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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.
To complete the mashing of jargon, in 2024 - "Objective SPARC Next++" (appending "On Rails" for rack systems).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Actually, Linux needs competition or it will start to run out of reasons to make it better. In future, it looks like the BSD family will be pretty much it.
Thanks, Sun/Oracle for erecting barriers around DTrace, thus motivating even better tracing in Linux. Thanks also for doing the same to ZFS, thus saving the rest of us from that sprawling abomination.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Oracle only ships ZFS on Solaris. Until Ubuntu added it (in Xenial was it?) you had to get it from a third party if you wanted it for Linux.
Does this mean Oracle will add it to Oracle Linux and support it?
This sadly reminds me of the demise of DEC VAX/VMS. Great operating system that faded with a slowly dwindling paying community. In a taste of irony.. Digital Equipment Company which sold this OS.. tried to compete with SunOS/Solaris with the release of Digital Unix which sadly never received much praise or acceptance and all but sealed the end of DEC/Compaq/HP's involvement in this legacy set of platforms. Now the FOSS community and its 'nix variants have led to the demise of what Sun Microsystems worked so hard to create.
To date... no operating system really provides the RBAC and auditing that VMS did.. but that overhead was one of the reasons that VMS was slower than Unix and thus less attractive for those processing high-cpu workloads. To quote my VMS instructor back then... VMS is a seasoned IT professional... careful, methodical and capable of securely maintaining a computing system. Unix is an 18 year old on spring break - it will do anything you ask of them with no regard of the outcome. Only recently has selinux and sudo started to bridge that age-old gap.
Now One Raging A$$hole Called Larry Ellison (Oracle (TM)) has become a Greek ship captain... at the helm during the crash but after the crash went to the short to coordinate the rescue. From my perspective the obtuse way that oracle took over sun led to its demise. At my work we are spending tens of thousands of dollars looking for solutions to avoid spending more money to keep Larry's boats afloat. We've been working on this for a year but this announcement only reinforces our decision.
A new SPARC chip without a new OS? That looks odd, except perhaps if they just plan a minor Solaris 11 update to support it.
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.
Would this mean that illumos us now the de-facto standard Solaris distribution? https://wiki.illumos.org/displ... It appears that they have quite a few of the old Solaris team members. https://wiki.illumos.org/displ...
And I will continue to use Version 11 of the X Window System.
I started with X11R5 back when I first ran Linux in 1993. I've upgraded to X11R6.
Is OSX a Desktop Unix? I thought they deprecated X11.
Furthermore, if they had an open desktop environment like maybe KDE or even Gnome, it would be different. Opaque binary-only windowing environments don't qualify as modern Unix. That's like NeWS or any of the other old proprietary croft.
Should really read the official line from Oracle for the reasons for the changes (taken from Register post)...
Here is what Oracle is communicating to customers:
The multi-decade record of SPARC and Solaris platform development and delivery continues with new innovations going forward. Engineering focus on SPARC and Solaris is being continuously applied to leadership in security, scalability, and enterprise reliability for mission critical computing for key customer adoption opportunities in the Cloud and on-premises.
Future features and functionality in Solaris will continue to be delivered through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases. This addresses customer requirements for an agile and smooth transition path between versions, while providing incremental innovation with assured investment protection. We are amending the Support lifespan for Solaris 11, to extend it considerably beyond any reasonable expected lifetime of use, through at least 2031 and 2034 for Premier and Extended Support, respectively.
See page 37: http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-301321.pdf
Linked off of this page: http://www.oracle.com/us/support/lifetime-support/index.html
"Solaris 11 follows a Continuous Delivery model, where new functionality is delivered as updates to the existing release; upgrades are not required to gain access to new features and capabilities. As a result, Support dates are evaluated for update annually, and will be provided through at least the dates above."
If any of Oracle's customers require an email communication from an engineering executive in summary of the above, Oracle are happy to do so.
Seems apropos. Though I doubt it'd be a million voices crying out these days.
As a unix sysadmin, I know some hard core Solaris bigots though.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
I'll have a soft spot for Solaris
You must be a sadomasochist. How can you have a soft spot for anything who's default shell is still ksh? It felt like I was stuck in the 80s every time I had to administer Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX.
Was this for an x86 or a SPARC?
What license does OpenZFS have? Is it still CDDL or is it something like one of the BSD licenses?
Not really.
Apple is doing their best to turn it into a walled garden, just like iOS. With the introduction of things like SIP (ensuring you can't write to any of the system directories, even as root- this includes /usr and a whole bunch of other locations) and their moronic sandbox tech that treats everything like a glorified word processor, it's becoming more and more difficult to use the "Unix" side of OS X. Not to mention the fact that their entire lineup of hardware is pretty much a complete joke, "pro" products included.
They just recently removed the graphical ability to disable Gatekeeper from the latest version of OS X (err, sorry, "macOS"). You can still do it from the command line though. Soon enough, they'll remove that utility, along with the one you need to disable SIP, and we'll start seeing people having to "jailbreak" their Mac to bring back any semblance of the freedom they once had under the earlier versions of Mac OS X.
I have a feeling that if Apple had the developer talent and resources to ditch all the open aspects of OS X and write something that was 100% proprietary and locked down, they would. However, I get the distinct feeling that, despite all the accounts, translators, and lawyers they employ- the actual number of people working on software products inside Apple is exceptionally small. So they keep trucking on with what they've got, which is why we haven't seen OS 11, but they've slowly been trying to lock down OS X as hard as they can.
So the last of the System V Unixes is dead? The only other one I can think of was SCO, but Xinuos has switched completely to a FreeBSD based Unix. So on the BSD side of things, you have NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and its derivatives, but is there anything left on the System V side? Just OpenIndiana, Schillix, Nexenta?
So in the System V vs BSD wars, has BSD finally emerged the victor? Not counting Linux in this, and not factoring in OS X within BSD, just considering the above distros in the picture
For a while you could download Solaris for SPARC as a completely legit free for any use thing. I put it on a couple of machines I picked up at auction to run legacy software (stuff that used to run on a SparcStation5 really flies on a new SPARC) and tape libraries. Maybe it's still a download and not something to order.
You must be a sadomasochist. How can you have a soft spot for anything who's default shell is still ksh? It felt like I was stuck in the 80s every time I had to administer Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX.
Default shell for SunOS was csh. Default shell for Solaris was sh. I don't know what silly sysadmins you've had in the past, but ksh has never been the default shell.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
So Oracle decides to name their next version of Solaris 11.next instead of 12. How does a random version numbering change spell demise for Solaris? Not that I think it has much of a future, but this is as silly as security ratings based on number of bugs. This tells us nothing about what features will ship with the next version.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
=(
I'm convinced that Casper Dik was just a code-name for the entire SunOS/Solaris support team, and that there's no way any one individual can know and contribute so much.
Decades later, and I still aspire to have even a tenth of a clue as him.
The people that count say it is. All that other stuff is just junk thrown on top.
You'd be better off criticizing how crappy their implementation of some of the commands is in terms of performance, because it is. I just opened up top totally vanilla and it was consuming 3.8% of a core. On Solaris it would be something like 1%, even with much slower cores. (Apple used to use 10% on top and this was a better example.)
SIP (ensuring you can't write to any of the system directories, even as root- this includes /usr and a whole bunch of other locations)
you can if you're an admin worth a damn. This is a very good idea in terms of malware protection and I wish Windows would do it.
it's becoming more and more difficult to use the "Unix" side of OS X.
It's actually exactly the same: open terminal.
Soon enough, they'll remove that utility, along with the one you need to disable SIP, and we'll start seeing people having to "jailbreak" their Mac to bring back any semblance of the freedom they once had under the earlier versions of Mac OS X.
yeah, the anti-mac argument has always been that it's just about to become a problem. It's like how we're always 50 years from fusion. Mac becoming a walled garden is always right around a corner that we never get to.
If you care what the default shell is, you're doing *nix wrong.
4.1.what? 4.1.4 was the one.
I bet Oracle thinks its easier to sell Oracle Linux (and easier to write too since they basically ripped off RHEL) than to bother developing Solaris. The gap between successive releases of Solaris has simply widened over time. They probably think of it as a legacy platform at this point.
Opaque binary-only windowing environments don't qualify as modern Unix.
How does having a disagreeable front-end prevent the OS from qualifying as UNIX?
Surely the more relevant matter is that Darwin is so unremarkable.
Not true: /usr/local is still writable just fine, and if you're installing custom libraries they're likely to go there. Same with /opt
Official apple docs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204899
It's about time Apple came out with an alternative to seliux or apparmor.
Similar setup for me back in the day. I kept a Sun "pizzabox" SPARCstation 5 diskless client on my desk running SunOS 4,1,3 long after our development environment moved on to SYSV Solaris. I preferred the BSD environment with pure X11. I'd remote in to the new hardware and work that way.
I've been administering since Solaris was a we babe.
It used to be rock solid, but somewhere shortly after Java, it truly died and went in a direction of differentiating itself from the competition by layering trashpile over trashpile, over POSIX.
Every time I get asked to fix or deal with a Solaris 10/11 server these days, I cringe and immediately start avoiding it. Mainly because basic tasks still aren't efficient, or even make sense in approach. It's like Oracle is determined to be stable, but different for no reason other than to sell the next version and call it an enhancement. Solaris has not seen a true enhancement since 9 and that was 10 years ago.
https://developers.slashdot.or...
So glad to see that witch dead.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Solaris (a.k.a. Slowlaris) had its run. In particular, networking still sucks and some other things are not good at all. If Oracle hat kept the experts on and had kept investing, it could have been improved to be a real alternative, but that time is over. After years of neglect, the best is to have it die now and to push for whatever was superior be integrated into Linux instead.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
1. GRUB is not Linux
2. GRUB boots Solaris just fine
Your point being?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm afraid Solaris died as soon as Linux came in, ran on x86 and ate its lunch. Sun could never come up with a response.
CDDL, license changes aren't allowed (because the code base came from Sun).
4.1.4 was way unstable for me.
"Most developers" you took a survey?
I don't see the end of Solaris at all , Oracle still sells all its high end supercluster machines with Solaris, they recently brought out a Sparc based Exadata too running Linux on Sparc. All Oracle's ZFS storage systems are running Solaris on X86. And ZFS is a strtegic storage platform for many of Oracle's curent initiatives including the Oracle Public Cloud machine.
Linkedin http://in.linkedin.com/in/robinsaikatchatterjee
No, it's a Mach kernel. That's a micro-kernel architecture. BSD is a monolithic kernel.
MacOS has a BSD userland, but that's not a lot different than the userland you get if you install Interix on Windows NT.
Linux isn't posix-certified. Or has Red Hat or some other vendor paid for that in the last decade that I've not been paying that much attention to Linux in?
A little education here... a Desktop unix system needs to have a Desktop to be a .... Desktop unix.
And X11 is not a window manager. X11 is a graphical subsystem on which you can run numerous Window Managers, like the Tab Window Manager (TWM) or FVWM or Motif's Window Manager or a lot of much newer alternatives. And even a Window Manager is not really a 'desktop environment.' Not that a 'desktop environment' is needed to run a Desktop Unix system. I prefer FVWM when I run a NetBSD desktop. My .fvwm2rc file is crotchety and old but it has worked for many years.
Does modern X.org count as X11R7?