Submitted by Engineers at Sun are working on a ‘small’ version of Solaris 10. “I’ve got a modified Solaris miniroot with ZFS functionality which takes up about 60 MB (the compressed image, which GRUB uses, is less than 30MB). Solaris boots entirely into RAM. From poweron to full functionality, it takes about 45 seconds to boot on a very modest 1GHz Cyrix Mini ITX motherboard.”
It would be just great to have such short bootup times, no swapping of system files to harddisks (so you end up with a very responsive system), and still ZFS for the most reliable file storage available. Would be cool for webservers, mailservers and fileservers.
The author should take himself more serious. He ends with something like he has to return to his real work, but frankly, I think this Diet-Solaris should be a priority for him. The result can prove to be very applicable to a lot of situations.
I just migrate to solaris because there is more consistant and mature software than linux (sun java enterprise system, sun studio creeator…), and the documentation from sun is just the best…and the software are free.This ideia fills my thoughts that solaris gets most of the inovation in unix world.
Edited 2006-08-06 13:42
Will it fit on a cdrom so I don’t have to buy my ancient sparc a scsi dvd?
From the top description:
“about 60 MB (the compressed image, which GRUB uses, is less than 30MB)”
From the article:
“Countless Linux devices boot from flash in a matter of seconds and just work. Why can’t Solaris do the same thing? “
I was thinking the same thing. I’m not even asking for a 60MB image, just something along the lines of a one cd install.
Have you ever tried rolling your own Installation CD based on the Reduced Networking (SUNWrnet) install cluster? I recently built a Flash Archive of a Solaris 10 1/06 install with a decent range of SPARC hardware support, as well as support for Zones. It came in under 600 MB, this includes gcc and all of the development tools and libraries.
That’s a terrific idea. thanks.
“more consistant and mature software”??? Please take a good look for example at the Solaris userland tools – they are a joke. They are very old, and the way they are implemented is just terrible. The only thing that interests me in Solaris is the kernel – but then I think the Linux kernel has its good sides too. Sun Studio Creator is nice – is it open source? Does it produce faster binaries than gcc? Solaris gets a lot of innovation – compared to the innovation Linux gets it’s a margin.
There is a reason for that, it’s called stability! Look at AIX and HP-UX, they are pretty much the same as Solaris when it comes to feature integration and age of some of their binaries. You don’t get that stability by using alpha and beta code in your OS, nor do you put in a bunch of “features” just to impress a handful of people.
If you want bleeding edge features you go to OpenSolaris or Linux. I am sure over a period of time the code that is being tested and written for OpenSolaris will be integrated into Solaris, but I prefer the slow and methodical approach. That means less problems for me as I deploy on production systems.
Funny I’ve always found the Solaris userland tools much simpler and less error prone. Let’s compare burning CDs just for kicks on Solaris vs. Linux.
Solaris:
# cdrw file.iso
Linux:
# cdrecord -v speed=12 dev=/dev/hdc -pad -data -please-dont-coaster file.iso
This is fud and you know it.
cdrecord does not need all of those options specified!
At most:
# cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc file.iso
How does Solaris distinguish which CD-RW drive to use if you have more than one? You’d have to tell it a device somehow.
cdrw -l will show you all the writable CD/DVD devices.
If you need to specify a specific one then use the -d flag which takes as a argument the alias name from -l output.
Latest Solaris Express (Sun’s OpenSolaris distribution) also come with cdrecord.
In my opinion the fact that you have to specify a device at all, particularly for the case were there is only one device, is poor user interface design.
If you only have one burner, can’t you just stick a
alias cdrw=’cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdc -driveropts=burnfree’
in your .profile?
Edited 2006-08-07 09:58
That assumes that every machine I use has /dev/hdc as the burner. The whole point of my post (and the original one I believe) is that with cdrw(1) you as the end user don’t need to find this out it does it. With cdrecord you need to specify it and it could be different for every machine.
Also on Solaris there isn’t a /dev/hdc we name devices differently
Please stop using that word (fud). I don’t think it means what you think it means.
That sounds very-very interesting – there’s a lot of situations where a slim Solaris would come in handy.
Just one thing, the Cyrix processors reign ended with the MII-400GP and didn’t OC very well – the mentioned 1Ghz processor more sounds like a Via C5/C7, which still is based on the Centaur Winchip design (And actually still developed by Centaur).
and that is the link to the thread:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=50585&tstart=…
60MB? 1GHz? 45 seconds?
I miss my Amiga.
Note that your Amiga OS didn’t have memory protection, it wasn’t portable, had not journalised FS etc..
Still I agree that this is far too much..
No I haven’t, but it sounds like a cool idea to try out next time I feel the urge to geek-out.