Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Scraps Plans For Solaris 12 (theregister.co.uk)
bobthesungeek76036 writes: According to The Register, Solaris 12 has been removed from Oracle roadmaps. This pretty much signals the demise of Solaris (as if we didn't already know that...) From the report: "The new blueprint -- dated January 13, 2017 -- omits any word of Solaris 12 that Oracle included in the same document's 2014 edition, instead mentioning 'Solaris 11.next' as due to debut during this year or the next complete with 'Cloud Deployment and Integration Enhancements.' At the time of writing, search engines produce no results for 'Solaris 11.next.' The Register has asked Oracle for more information. The roadmap also mentions a new generation of SPARC silicon in 2017, dubbed SPARC Next, and then in 2020 SPARC Next+. The speeds and capabilities mentioned in the 2017 document improve slightly on those mentioned in the 2014 roadmap.
I'll have a soft spot for Solaris, but the writing was on the wall long before this. Solaris was stagnating even before Oracle bought Sun. It was obvious that Sun lacked the resources to maintain their compiler suite and operating as well as actively research new technologies. It was sad to watch, but such is life. Solaris was probably the most usable desktop UNIX before OSX took that crown away. Solaris tried to add much-needed things to UNIX like role-based administration, light-weight virtualisation (zones/containers), non-intrusive profiling/caching (dtrace), advanced storage pools (ZFS), and heaps of other cool stuff. Sun SPARC hardware always had cool high-availability features like being able to disable bad RAM in a running system, really wide system buses for pushing around a lot of data, and was built to survive physical abuse.
The trouble is, they lost out to "good enough". Solaris on SPARCstation was better than WinNT on a whitebox PC, but WinNT on a whtebox PC got to the point where it was good enough, and the added expense of a Sun workstation couldn't be justified. On the server side, Linux became good enough, IBM and Dell x86 servers got to the point where they were good enough, and my 13th generation PowerEdges are definitely better build quality than the Sun V245 servers I still have sitting in a rack for nostalgia.
This took away a lot of their revenue so they couldn't throw resources at research and development. In particular, SPARC fell behind in price/performance/power consumption trade-off, first to AMD's 64-bit Athlons, and then to Intel's post-Netburst Xeon. The UltraSPARC T gave them a bit of a reprieve on highly parallel workloads, but cancelling the Rock was the right decision as it was painfully obvious it wasn't going to compete for single-core throughput/latency performance.
They also lost at the extreme high end to IBM who've managed to get insanely high throughput on POWER with a brute-force approach of throwing better and better cooling systems at a design that's arguably incredibly lazy compared to the E5 Xeon.
Yes, I miss Sun, and I'll shed a tear for Solaris. But I don't miss the Sun that Oracle bought - the Sun I miss had already faded half a decade before Oracle bought the dimly glowing remains.
To some extent we're already seeing this happen, although it's not quite like you describe. Systemd, which is now present in pretty much every major Linux distribution, has caused a lot of problems for a lot of users. A lot of serious Linux users, who need systems that are reliable and robust, have had to switch to FreeBSD thanks to systemd.
Running a Linux distro that includes systemd is not an option for these people/organizations, and running an uncommon or niche Linux distro like Slackware, Devuan or Gentoo is even less viable than running a major one that uses systemd. The only thing that's even less viable than a niche distro is trying to hack a distro like Debian into not using systemd, especially when it breaks dependencies and causes other package management or update complications.
So FreeBSD, and to a lesser extent OpenBSD, have already become "pretty much it" for a large set of former Linux users thanks to unwanted and problematic "innovations", like systemd, forced on users by the major Linux distro maintainers.
I switched to NetBSD because of Red Hat 5.0. It was such a disappointment after Red Hat 4.3.
or one of the BSDs - OpenBSD
FTFY. Only OpenBSD supports Sparc64 on modern Sparc64 - ie with T-series processors. And even that does not support the hardware crypto kit (cos Oracle wont let it).
Oracle need to think again FAST! OpenBSD on the new hardware could be a world beater for serving secure websites (something the world actually needs AND wants). However, they are currently engaged in supporting it in the Ellison traditional manner - with multiple stabs in the back!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII