
In a word GPFS, and then add in clustering, HSM and ctdb, and no I am not an IBM sales rep.
Frankly though I would also be far happier using XFS on a 20TB SAN with 15 years of heritage than this new upstart ZFS.
On 7200rpm SATA spindles only. Great if you don't need lots of IO's otherwise your a bit stuffed. Also great if you never need more than 48TB. If you however do then you are a bit stuffed with the thumper approach as it does not scale.
ZFS is also missing user guota's, clustering and HSM. If ZFS floats your boat good for you, but claiming it does everything and is without serious problems is shear ignorance.
openSUSE 11 is the first version (a fairly recent release BTW) where I really started to like SUSE at all. Package management is pretty fast. I've yet to run into any dependency hell. The new solver works well. Yast is a good tool. The install is very fast. The installer will auto-resize a Windows partition and setup dual-boot (as its recommendation, but you can always change the partition scheme during the installer).
The KDE, KDE 4 and Gnome desktops are all very solid in openSUSE 11.
I have no real complaints with it so far, and I finally ditched Gentoo with it. I loved Gentoo for a while, but I think they are hurting from lack of management, direction, and package maintainers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Sun has not yet released ZFS an openSolaris under GPLv3, which is the first step.
Next, the Linux kernel would need to be GPLv3.
Linus can relicense all of his contributions to GPLv3, but then the kernel can not include any code currently licensed GPLv2. So actually, every developer who contributed code and maintained copyright on that code would have to be contacted, and all of them would have to agree to relicense the code.
Unlike many other projects where people contributed under "GPLv2 or later", the Linux kernel is basically all "GPLv2 specifically".
It would be a logistic nightmare to relicense the Linux kernel, and many developers have stated they would be opposed to it on principle as well.
Sun could just license ZFS and the openSolaris kernel under GPLv2, but in their eyes it would be effectively giving it away for nothing. The reason they'd consider GPLv3, is to entice the Linux kernel to go the same route, and then both can take from each other.
When Sun discovered that Linux wasn't likely to go GPLv3, they decided not to either.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
ZFS is still under the CDDL currently. Sun said they'd released ZFS under the GPLv3 if the Linux kernel went GPLv3.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Ah, I thought I'd seen someone say they went ahead and did that anyway... do you know if CDDL has similar linking rules, or something else that would block the module approach from the ZFS side?
Yeah, but he was talking about gear that runs on FreeBSD of all things.
Do I really have to be the one to point out how sad this is?
This is SERVER gear we're talking about here and Linux has been very respectable in this area for a long time.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I gave Solaris 10 more than a fair shake a few months ago (with an eye on its ZFS support) when I had a hard drive fail. I worked pretty hard at getting it to run and really didn't get very far. Note: I've been using Debian for almost 10 years now -- so I'm pretty biased.
.tar.gz package system (excusable for the rare unpackaged Perl module, but unacceptable for the whole damn system). I'm quite admittedly not very knowledgeable about BSD and Unix, but damn those systems seem like a bitch to maintain. And Nexenta simply wasn't there yet.
From what I remember there was an astroturfed Sun-staff-only developer community, little information available online, slow as hell boot time, ZFS boot partition complications, and a broken KDE (the X server didn't work correctly; I have absolutely ZERO problems, even with 3D here in Linux).
And when I looked ahead to maintaining the system (the VAST BULK of where overhead is spent) I didn't see anything that looked as sane or easy as Debian. No incremental updates, just some arcane BSD-esque 'port' or
Solaris 10: pass.
No, I don't believe the CDDL has blocking rules, which is why FreeBSD was able to pick up DTrace and ZFS. However, the GPL has blocking rules which is preventing the inclusion of ZFS in the Linux kernel.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Oh? Try using an Atheros 5007 chipset for wireless.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
He's talking about real-world apps running on large SMP hardware, not some thousand-node HPC cluster. Scaling a single instance of an OS over 30, 60, 100 or more cpus in a single box is tricky business, and Linux doesn't do it as well as Solaris does. Maybe Linux is more stable than it used to be, but Solaris has a proven track record of top-notch stability and uptime. Top500,org is interesting, but irrelevant to the GPs point.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Binary compatibility ... your "setup for failure" is true - in Linux.
Fortunately it is not true in (Open)Solaris (or Mac or Windows or ...).
Listen, I really, really hate that X server breaks for every minor-minor kernel update (I have switched to Ubuntu which does not have that brain damage). I really, really hate when I have to recompile (FOSS) webcam (and DVB and maybe two other) drivers after every minor-minor kernel update.
Maybe you have time for all that. We don't - I know people who do not update their kernels anymore.
I don't don't of Linux distros out of the box that scale to 100+ processors well
Isn't the usual mode of scaling Linux based systems oriented towards bunches of generic boxes with a small number of processors? I don't have broad experience here, but the sites I have worked with don't want to spend the money it costs for large SMP boxes, when, by architecting the application correctly you can scale it across large numbers of commodity boxes more economically, and gain resiliance in the bargain.
I have nothing against Solaris, but neither does it do anything for me. Our company has done well with openSUSE and CentOS/Fedora. As I said above, we haven't had any stability issues, and nothing that would force us to go to Sun. Our load is compute and file system, though, so we don't need a huge Oracle server.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
You've not heard of belenix have you?
www.belenix.org
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Which is why Google runs on Solaris, right?
Oh, wait...
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
All OSS licenses are equal, but some are more equal than others ...
Fair point about load average (find a lot of people get needlessly hysterical about that without looking at other metrics), though I'm not generally fond of relying on vertical scaling to that extent.
As for the rest, where exactly did I say we left broken hardware in production? Failed machines are pulled for diagnostic and root cause analysis. It may be relatively rare compared to some vendors, but Sun hardware can and does fail and Sun software can and does fail to handle it gracefully sometimes. We've hit undetected cpu faults, firmware bugs and of course the fucked cache modules Sun was shipping in the older Enterprise servers for a while.
And no, it had nothing to do with user actions. The only applications we've run on Solaris machines are databases. Only a handful of highly trusted admins even have access and in none of the cases was anyone logged in.
Academic matter, anyways. We're largely abandoning Solaris. We're getting far better price/performance on x86 hardware and the reliability advantage is minimal to non-existent. Not that we trust the reliability of a single machine anyways.
List price is marginally lower, yes. It's an apples to oranges comparison, though, since Sun is covering an operating system and a small number of bundled applications (Apache, Bind, Sendmail, WU-FTPd, OpenSSH, Samba and a few other minor components). The subscriptions from Red Hat are far more comprehensive, covering software that Sun ships with Solaris but cover with the support contract (e.g. MySQL and Postgresl) as well as a ton of additional software that Sun doesn't even ship (Postfix, Exim, VS-FTPd, lighttpd, Tomcat, Dovecot, blah, blah, blah, etc).
Sorry - I still don't classify HP with the compaq gear they throw their label on.
When I say HP - I mean PA-RISC or ITANIUM based servers - which for the most part rely on HP-UX as an OS, which I did reference in my previous post - just not in the same sentence - so I can understand the confusion.
Migrating from an old SAN to a new SAN has been a major pain in the ass for the Linux servers - drive letters changing, size of virtual disks changing, layouts changing - and all trying to use their replication utilities.... ugh...
ZFS has been a dream... I wrote a simple script that writes the scripts to map the old drives to the new drives, run it (a series of zpool replace commands) and done.
I would presume that presenting the raw disks using ASM on Solaris would be similiar - although, yes, it may require that a label be present - but that's such an easy chore. I've got a script that will scan disks for those that aren't labeled, presents that list, you answer yes and it labels them.... One extra step... Not going to worry about it.
And all you have to do is label... once labeled, use slice 2 on SMI labeled drives as your device and nothing else needed.
With ZFS, you don't even use the slice numbers, it relabels to an EFI format and uses the disk.
Not too much BS, and beats having to deal with drive names changing on every other boot when you've added additional disks to the zones.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
As ZaMoose observed; without any clues as to the backstory.
One of my FreeNAS mirror disks broke and switched to an OpenSolaris NAS . Happy with all the additional functionality.