Submitted by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said it is time for Solaris to simply move out of the way and yield the future to Linux. ‘The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris,’ he claims, contending that Sun’s strength in long-lifecycle apps is giving way to Linux, as evidenced by the rise of Web apps, where Linux holds a decided advantage, Zemlin claims. With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, he says. ‘That’s literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.’
I find Zemlin’s statements to be offensive and untrue. It is true that Linux is gaining popularity but that doesn’t mean that Solaris is dead. Dismissing ZFS and DTrace as “minor features” just points to his lack of understanding – they are huge. ZFS is far superior to ext3 in almost any way thinkable and features futuristic technology while ext3 is very outdated and basic in comparison. DTrace is a huge help to developers who actually use it. Solaris is also incredibly reliable.
Linux has it’s adantages (larger user base, easier to install & set up, slightly larger base of software available) but Solaris, BSD and other open-source UNIX-like OSes still have their places.
Yeah well it’s his job to upsell and promote Linux. This is just a case of FUD, nothing more.
Perhaps he feels threatened to a degree and needs to reaffirm himself. Who knows.
You’ll be hard pressed to convince highly skilled and professional Solaris admins that they should dump their infrastructure and knowledge base for Linux.
Also, his comments about long lifecycles is crudely inaccurate.
I find Zemlin’s statements to be offensive and untrue.
He’s bragging a bit, but if that’s offensive, I think you are too thin skinned.
It is true that Linux is gaining popularity but that doesn’t mean that Solaris is dead.
I look at things differently. I fear Zemlin might be right. That would be too bad. The good news is that OS2 has been “dead” for years, over a decade, even, but it’s still for sale and being used. And moving to the opposite extreme from Solaris, BeOS is another “dead” OS, but you’ld never know it from reading this site.
Dismissing ZFS and DTrace as “minor features” just points to his lack of understanding – they are huge. ZFS is far superior to ext3 in almost any way thinkable and features futuristic technology while ext3 is very outdated and basic in comparison. DTrace is a huge help to developers who actually use it. Solaris is also incredibly reliable.
I’ll pick ZFS as an example to challenge. It’s a memory hog. It’s a CPU hog. It has no place on any of the machines in my house, which all run ext3 reliably and nicely. Where might it be useful? On really big iron, where absolute reliability is a must. And that is where the future of Solaris lies, on specialty equipment. Unfortunately, that’s not a big market.
Linux has it’s adantages (larger user base, easier to install & set up, slightly larger base of software available) but Solaris, BSD and other open-source UNIX-like OSes still have their places.
If I wanted to set up a web server, or a workstation, Solaris would not be my first choice. I have installed Open and Free BSD, as well as various flavors of Linux. I have tried Solaris several times, and failed. One might say Linux is “easier” to install, but that doesn’t quite capture the user hostile environment that is Solaris.
As always, to those who are comfortable with Solaris, have at it. If you can get work done with it, more power to you. The steady, downward trend in Solaris deployments (from the article) is not a good sign. Version 10 did nothing to reverse it, and so far the attempts to build an open source community around it haven’t either. There isn’t much time left to turn things around.
You have some points but IMHO, the biggest problem facing Solaris is simply that it’s user base is too small and it’s users are too dull to push it. I must admit, Solaris is not the easiest to manage (I must admit it can be very frustrating at times) but things are improving thanks to initiatives like project indiana. It’s hardly what you’d call a “dead” OS.
Also, I didn’t find ZFS to be a resource hog and it’s reliability & speed are unmatched and if only it was better understood, it’ll be the next must-have for many desktop users.*
*Must-haves are things where you were living fine without it for the past x years but as soon as something new comes out, you can’t survive without it (or at least think you can’t)
P.S. – The reason I was offended was because one of the world’s most advanced operating systems was called dead and it’s world class features were dismissed as minor. If you developed Solaris (I don’t but suppose you did), how would you feel if someone said that about the project that you have put so much hard work into?
Edited 2008-09-25 01:03 UTC
Also, I didn’t find ZFS to be a resource hog and it’s reliability & speed are unmatched and if only it was better understood, it’ll be the next must-have for many desktop users.
I keep reading that ZFS requires at least another gig to function, as compared to a non-ZFS system. Add to that the extra CPU cycles to manage the thing, and yes, it is a resource hog.
I wonder what use ZFS would have for a desktop? I realize it has some cool features, but what advantage are they on a desktop?
P.S. – The reason I was offended was because one of the world’s most advanced operating systems was called dead and it’s world class features were dismissed as minor.
I know that’s why you were offended, but there are two things to remember:
1) Such statements pale before the truly offensive, such as white supremacy rantings, or even the dirty tricks that go on in political campaigns. This stuff is penny ante.
2) Welcome to computers, where superior technology loses all the time to inferior technology. There are all sorts of reasons for why this happens, but in the end it’s a fact of life.
If you developed Solaris (I don’t but suppose you did), how would you feel if someone said that about the project that you have put so much hard work into?
No, I haven’t developed for Solaris, but my advice for those who have mirrors that for its users: Use it and enjoy. If the OS comes back, great. If it fades away, at least some people will have gotten some use out of it.
I’ll give this to Sun: They may have fought Windows, Linux, and the x86 architecture for longer than was prudent, but they ended up making use of all three. It’s that flexibility that may save them.
“I keep reading that ZFS requires at least another gig to function, as compared to a non-ZFS system. Add to that the extra CPU cycles to manage the thing, and yes, it is a resource hog.
I wonder what use ZFS would have for a desktop? I realize it has some cool features, but what advantage are they on a desktop?”
I used to run a ZFS raid on a [email protected] and 1GB RAM. It worked fine during a year. The problem was that I got like 20-30MB/sec transfer speed. But that is due to 32bit CPU. ZFS is 128 bit and likes 64 bit CPU. On 64bit with many drives, you can reach 5-600MB/sec at best. On a typical home server you can reach 120MB/sec:
http://blogs.sun.com/barts/entry/new_home_server#comments
ZFS likes to cache things up, that is the reason it uses all avaiable RAM for cache. ZFS gives back the RAM when asked for, but if no one is using the RAM, ZFS will use all RAM it can grab. Remember, ZFS is an ENTERPRISE server file system. RAM is of concern there. But ZFS works great with 1 GB RAM, as I can testify.
Now, why would anyone use ZFS on the desktop? Well, because of one thing: data integrity. All filesystems relies on the underlying hardware for error detection and correction. But what if the hardware is faulty (a short current spike, cosmic radiation, faulty power supply, over clocked RAM, etc)? Then you are smoked. The bits in RAM will flip on their way to the hard disc. But ZFS detects the flipped bits (in RAM or on the hard drive) and _guarantees_ that the RAM or hard drive is intact with no changes. ZFS ASSUMES that the hardware is unreliable and can deal with all these problems and correct them too. There are problems that ZFS can solve, which no hardware raid can solve. I trust more in ZFS than in hardware raid. My friend which is CIO told me about several occasions where their hardware raid got broke, because the card’s BIOS was buggy!
Conclusion; if you value your data, you use ZFS. If not, you dont have to use ZFS.
Here is a long article of a Linux guy who tries out ZFS for home use and loves it. Very informative:
http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/
Here is a discussion of future file systems and the directions. And what problems they have to solve in future. And how ZFS have solved the problems.
http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=50…
Edited 2008-09-26 08:07 UTC
Because any developer who isn’t an egotistical idiot knows that code in general sucks, especially his own code.
As stated before, solaris has 2 major strikes against it: smaller user base and control by a single company who is likely being generous only as long as it has a smaller user base.
You don’t happen to be running ZFS with FUSE so it runs in user land are you? Perhaps if Linux wasn’t so antagonistic to anything none-GPL then perhaps they could include it in the kernel. Performance would increase dramatically.
ZFS is awesome for data centers, file repositories and server farms. It provides redundancy and load balancing with absolute ease.
No he is running solaris maybe on a old system maybe 32bit? Oh thats right SUN has had 64bit for the last ten years… So maybe old code isnt that great ZFS shouldnt work in 32bit in my opinion it should probably be run on 128bit procs that haven’t been developed yet (since its a 128bit filesystem)
The thing is that in Datacenters people are using X86. And on X86 and Intel 64 Bit Linux “smokes” Solaris and FreeBSD.
People say that Solaris and BSD are more stable etc. But interesting that Yahoo uses BSD and Solaris, Google is using Linux and smoking Yahoo and Microsoft.
Linux is the future on the server. Apple is the future on the Desktop it seems.
Wow… your logical dissonance is astounding.
Following your logic: Microsoft smokes Linux in the market place, ergo…
Not on servers. Ergo. ??
BSD and Solaris are not the same thing, so don’t group them together. BSD and Linux are fairly neck and neck in speed, and features, even though Linux has much wider hardware support. Solaris is a different OS, with different strengths and weaknesses
I have MS telling me how I can use my computers enough, I don’t need Apple’s even more overbearing stewardship over my computers.
As for the BSDs, they tend to be more stable and standardized than the various Linux distros. OpenSSH, you can thank OpenBSD for that. I’d go more FreeBSD for my personal needs. In terms of server OS, for me, it comes down to Debian Stable/Testing or BSD and there’s a reason why OpenBSD is so popular for publicly facing servers.
Windows speed versus Linux speed; sure.. Linux and Unix like OS are way ahead on many fronts. BSD being slower and more bloated than Linux based OS; your not thinking clearly.
Version 10 did nothing to reverse it, and so far the attempts to build an open source community around it haven’t either.
Well following the discussion lists for project indiana would lead you to believe something different. There are quite a few people interested in it and there is a lot of activity in the development of indiana. It’s still new and it has a ways to go, that’s a given. Linux didn’t develop the massive community it has in 5 months (the first official release of indiana was in may this year).
There isn’t much time left to turn things around.
I disagree, there is nothing but time and indiana already has a group of strong willed individuals dedicated to investing theirs in the project.
Keep saying ZFS is a memory/resource hog when OS X 10.6 is released. Then you’ll bitch about something else.
Why? This has been on the cards for years, and it has even been obvious to some of us since the mid-nineties. Sun absolutely steadfastly refused, along with other Unix vendors, to put Solaris on to x86 and commodity hardware, get economies of scale from open source development and allow its usage to sky rocket. Nothing will change that now, and it is too little ten years too late. IBM pushed AIX into a reasonable niche, but even that will get squeezed as the years roll by.
Lots of people want to think that’s true, but it’s not. What you need are applications, as Microsoft well knows, and all the open source applications and lots of proprietary ones now are written for Linux and the toolchain used there first.
Application availability is still a major complaint of Linux versus Windows, so I really don’t know how Sun will improve that situation for Solaris.
People do not use operating system because of a filesystem sadly, but Sun has had that attitude for quite a long time now, and it’s a bit sad. “How can you not use a real Unix like Solaris! It has [insert new technology here]”
DTrace is moderately nice, but again, I want applications when I choose a system to use. I’m not going to use Solaris because it has something I can use to probe the system when something goes wrong.
Telling us that Solaris is incredibly reliable is the same sad refrain that Sun’s consultants have been telling people ever since Linux came on the scene. By what metric? Linux systems have proven themselves to be exceptionally reliable themselves over the years, and saying that to someone now means zilch.
Well, yes they do, but BSD usage is higher in the open source world than Solaris. Sun has OpenSolaris competing for attention on many fronts, and they have just started. Additionally, an open source community for Solaris is quite essential for Sun now if they want to keep Solaris commercially viable for themselves, but it should have happened ten years ago.
Edited 2008-09-25 10:39 UTC
The future is Linux/Unix and Syllable/Haiku. no place for MS or Apple. P.E.R.I.O.D.
I wasn’t outright offended. I just simply don’t agree that any competing OS should simply give up. If other OS simply stop development, the only motivation for Linux based OS to continue evolving is competition between various distributions. Besides, we’ve already seen what happens when a single OS dictates the futures of other platforms in ways not related to it’s own competitive product quality.
What I want is for Solaris to remain in development. OpenVMS, OpenSolaris, The BSDs.. bring ’em all on.. heck.. if I can have my copy of OpenWindows waiting for me when I get back from my ski vacation in Club Haides, I’ll cut a VM and install it too. If any of them prove to fit my needs better than my current platform, I’ll change host OS and continue on with my humble VM’d OS client collection.
Nope. It’s neither untrue nor offensive. It’s simply the world as it is. ext3 is _one_ file system for Linux – which you’d certainly not compare to zfs. But comparing xfs and lvm with zfs is a completely different thing. See.
“Solaris is incredible reliable”. Yes, sir. My Debian installation is also incredible reliable …
What is the place for OpenSolaris then? I fail to see it. Please explain. (Don’t get me wrong: zfs and dtrace are great – but simply not enough. It’s the whole picture thar counts. And in that matter there is a crystal clear advantage for Linux
Yes, you should not compare LVM + XFS to ZFS indeed. Ive heard horrendous stories. To create a raid with LVM takes like 20-30 commands with complex syntax. In ZFS you write one command, and you are off. No formatting that takes hours. Just start to use ZFS right away. Unless you have tried ZFS, you wouldnt know why the hype.
Linux beeing stable, yes it is easy to get it stable when we are talking about small installations and home use. Heck, even Windows will do for small installations. When you have complex things, then Linux will not cut it. As proved by some of the links Ive provided above. It is like “why mainframe? My Windows installation hasnt crashed once!” – Well, for large complex setups, Windows will not scale nor perform well. Nor Linux.
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s…
Also, I dont see why you Linux people are always _attacking_ others? Why so offensive? Why is it right to flame and humiliate others? Is it because of Linus Torvalds is leading the way? Linus said something like “Ive scared away all normal developers, and now the only developers that are left also thinks it is ok to insult other people. :o)”. If you can not get people to do what you want, without insulting or fighting, then you are hardly empathic. But Linus has never been famous for being empathic and nice, he is often involved in flame wars, with Tanenbaum, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc.
Also, I dont get why Linus with his big ego (“I am your God” – speach on a linux conference) states that someone else called HIS creation for “Linux”? You know, If I had hacked on a project for a long time and were in charge, I would never allow someone else to name that project. That project is mine. Conclusion: Linus would not let someone randomly name his project. Stallman said: “well, I am not the one who is calling GNU for Stallmanix” – implying that Linux has big ego. Linus is calling it Linux. Not someone else. Linus would never allow someone to name his project. But that is in line with someone opens a Linux conference with “I am you God”. Arrogant to some. Others who like to follow, might like it.
So, the Linux camp: why attack Solaris all the time? If you are threatened by Solaris (but want it’s technology), you really dont have to attack. It is not the right way to get it’s hot technology. Why not let Solaris be? Why are you being such a great pr*cks all the time? Why is it ok to bully others? Can someone explain the Linux culture of attacking people and companies and OS? Is it because of Linus Torvalds?
Stating that Linux scales badly above 4-8 cpu was not really correct maybe. It is better to state that Linux doesnt scale well above 16 cores:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8769
Unless you do scientic number crunching, then there is a special Linux kernel tailored to that, allowing massively many CPUs, but it can do nothing else than that.
I dont know if you have seen what Andrew Morton says about Linux kernel? It is really buggy (beyond repair?)
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/
Of course, there are links that showing to migrate from Solaris to Linux is better. But for instance this link, I think doesnt tell the whole picture:
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s…
If you migrated old Solaris 8 Sparc machines to new Solaris 10 machines then you would also see a big performance boost. Possibly even more a boost than going to RHEL as this link shows (Solaris on T1 Niagara CPU being 50 times faster than Linux on AMD opteron):
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s…
Edited 2008-09-28 09:11 UTC
“Of course, there are links that showing to migrate from Solaris to Linux is better. But for instance this link, I think doesnt tell the whole picture:
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s…..
If you migrated old Solaris 8 Sparc machines to new Solaris 10 machines then you would also see a big performance boost.”
I forgot to add: If you migrated 800 old Solaris 8 Sparc machines to 4000 new machines with Solaris 10, then you would also see increased performance. Actually it would not matter if it were Linux or Solaris on the machines. It would be faster. Maybe Solaris would be slightly faster than Linux. But who knows?
For you developers who dont know what DTrace is. Read this short article that shows it’s unique magical features, and tell me DTrace isnt overhyped. Only developers will understand this, you rest skip this:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/dtrace_and_php_demonstrated
Edited 2008-09-28 09:28 UTC
If this were slightly more delicately worded (not as offensive), it could be just typical Microsoft FUD. Kinda eerie to hear something like this from someone representing Linux (how representative is it anyway?)
Kinda eerie to hear something like this from someone representing Linux (how representative is it anyway?)
Agreed. I found his words pretty offensive even though I don’t use Solaris or any other OS except for Linux and Windows. I’d say having even the slightest competition is good overall, it’ll push everyone ever more forth. It also creates an interesting landscape for OS enthusiasts to explore. I haven’t ever tried Solaris personally, but I have never heard anyone claiming it’s inferior to Linux in any way either.
I have a feeling I am not alone in my feelings and I dare to estimate that his opinion is not representing the majority of Linux users.
Why’s he worried? If Solaris is actually “burning to the ground”(which is highly doubtful), why not just shut up and let them?
Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.
I was thinking the same thing. The timing is a bit suspect – this is the first period in my IT career that Sun actually appears to have their excrement together. They’re finally seem to have some forward momentum again, as opposed to directionless floundering they had been doing since the late 90s.
If anything, I think Solaris appears less dead/dying than it has for a decade.
I’m a die hard Linux user at heart, and this kind of comments only makes Linux look bad, stop it already.
Grow up and accept competition from other UNIX vendors, competition drives innovation.
Edited 2008-09-24 23:35 UTC
Where do they find these people. Last time I checked OS X had a much larger market share than Linux so how is UNIX irrelevant? I also use BSD which i switched to after a lot of frustration running Linux.
Don’t get me wrong, I have helped a few people switch to Linux which I prefer to Windows, but for my own uses it is just not what I want. People like this are not helping the Linux cause at all.
Edited 2008-09-24 23:37 UTC
Last time I looked when you compare Solaris and Linux its most likely going to be on servers and Mac OS has NO presence on servers at all. (Even though apple pretends to make a server OS)
Unix has been dead since Google started to use Linux and almost all super computers started to using Linux and it started to take over device markets and phone markets.
Linux is mainstream now, we have to face the fact that on the server its Linux and Windows and that is that. And now Linux is going to be marketed like anything else if it’s going to continue to grow market share etc.
“Unix has been dead since Google started to use Linux and almost all super computers started to using Linux”
Ridiculous reasoning!
Google is but one company, however you want to measure it there is no denying that Unix systems have great market penetration in the things they have been targeted at. The financial services industry is almost solely using Solaris or AIX for their heavy lifting. Telco’s are heavy users of Solaris as are the oil industry and military.
On the web-tier LAMP is king, but keep in mind that Sun’s new CMT boxes running Solaris have changed the price/performance ratio in this market.
Are you kidding me??
Last time I looked:
New York stock exchange:LINUX
Chicago Mercantile Exchange: Linux
HSBC:LINUX
New Zealand’s TSB Bank:LINUX
Korean Air:LINUX
FAA:LINUX
US POSTAL SERVICE:LINUX
US ARMY: Lots of Linux http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/27/us_army_going_to_linux/
I could go on an on. But that is a small snap shot of companies that crunch large numbers using Linux. HSBC alone having 125 Million customers.
Way more companies are moving to Linux then moving off Linux. If you look at company figures Suns sales are stagnate while Novell and Red Hat are growing.
Solaris can not out run Linux on x86!
Crunching numbers is but a small part of what these companies do. I’d very surprised indeed if HSBC was a pure Linux shop without some serious Solaris or AIX and mainframe hardware in the background shuffling important data.
While it’s not a stretch to assume that they all have some sort of ibm or sun datacenter (although Dell and HP should also be thrown in that list), the conviction they are running aix or solaris for the “serious stuff” is ill-founded, considering both offer Linux at least for every server model I looked through.
Yeah and NONE of those companies are running exclusively Linux. I bet if you went to each of those companies respective job listings you will find jobs regarding a myriad of other operating systems
Oh and I’ve actually been in the CME data centers, they have quite a bit of SPARC hardware. Most companies in the finance industry or any large company for that matter do not run on a single operating system.
True almost no company runs just one OS. The companies I listed are companies that changed enough of their operations to Linux that there were major news stories about it.
Its not news when a company moves a few servers to Linux. It is a news story when there is a major move of some part of important operations to Linux.
Also my key point was that Linux is growing fast in places where people claim Solaris is entrenched.
Linux has basically always earned its popularity and grown based on real advantages compared to other OSes (especially Windows) and its own merits. You claim that it’s now mainstream–if that’s the case, it seems that word of mouth really paid off. Given that, why the hell would it take FUD and belittling the competition (which, no doubt, Linux is riding off the success of in terms of system design) to start selling it now that it’s already relatively popular? Solaris *is* UNIX. Linux was designed right from the start to be a *clone* of UNIX.
I’m sorry, but this guy seems like nothing more than an arrogant prick. All the article did was praise Linux as if it were his god, and put every other UNIX or UNIX-like operating system down.
Edited 2008-09-25 12:34 UTC
The funny thing is that no one can dispute what he is talking about. He doesn’t say Solaris sucks, he doesn’t say that ZFS and DTrace are not good or great. All that is said is that no matter how good that stuff is no one is really using it and Solaris is loosing market share to Linux.
Suns biggest problem is that on x86 Linux runs better. On sparc Solaris is king cause they own the platform like Apple. BUT you get stuck. When you want to upgrade to faster hardware its way more cost effective to do it on x86. Also you can shop around and get the best price on x86 not being stuck with one vender. Same with most apps for Linux. Hey Red Hat doesn’t give me the value I need then I can go to Suse or Ubuntu if I have a good Linux staff. Makes companies like Red Hat work harder to keep customers happy!
That Linux “works” better than Solaris on x86/x64 is such a myth that at one of my previous gigs, it was blown to smithereens. From a crazy move (for a Financial Exchange in the midwest) to Linux, plagued with ridiculous performance (poor) and manageability issues (Linux is primitive in it’s management features), there was an en-masse move to Solaris 10 on Sun’s AMD x64 architecture. Guess what, literally replaced thousands of Linux boxes with about half the number of x64 servers (such as Sun’s 4600 M2).
Linux SMP stops scaling beyond 8 CPUs (or is it 4). Solaris scales almost linearly (and has for decades). Guess how much of an advantage it is to run a 32-core server at a throw-away price (4600 M2) and use every CPU clock cycle to the fullest? At that gig, we dismantled the Sparc Infrastructure (unless absolutely necessary). Doing so, reduced latency (one huge, distributed trading application running across clusters of such servers) literally by multiples of seconds (in the trading world that translates to millions of dollars).
Ever had to do diagnostics on a Linux system (with poor to no crash-dump analyis tools)? Ever had to implement HBA multipathing? Ever had to configure NIC multipathing? All these are simple and accurately implemented in Solaris.
Ever had to tweak the Shared Memory parameters of a Linux server? Ever had to do it on a Solaris server? If you have you’ll know which was easier and a superior OS interface (from the shell).
For us Sysadmins who have to watch 100s of servers 24×7, using an OS such as Linux in the enterprise is not an option. Even from a cost perspective — I’ve been in several shops where the operational costs of maintaining Linux was so astronomical that we had to revert back to Solaris/Sun (I’m talking Fortune 50).
For those who think ZFS is not a desktop friendly Filesystem, go check out Mac OS X (Leopard) and it’s Time Machine feature (ZFS).
For those who complain about applications being available on Solaris, starting with Desktop Applications (OpenOffice is an offshoot of sun’s staroffice initiative) to literally every opensource app out there, everything runs and runs very well on it (except for those which have been poorly ported).
Nowadays, with Sun’s lxrun Branded Zones (check out BrandZ and SOlaris 10 Containers/Zones — free virtualization), you can run linux native binaries inside solaris 10 zones.
I love Linux on the desktop, it’s a quaint operating system.
I had posted my comments on the original article on Infoworld and went to check it today and saw all comments had been deleted (talk about censorship).
“Suns biggest problem is that on x86 Linux runs better. On sparc Solaris is king cause they own the platform like Apple. BUT you get stuck. When you want to upgrade to faster hardware its way more cost effective to do it on x86. Also you can shop around and get the best price on x86 not being stuck with one vender. Same with most apps for Linux. Hey Red Hat doesn’t give me the value I need then I can go to Suse or Ubuntu if I have a good Linux staff. Makes companies like Red Hat work harder to keep customers happy!”
Another cool thing with Solaris is that it is homogen and unified. If you are stuck on SPARC, what do you do then? Well, you buy a cheap x86 and just _recompile_. A simple recompile is all that needs if you want to change platform. On Linux you can not do that. It is not unified and homogen. And ZFS is endian neutral, with several patents. Just take the SPARC ZFS drive and tuck it into x86. Everything works. SUN has frozen the API and ABI since way back. SUN guarantees binary backwards compatibility back to Solaris v2.6. And now Solaris 10 is v5.10. Old drivers mostly works without problems. Linux changes everything all the time. Everything is an afterthought.
That is interesting. With all those problems why would someone who has to crunch numbers like the New York Stock exchange or the Chicago stock exchange or HSBC or the US FAA replace other systems with Red Hat Enterprise and Suse realtime Linux?
If Linux could not perform then Linux would not even be in the mix. But in the case of the companies I listed above, not only is Linux in the mix but these companies are running mission critical apps on Linux.
Also out of the top 500 Super computers in the world 427 run Linux, 0 run solaris. 5 run Windows 2 run Mac OS, 1 is BSD based and 25 are UNIX (Mostly AIX cause IBM dominates the super computer market) and 40 are mixed mostly Linux and proprietary. So we can see where the world is going when it comes to high end computing and number crunching, Linux and real time Linux. And you would think that something like BSD or Solaris would rule this market esp with BSD being open source and so called so much better then Linux?? But BSD and Solaris with ZFS and DTrace are not even a BLIP on the super computer landscape??? I wonder why?
Oh maybe this is why: http://www.forbes.com/2005/03/15/cz_dl_0315linux.html
“Linux outguns popular Unix operating systems like AIX and Solaris from Sun Microsystems because those systems contain features that make them great for commercial users but add a lot of system overhead that ends up limiting overall performance. One example: a “virtualization” feature in AIX lets many applications share the same processor but “just hammers performance,”
Most companies that stay on Solaris are companies who have a lot invested already. Very few are moving to Solaris and even fewer are starting out on Solaris.
Yes Linux is a cute OS on the desktop. But NO one uses Solaris (Some people play with Open Solaris) on the desktop. Well there are a hand full of Solaris Workstations. But they slow as my grand mother (Which is why we call Solaris – Slow Laris)
Anyway what this guy Zemlim might be spouting stupid talk because of the way he said it. But the fact is Solaris will be a foot note soon. Like SCO Unix, Sun will have Unix customers but not many.
I am first-hand witness to Fortune 50 companies do an about-turn to their Linux strategy because it was very hard to maintain and operate a linux shop. It is a very different thing to run a few/niche linux servers in a large shop as opposed to run a large Linux shop.
Most of the popularity of Linux drives from the fact that Big-iron is/was on it’s way out of the Datacenters after the dot-com bubble burst.
Horizontal scaling on Intel/like(Cheap/commodity) hardware called for something that would run on it ergo — Linux, given that it was a unix-clone, especially when the other choice was *blech* windows!!
That has changed significantly since Sun started serious support of x86/x64 with Solaris 10. Try running your favorite flavor of Linux through a gamut of benchmark tests (try sysbench if you don’t have anything else to run) and then run same benchmarks on Solaris 10 on a Sun 4600 M2 (8 quad-core AMD).
You’ll see the difference. Linux doesn’t scale.
Grid computing relies on running multiple nodes on cheap/smaller hardware platforms (scale by number). So you can have a huge super-computing grid of 2-cpu systems running linux (same reason as given above).
Why aren’t people switching over to Solaris?
They are.
Who is?
Which companies?
According to revenue people are not buying anything from SUN? So I wonder who is switching to Solaris?
Edited 2008-09-26 22:03 UTC
How about Greenplum and Fox? See Jonathan’s blog of a few days back – http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/openstorage_and_really_big_data
The lead paragraph being, …
“I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media – the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web.”
Someone once said that when the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails, one might draw an analogy that when your focus is in pushing one OS you tend not to notice things that another might do that are interesting.
Alan (who while he works for Sun, is proud to *not* be an operating systems zealot).
Last time I looked IBM was making most of their money on “Big iron” in the Datacenter and Linux can run well on all that. IBM pushes it against their own Unix
That is a revival that is an aberration (as opposed to a norm). Most designs these days tend to be putting together applications on smaller boxes (identical hardware)so that, these can scale horizontally.
Tell me how many customers of IBM have actually implemented these monoliths?
As long as these scenarios happens, Solaris will not die. It will be used instead of Linux when there is serious work to do. Maybe if Linux catch up technically Solaris will die.
http://lethargy.org/~jesus/archives/77-Choosing-Solaris-10-over-Lin…
There was an article where a guy explained why Linux is a bad solution for file server (for instance, Linux can not satisfy a band backup band width, whereas as Solaris can satisfy the bandwidth need for the tape backup). Cant find the article though.
Another thing. For super computers, Linux is the prefered choice because it is easier and less complex than Solaris to tailor to a specific need. But Linux scales very badly in ordinary everyday usage as many can testify.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8769
But for a very specific need, such as number crunching, Linux can be fine. Of course you could tailor Solaris to number crunching too, but that would be complex. Linux has a simpler structure, uses a more naive approach and easier to understand and modify. Easy to rip out the unnecessary parts not need for number crunching. The hallmark of naive solutions is they are easy to understand and implement but scales badly. Compare bubble sort to quicksort for instance. Solaris is more sophisticated, evolved under long time. Kernighan (or another guru) said about the Linux code, that it wasnt that good.
Solaris will never “Die” Nor will SCO Unix or HP-UX or AIX.
But if you looks at market reports it just doesn’t look good for Solaris. Sorry to say.
1. Ubuntu beat Solaris in the 2007 – 2008 Server uptime reliability report (Done by the yankee group.) Ouch. http://www.iaps.com/2008-server-reliability-survey.html
2. Linux has a bigger market share then Solaris. Just like with Windows saying its not as good as Solaris wont stop it from being popular.
3. In devices, phones, set top boxes, PC’s, Servers, Super computers, web hosting etc. Linux is every place, Solaris is no place.
The fact is you can say Solaris is better then Linux, better then Windows. In the end Windows and Linux have the market share and Solaris is losing what it had.
In the end Linux will be the king of the NX’s and that is just fact. Solaris is not making a come back or some crap like that and ZFS, Zones, DTrace will not save it. Solaris will have it’s nitch place like BSD and SCO unix.
It will always be “better” then Linux just will never again have the market share.
We all seem to agree that Solaris is technically superior. We all seem to agree that Linux has a bigger market share. We also know that the best technology is not necessary the winner (Windows is a winner, with lousy technology. VHS vs Betamax. etc). Therefore, Linux might come out as the winner in the long run. I think the Linux camp, hopes that Solaris is abandoned and all Solaris high tech features are given to Linux. Then Unix will have the market share that Linux has, with Solaris technology. This is what the Linux camp hope, I suspect.
Another thing about up time. Ive seen reports that say that Windows have better up time than Unix. The reports are of no great value. Also, Solaris tend to drive big complex applications whereas it is very easy to make a Linux webserver doing a simple trivial thing. Lots of Linux servers doing simple things => good uptime. Even Windows will do great for simple things. That is the reason Windows had a better up time, I suspect.
I don’t know about most uptime reports. With the Yankee group report that I posted they look at OS’s doing similar tasks. That means if they are comparing Linux and Solaris it would be in similar tasks. So it’s just web hosting then it would be web hosting on both. Also they survey different companies on a list of things like Application serving, Databases, Web Hosting, File Serving etc.
What they find is that these days 95% of downtime that is not hardware related is patch related and boot time. So the downtime is based on how long it takes to patch and reboot and also how many patches require reboots. As we know if you look at just that then Windows can never win (Unless you never patch)
Eventually with Sun or not Linux will get similar tech to what Sun has just like Linux has similar tech to Windows and Mac OS. Once that happens Sun will be out of the loop. Once they are out of the loop the only thing that people will remember them for is Open Office. LOL!
Sun would of been smarter to make their own version of Linux including their own tech then to hire Ian Murdock and try to make Solaris into Linux. Not gonna work.
When I saw the “linux doesn’t scale past 8 (or 4) cpus” you really pegged yourself as heavily biased. I haven’t seen bottlenecks in linux scaling with SMP, and you have to go back 5 years or more to find these. And yes, I use linux to run high performance military grade type processing on SMP systems. And yes, I used to work on solaris boxes.
The availability & ease of scientific analysis packages and other utilities for software development available on linux and bsd’s is far more painful and dicey with solaris today.
OSX has a desktop market share, but their server share is trivially small while linux is quite considerable… I would say Solaris has considerably higher server share than OSX too…
Saying that ZFS and DTrace are “minor features” is very offensive and arrogant.
The idea behind open source was cooperation, “healthy” competition, sharing, etc. Where is such spirit right now?
If Solaris is dead, what about my NetBSD little project? What about the other BSDs? the “revolutionary” ideas behind DragonFlyBSD? And what about SkyOS? Syllable? Haiku? AROS? Or what about MacOS X? It actually has more marketshare than Linux!
Some days ago I read a similarly arrogant article about how “ubuntu” does not contribute to the kernel…
Linux guys always attacked Microsoft when they were smaller, but now while they are growing, they are becoming more and more arrogant and aggressive… just like them…. What a pity!!
Edited 2008-09-25 00:11 UTC
Possibly, but he’s not dissing ZFS and DTrace per se. He’s merely hinting that they’re not features that are going to make people flock back to Solaris and get all wet over OpenSolaris, as Sun thinks they will.
I haven’t seen such spirit for a very long time, and I certainly haven’t seen it amongst Sun consultants, and internally, where Linux is seen as a toy OS that cannot match up to a real Unix like Solaris. That view is still held by Sun culturally today.
If you’re suggesting that that is Solaris’s future, then it is dead. Sun simply cannot sustain something with such little usage versus the research and development and maintanenance money and resources they are putting in. Sun’s costs need to come down, and there will be some kicking and screaming, but ditching Solaris and SPARC is what’s needed. It’s just not a growing market, and the costs of keeping it going aren’t getting any easier.
I have never seen a Mac OS X server actually used anywhere for anything.
Well they don’t, and those that write code are entitled to point it out. That’s the currency.
Competitors always will get a bit aggressive with each other, but it is nowhere near as arrogant (companies in the Linux foundation compete with Sun), aggressive and sad as the attitude I have got from Sun consultants when they see a Linux server, or when you mention Linux as a solution to some problems:
1. Linux is not a real Unix OS and has nowhere near the reliability of Solaris.
2. Solaris performs better.
3. Yes, if you run Linux on x86 you might well get a pretty sizeable performance increase whilst cutting your costs (admitted grudgingly), but using Solaris on SPARC is so much more reliable and won’t kill your family and eat your family pet.
4. It is simply inconceivable and unimaginable to Sun that you could run anything serious on Linux or x86 versus a real Unix OS and real hardware that costs serious wonga and needs an army of consultants to set it up for you and keep it going.
Point 4 still pervades Sun to this day. Don’t be fooled. They actually see OpenSolaris and Solaris on x86 as stop-gap measures until people see sense and come back to Solaris and SPARC.
perfect response… Sun has shunned the GNU/Linux community for years, Now that they are feeling it in their pockets they are suddenly open source advocates.
Seriously. Him and Steve will get along just great. I feel disgusted that this guy claims to be a “Linux representative.” Get him out of here. Go “represent” Microsoft instead.
Competition is good. I use Linux (ditched Windows), and still see a lot of good stuff in Solaris. It ain’t going anywhere, and doesn’t need to; it’s here to stay. Solaris was late to the desktop arena, but its first release is here, and I recall hearing not too long ago its second release is moving along well. I fully expect it to continue to improve.
Sure, maybe it’s going a bit slow, but Linux didn’t get to where it is today on the desktop fast either. Unless this year is the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop I’ve been hearing about for years now.
I also find it ironic that this moron didn’t mention Mac OS X which, last I checked, is a certified UNIX and is more widespread than Linux. Okay, only by a small percent, but still more.
“I also find it ironic that this moron didn’t mention Mac OS X which, last I checked, is a certified UNIX and is more widespread than Linux. Okay, only by a small percent, but still more.”
Well, if we refer to the last data published by Net Applications in July 2008, Mac OS X represented 7.94% of the market, Linux while in growth represented only 0.8%. That’s definitely not only a small percent more, but roughly 10 times more.
And Zemlin should really see those numbers, that will certainly help him to come back to the reality and make him stop thinking that Linux became suddenly the only choice over Windows.
And by the way, should we recall him that without Unix, Linux would not be where it is now, so saying offensive words on the death of UNIX is not what i could call gratitude to the UNIX world, world that Linux itself is part of.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showA…
While I don’t wish to contribute to this Unix and Unix-like OS family feud, I would point out that the topic at hand is server use and not desktop use. So the Net Applications numbers are completely irrelevant here. I’m not sure I’d be inviting prevalence comparisons between Linux and OSX in that segment if I were you.
Edited 2008-09-25 02:58 UTC
linux have 4% of the desktop market…
source: gartner
http://ca.biz.yahoo.com/ibd/080807/tech.html?.v=1
i believe number is more like %1
As those comments come from the Linux Foundation Executive Director, they could be seen as the official statement of the Linux Foundation. Not very diplomatic, especially as he is talking about Unix in general too.
That kind of talk may be doing more harm than good to the reputation of Linux as a project that is not based on aggressive business competition only.
But as the core of the Linux Foundation is a consortium of large companies with revenue models that include Linux, maybe it is not such big surprise to hear such aggressive business talk against their competitors from them…
It would be harder to imagine someone, like, say, the Debian Project Leader, from the larger and also (still) not-for-profit Linux & open-source community, to claim something like that.
As a Linux advocate, I am appalled by his statements. This is the time for the POSIX world to stand together, not throw rocks at each other. Who gets the next rock? FreeBSD?
Besides that, what he says is either true or it is not. If it is not true, it should not be said. If it is true, it does not *need* to be said.
Shame on him.
Sun has put a massive ammount of time and effort into creating another excellent free UNIX system, with lots of cool and useful features and the head of the Linux Foundation insults them…
From the article:
So his argument is “Sun technology sucks, we need it?”
Good luck with the Linux Foundation’s very own version of Microsoft’s ‘Get the facts’ campaign.
Windows is the past. Apple and Open Source are the future. I don’t see why OpenSolaris doesn’t have a place as well as FreeBSD.
Any Database Administrator worth his salt knows that. While still a Unix with proprietary underpinnings. SUN has offered a hell of a lot to the OpenSource world that Linux Distros, Admins, and Users STILL take advantage of. If it wasn’t for project Looking glass there would be NO hope for Linux/Compiz/Beryl/ etc. What about ZFS/Dtrace, There is a bastard child named SystemTap… which remains not any further mention. Any old school Unix Admin will still stick with Solaris for many purposes. They still make the MOST stable NFS servers, far more stable than any Redhat based system would boast for high end usage.
The only longstanding problem that hurt Solaris adoption was SUN’s insistance of tying their hardware with their world renowned OS.
I don’t really care about Solaris since it appears that OpenSolaris’s focus is on becoming a Linux clone with package management and lame desktop usability.
What I do like about Solaris is the stable SunOS kernel it possess. Stable kernel interfaces is something that Linux lacks and makes driver development a pain. The Linux development model is also a mess with no stable branches and nasty regressions occurring at any time:
http://blog.mandriva.com/2008/09/23/urgent-notification-major-bug-i…
Lets see GNU/SunOS form (like Nexenta) but without the countless show-stopper bugs and two sets of userland tools to learn.
Edited 2008-09-25 02:39 UTC
Zemlin is a Gremlin
Or maybe he’s a Troll
His face looks like a doughnut
And now he lost his plot
He drank 6 pints of lager
And smoked too many spliffs
When he ran out of rizzla
He looked for something bigger
“Linux For Dummies” on his desk
Made for a giant reefa
In this defining moment
With stupor he proclaimed
Today I’ll make retarded comments
That make me look to all my colleagues
Like I’m a total f**king prick
In other news Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin is a doofus.
Linus earlier this year called the bsd security developers a bunch of masturbating monkeys. Linus has a humor a sharp wit and it wasn’t meant to be a public statement so it was laughed off. This looks like a public statement in very poor taste. I hope to see a public apology in good taste.
Everyone knows at least what Linus has done (even if we don’t always agree with all his opinions).
What has Zemlin done for Linux? nothing! He’s just a big parasite with a bigger mouth.
Who knows.. maybe Zemlin didn’t quite put it this bluntly? It wouldn’t be the first time that the tech press takes something completely out of context to try driving emotions. It’s quite funny when they do it, except if it’s your product getting slammed.
“You can’t really talk to any Web-based application company these days that’s not using Linux,”
What about joyrent? Built on opensolris. Personaly Linux will slowly lose market share in file server market. Look at the high density file server SUN are pushing out. Oh change one line in passwd file and boom have unix users authenticating with windows clients via ZFS. Why do you think samba is complaining and throwing toys out of the cot.
ZFS tells no lies I discovered that my machine was throwing errors out in ram since its not ECC unless i lowered the speed to improve compatibility in Dual channel mode.
And what about Fire engine? dladm what a joy…
Ummmmmm, last time I looked Red Hat was MAKING money and Sun was trying to stave off bankruptcy!
Sun is only making money by cutting staff. That is not making money!
Hum, obviously you do not know what bankruptcy is… SUN’s revenue is flat, that is indeed a problem. But they have plenty of cash, thus they are pretty f*cking far from “bankrupcy.” Imagine that you did not get a raise this year, and you had to tone down your vacation a bit… does that mean that you are bankrupt now? Not even close…
SUN is a $14 billion company, and red hat is what 300 or 400 million tops?
In fact SUN had a larger revenue that all the linux companies (and no, IBM nor Oracle are not Linux-only companies) combined. So it takes some serious amount of gall for a linux guy to say that Solaris is dead…
Until Linux has a file system comparable to ZFS, a facility even remotely close to DTrace, proper kernel threads, stable interfaces, the pervasive hot plugging capacities of Solaris, etc… then we will talk.
I am a linux user, but sometimes I wish I could have some of my tools in Solaris so I did not have to deal with the head aches that Linux brings. Between the multiple distros, the flat out hacks, and some of the mindblowing inconsistencies interface-wise when it comes to programming anything low level (anyone writing a driver or anything close to the kernel knows what I am talking about)… I am about done with Linux. Life is too short, and honestly the more I have been developing in Solaris the more I like it.
Give me 3rd party apps, CUDA, and the intel compiler suite for solaris and will be a happy man.
And yes, I just spent 4 days to implement a hack that allows me to get a specific trace of performance counters for a benchmark under linux (for a paper). The same process took literally minutes with dtrace. So it was quite the eye opener, never mind the fact that a apt-get update did bring a new library version that somehow borked the hack I had got working at some point…
So yeah, maybe it is the sheer lack of sleep but if Mr. Zemlin would STFU and go back to hack to get things a bit more consistent, that would be great.
Wow do you know anything about finances? Yes Sun has larger revenue then all the Linux companies BUT lets look at share price and profits:
Today Sun’s share price is at 7.85 a share
Red Hat 17.90 more then double Sun’s
Sun’s profits plunged in its most recent quarter, down to $88 million from $329 million in the same quarter last year.
That does not look stagnate to me, looks like they are losing money and also losing revenue at $3.78 billion for the quarter, compared with $3.84 billion a year ago.
And as the economy gets worse guess what??? Linux looks better and better and Sun looks worse and worse.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/wallst/64257.html
With the stock price as low as it is we may see a Micro Sun soon!
Edited 2008-09-25 13:56 UTC
“Wow do you know anything about finances? Yes Sun has larger revenue then all the Linux companies BUT lets look at share price and profits:
Today Sun’s share price is at 7.85 a share
Red Hat 17.90 more then double Sun’s”
Ehrm. You know, the share price is not THAT important. Imagine SUN has millions of shares at a price of $1, and Red Hat has 100 shares at a price of $10. Which company is more valuable, mr Finance Expert?
Ummmmm! It’s important enough for people to talk about Sun being a take over target BECAUSE of it’s stock price.
Also please read full posts, I didn’t just talk about stock price I also talked about losses! Sun had a drop of over 200 Million dollars in profit year to year from this time last year. So stock price or not genius they are losing money not making it!
And to add to your comment.. Thinking with the logic this guy uses: Since Intel’s shares are @ ~$18/share, and Google’s is ~$442/share, that means Google must be 25x bigger AND better than Intel.. Hmmmmm. I DON’T think so. Market capital for Intel: $105 billion, while Google’s is $139. Sure seems like they’re 25x bigger to me ….
Their revenue is flat most quarters, but shows a pretty distinct decline overall while their costs are still too high.
Most of that cash is going on maintaining their costs and the things that eat money in their business, namely maintenance of Solaris and SPARC which are simply not growing markets. When you’re pumping money into costs which do not turn into growth and an increase in revenue, and the revenue from those costs continues to decline steadily as well, you have a problem.
Correction. They think they are still a $14 billion company from the nineties when they could support that by selling exceptionally expensive software, hardware and support to people, and where the dot com boom companies then lapped that up. Those days are over.
That revenue is all coming from maintenance of existing Solaris and SPARC systems, and is declining at a fairly steady rate that Sun can do nothing about.
Proper kernel threads? Pervasive hot-plugging? You’re not a Sun consultant, are you?
Unfortunately, very, very, very few people actually care about that stuff (the stuff that exists, at any rate), and it’s a niche market of features as Zemlin was trying to say. When a Linux distributor adds comparable features then people will definitely like it, but it’s not going to make people rush out and switch distributors tomorrow.
While I won’t reply to the rest of that because it is unsubstantiated bumf, I will say that it would be nice if Sun actually had some drivers ;-).
Solaris has very few third party apps that run well on it, let alone all the open source ones people have tried to get working for years. People complain about application support within Linux systems, and software installation on Solaris systems is still a headbanging experience with no package management.
Unless you are using a GNU toolchain, or at least a compatible one, you are in for a world of hurt if you want to get any open source applications running on there. You’ll need a lot of caffeine and Red Bull ;-).
That’s a great anecdote that you’ve pulled out of thin air to meet a specific task, but that’s not a task of the vast majority I’m afraid.
It would be nice if Solaris had apt-get, or indeed, any package management at all.
They’re one drop amongst an ocean of web companies. Having personal experience of Joyent I can say that they’re not quite as good as they could be. Their shared BSD virtual servers weren’t terribly pleasant to work with, and their move to Solaris hasn’t exactly been straightforward.
As a Rails hoster they’re fighting a bit of a losing battle. Fact is, the vast majority of Rails core developers code and deploy to Linux systems. Capistrano, amongst other things, basically assumes you will deploy to an average Linux distribution. If you don’t at least use a GNU toolchain then you are nobody. Most just end up deserting that kind of set up and go for a dedicated server they have complete control over, and it’s more often than not a VPS running Linux on Xen or KVM now where the cost is quite attractive. The ZFS and zones stuff behind the scenes, while cool and useful at times, are not the priorities people put first.
Joyent have just got really excited about all the cool stuff without thinking about the fundamentals, and basically, their use of BSD shared servers that weren’t up to the job and the mass rush to Solaris screamed “We will use anything but Linux”. They were bitten by a nasty ZFS bug few months back:
http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=19430
ZFS was, and still is really, not ready and certainly not ready to be used as a cool new thing. While I won’t pretend that there haven’t been some annoying problems with things like Xen set ups, these have amounted to some reboots of guests.
I don’t think you know what Samba actually does.
Nice. Is that a problem with your hardware or a problem with the system you’re running on?
Im not supprised that joyrent got bitten by a ZFS bug but they happen in all distributions remember the LG Burner bug that kills your burner as well as the new one that kills your intel network card? ZFS is a work in progress indeed file systems do not mature very quickly. I have a stable solaris system and it only took me 3 Years to get it. Sure you may think 3 years is a long time to wait for ZFS and other features to mature to a point where I am happy? Isnt those features worth it.
Solaris still isnt a desktop distro and will not be a contender for at least another 5-10 years. Look at how long it took linux to get from a similar state to where it is today.
I have been integrating linux systems for the last 5 years. Pdbedit etc sometimes samba is a pain to use. The only really easy distro to deploy samba on is SUSE in my opinion not to start a flame war. Samba has great developers but SUN have one thing 100k Developers on its side as well as Microsoft which IS A GOOD THING. Integration with Microsoft painlessly is important.
At one stage it was Solaris 10 but that was the buggy IDE controller driver that didn’t like my Segate ES Drive. I know for a fact that the two RANK’s of ram are slightly under specification of DDR2 667 CPUZ Proven(Transend RAM) Maybe the drivers for the memory could be improved who knows im not a developer.
I’d rather it wasn’t that experimental, and I wasn’t going to be paying Joyent for a beta testing program for Sun.
There’s a lot to like about ZFS, but Sun needs to improve a lot more around OpenSolaris for it to really be a differentiator for Sun.
Pdbedit is always a pain to use, but my point is that what Sun has integrated into Solaris is not Samba. Samba does an awful lot more than authenticate people.
Microsoft is not going to help Sun make Solaris a drop-in Active Directory server. Never going to happen. Sun will be better off contributing to, and integrating code from, Samba.
Arghhhhhhhhh. Find out about and debugging Solaris’s driver problems with ZFS. I really hope Sun gets a driver community around OpenSolaris and Solaris users get the driver quality they deserve, because this sort of thing has gone on for years.
Edited 2008-09-25 22:54 UTC
He should have pointed out Linux strengths, but not Solaris weakness.
In 10 years time Linux will still be a viable choice on the server that is fairly certain.
Solaris on the other hand is _very_ dependent on Sun.
If Sun looses more money they won’t be able to pay the 1000 engineers working on Solaris and Solaris will progress at a pace similar to Haiku.
So if you are conservative and you don’t really need ZFS or Dtrace Linux is the better choice. That is what he should have said.
for me a major difference between linux and say, NetBSD, or Solaris, is the engineering approach, or lack thereof. linux’s less rigid approach does have advantages, but so does the more sober approach of solaris engineering.
different problems – different solutions.
if solaris was to die it would be for commercial reasons, not technical.
This guy should be kicked.. if he’s payed for the job that is. I’m participating in a small “niche” project (much smaller than anything on the OS field) so I know the position of the “forgotten underdog” quite well.
Linux is nice, and he has some points in regards to general users’ views about Solaris (I also think it’s pretty much irrelevant to me, and I don’t really care about ZFS or DTrace even if I’m a dev, but then I’m not an OS dev).
However the whole message is a FUD. Saying that “project X is dead or irrelevant” in OSS is just FUD. No project is dead or irrelevant in OSS, not even projects which are “formally” dead. Why’s that? Simple:
1. The source is there so someone can pick up
2. They probably do things in different way at some point which can be quite important for general progress
So, FUD alarm from me, we should probably hatemail this guy. I’m a Linux user btw, but this is “teh sh!t”.
What a nonsense.
– MS Windows is clearly on the decline. While it still holds a bold market share majority, more and more companies escape the iron grip and offer alternatives. See Eee PC, see Dell’s Linux, see IBM’s Linux, …
– To the best of my knowledge, I can’t see how traditional Unixes (remember, Linux is a Unix derivate as well) hobbles the development of Linux as a kernel or Linux distributions as more complete environments. Much open source stuff runs on AIX, IRIX, HP/UX, Solaris as well, giving more perspective and fixing more bugs. On both sides.
– He totally forgot about Mac OS X. It’s market share went from 3% to 9% over the last few years.
The gentleman doing such cheap and dirty claims is director of the Linux Foundation? This doesn’t shade a good light on Free Open Source Software as a whole.
Common people leave the Drugs.
I work for one of the major ISP in Europe, and the majority of our servers is FreeBSD, we only have 10 or 15 linux box.
What BSD gives us is much better than any linux distribution out there.
FreeBSD is an OS, Linux is a lot of programs working togheter to make it an OS
Small footprint, only a few kernel modules, stability, easy to install apps and no dependecy hell.
Unix is alive and in very good shape.
Edited 2008-09-25 10:33 UTC
“FreeBSD is an OS, Linux is a lot of programs working togheter to make it an OS”
I hate to break it to you, but the two OSes are structured pretty much identically. It just happens that with FreeBSD, the low-level userspace is packaged together with the kernel, whereas on Linux, you have the kernel and then you have the GNU userland, packaged separately. Once it’s all installed, though, there is no functional difference between the two OSes.
Except BDS is all put togheter by only a Team, and linux….
When working in a BSD environment you feel that everything is always where it is expected to be.
Now try that with Debian, Red hat, Suse….
Only for the base system. Once you get to the desktop level libs and apps (ported usually) it’s same and even worse on freeBSD due to poor packaging and management.
Proper Linux distroes on the other hand are put together by a dedicated Team and click much better (compare desktop integration of Ubuntu and FreeBSD with same soft. installed)
FreeBSD is good on servers tho, the source based ports also make sense there to custom-tweak your stuff. On everything else tho, I personally find it clunky, with low integration of subsystems, badly packaged and buggy (ports, not core).
Edited 2008-09-25 17:04 UTC
That’s a brilliantly useful statement, with ample amounts of quantitive evidence to back it up.
He seems to be blind.
Just a quick look to market shares – boom. Free/Open/NetBSD and Apple – All togheter UNIX has a bigger market share als Linux.
(To call WIndows the future is a really annoying imagination)
I agree that when tediously filling a server rack; boring; dull; unimaginative; reliable old Linux is there.
Its not exactly a hotbed of innovation though is it.
Just shut up and do something meaningful
Solaris is not a whiz bang OS in the same way as apple is nor linux to a lesser extent
Solaris, like its users, want thing that work. Its a server OS!!
Linux users seem to like the latest and greatest version of everything. Solaris users (the few I know) would rather use the version they can put money on will still be running after they die. Not the latest version, the most stable.
This mentality shows in their products and for that reason Solaris wont die any time soon
But we don’t have Dtrace and ZFS. Solaris does, indeed, have its whiz-bang aspects and should get credit for that. Other aspects of Solaris can seem like they’re from out of the stone age. But still.
Edited 2008-09-25 14:08 UTC
but these new features (again by the accounts I have heard) are super stable.
Although the features are certainly of note, the would not have been included until they were confident they were 100% stable
You’re correct. That’s what you’ve heard.
Segedunum,
Please stop trolling Solaris threads. You do it habitually. You have nothing constructive to say. You don’t seem to know what you are talking about much of the time. And you make the rest of us in the Linux community look bad.
Very Sincerely,
Steve Bergman
Edited 2008-09-25 19:55 UTC
I dont get it. Why are Linux guys so offensive all the time? Look at the things that Linus Torvalds says, for instance. “OpenBSD developers are masturbating monkeys” and something like “when someone has produced a weak solution, I flame them, but if they can show that the solution is not weak, I change my mind”.
Why do you have to flame anyone if they made a weak solution? He works for you, for free. Why do you have to insult people?
The sad thing is that lots of Linux people thinks that Linus is right: it IS ok to insult people and flame them.
I dont get it. If someone cooperates with you, why not be nice to them? You dont have to be a prick just because you can. Linus says things like “I have more experience, I am right, therefore I can flame others”. But hey, if I have more power or experience, I dont have to insult others? That would cause a sad climate.
Linux people are obviously not team players. Imagine a fotball team, and when someone has messed it up, it is not necessary to give him bad confidence and yelling. I play to win. I encourage my team to win, and I expect to be encouraged if I have a bad day. You can not be on top all the time. I do NOT accept to be insulted. Im a grown man, with adult coworkers. Im not a child mobbing others. I dont understand people saying adult mobbing/bullying is acceptable. They lack something. That is obvious. If their children were bullied, I bet they would not tolerate that.
Other than that, ZFS and DTrace is available to FreeBSD, Mac OS X, QNX (dtrace), etc. It is open code. You can download and use it right away. SUN has publicly stated that they love to port DTrace to AIX, but IBM has not responded. It took long time to open up Java, because SUN had to prove they owned all code. And, there were closed third party libraries that had to be dealt with. Same as Solaris, it has 3rd party code. I see it is hard for SUN to satisfy every license. If Linux wants Solaris tech so badly, then they should change license. Why yell at SUN and demand SUN change everything, so it suits Linus Torvalds? Linus has also said that if Solaris is GPL 3.0, he will consider releasing Linux to GPL 3.0. So he will change license then. Maybe. FreeBSD and Apple succeeds using ZFS and Dtrace. They are NOT closed code, contrary to what Linux people thinks.
Which other large proprietary company than SUN, has opened up all their code and technology? Has IBM done that? Or Microsoft? Oracle? No one has done that. Do you prefer companies to have closed source, or open? If you prefer open source, then we should support SUN. What happens if IBM, Microsoft, etc sees that SUN’s opening up code is successfull? Then they will follow! What happens if SUN bankrupts? No one will ever try to open up code again. It will stay closed. Do we want that? What should we support? Closed companies, or open companies? Which companies do we want to be successfull? Open or closed? Your choice!
Although I agree with you on your point that SUN has done a lot for FOSS, the attitude expressed by Jim Zemlin is pretty common in the IT world.
What I mean by that is most of us are arrogant pricks and when we think we are right we tell you, and its normally not in the friendliest of ways.
I do Disagree with what Jim Zemlin has said, I think SUN has a lot to offer server side with Solaris, and client side with apps like OpenOffice. Although I think Open Solaris is kind of weak but I will wait and see where it goes.
I guess my real point is Jim Zemlin sounds like the kind of IT you would expect to find in a server room making sure the junior administrators realize they aren’t as smart as they think, and he should probably know by now he is in charge of a organization and the things he says publicly might bite him later.
Blehh… By using offensive generalizations like that you are guilty of the very thing you are accusing others (your so-called “Linux guys) for… *sigh*
The Linux community is big and heterogenous. You can find many kind of “guys” there, from SCO to Debian, from big corporations to individual Linux users, OS hobbyists and developers. Probably majority of “Linux guys” use and value other operating systems too.
Let’s all try to be balanced in our opinions, ok?
How does one guy making a stupid comment make “Linux guys” offensive all the time?
People are pricks. Everywhere. Regardless of race, gender, eyecolor, music taste or preferred OS.
I think of a lot of things that Theo has said that is worse. Of course, I dont mind either Theo or Linus speaking their mind, no matter how abrasive, and I sure won’t generalize that into that all Linux or OpenBSD users are abrasive assholes.
It has nothing to to with it being closed, it has an unsuitable license. Just like how OpenBSD, for example, avoid including GPL’d code in the base OS.
Why are you insulting Linux users?
All of it? Really? Do you know something we don’t? Are all their hardware specs open?
Zemlin is the new Ballmer.
Regarding Linux vs Solaris vs BSD vs Whatever… Its like any storage expert will tell you, EMC is expensive but you’ll never lose data, you can buy faster/bigger/cheaper but one day it WILL make you cry. Thats exactly how I see Linux vs *nix (including BSD). The cheapest option up front isn’t always the cheapest option in the long run.
I’ll take this as Sun is on the right path and it’s becoming a major alternative opensource os that will give a real competition to linux in the OSS world . I think SUN has every right to build their very own OSS community and use any license they wish. i run opensolaris and i love dtrace, i hope linux version is as good.
I don’t necessarily agree that Solaris should be “on it’s way out”. DTrace is actually a very, very, very nice feature for developers. It was ported to FreeBSD not long ago. Though I still haven’t had the time to play with it.
ZFS is one other feature that is awesome (at least on 64bit systems). That too was ported over to FreeBSD not too long ago. Granted, it’s still experimental, but it was still ported over. Hmm… I see a trend.
Solaris has introduced not just those two things, but age as well. It’s a mature OS with a lot power. However, *BSD seems to be a bit more suitable for at least me. Still, I don’t see Solaris going anywhere anytime soon.
I find FreeBSD 7.0(64bit) much faster than linux. Maybe I’ll do some benchmarks to see if it’s true.
Dear [Open]Solaris:
Greetings! We are so glad to hear of your timely demise. We take this opportunity to welcome you to the land of the dead. Perhaps your are fearful of this great unknown land of the shadows, but we can assure you of the many great things you can soon expect to experience:
1. While the “living” dance on your grave, you will go on merrily serving the needs of your users far and wide.
2. While the Dot-coms and Dot-bombs swell and pop, you will maintain a steady course under the radar. Companies will gravitate toward your new-found “stable condition”.
3. Years from now, after the “dust to dust” has settled, you will have been found to have accompished far more post-mortem than pre.
Undeadly yours,
The BSD’s
What all the technical heads here don’t understand is that it’s not the developers that decide what a major corporation uses for its servers, Its the CIO/CTO and/or technical managers.
These guys don’t care ZFS/Dtrace make System admins/developers lives easier and most likely never heard of them. They read CIO magazine and shop for the current buzzword and what their other CIO buddies are purchasing. I’m sorry but the momentum on server side processing is currently towards GNU/Linux. Open Solaris being “technically” superior with its tools/Filesystems is irrelevant from this aspect. (remember VHS vs Beta max?)
I personally think the momentum is starting to swing Sun’s way. Look back a few years and you will see Linux ripe with all sorts of new exciting development. Look at the new journalling file systems, SELinux, LVM, and all other sort of cool technologies that were going into Linux. On the otherhand, Solaris was still in dead water. They didn’t need to update their 20 year old UFS, it work and if it didn’t, they will just tack on a feature. They didn’t need a new network stack. Why would you when you can saturate a 10MBit connection? And userland was perfect usable… just like it was 20 years ago on dummy terminals.
Today, Linux has become stale. It has become boring. All the exciting stuff is happening on Solaris, from ZFS, Dtrace, to SMF. I have played with OpenSolaris and I have deleted it because it is not usable yet. BUT judging by how quick it is developing and what ideas are going into it, it will become awesome. Just the beadm and pkg utility are going to be ground breaking. Imagine patching a system… and never worrying about breaking it. Imagine upgrading a system… and never worrying about breaking it. That is what Solaris is bringing to the table.
OpenSolaris/Solaris is far from dead. The only reason someone would make a comment like that today is due to wishful thinking.
Lets face it. Everyone that knows about x86 also can confess that it is a mess and riddled with bugs. SPARC on the other hand is more reliable and less buggy. That is the reason SUN is talking about SPARC for mission critical tasks. As they talk about ECC RAM, etc. x86 does NOT cut it for critical tasks.
I don’t care about Solaris/Linux/AIX/Windows they are all the same: a commodity. Nobody gives a shit about them.
But the truth is, at least at Fortune 500 companies, Solaris is a much more common server platform than Linux.
http://www.opensparc.net/
I don’t agree with his points of view. I think that if you want to market your product you have to make your product look better than the rest rather than putting the others down.
It’s like if I go to an interview and the hiring manager asks me “why should they hire me over the other guy” and I reply “well because the other guy doesn’t know how to do anything correctly at all and all of his skills are minor”. I don’t believe that doing this makes me better than the rest at all, but simply a person that can’t back his skills.
Besides that I’d like to see what happens to big mainframes. Most mainframes in the financial sector use Z/OS or one of its brothers. Those are Unix OSes so I think that insulting the Unix family is very low and inaccurate, specially when Linux is an OS that gathers ideas from Unix.
That’s my two cents.
Complaining about this amongst ourselves is not going to do much good. Direct your complaints here:
[email protected]
Their “contact us” page indicates that’s probably the best place to send feedback of this nature.
Linux Foundation’s Zemlin Declares Solaris All But Dead
posted by David Adams on Wed 24th Sep 2008 22:44 UTC, submitted by snydeq
IconLinux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said it is time for Solaris to simply move out of the way and yield the future to Linux. ‘The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris,’ he claims, contending that Sun’s strength in long-lifecycle apps is giving way to Linux, as evidenced by the rise of Web apps, where Linux holds a decided advantage, Zemlin claims. With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, he says. ‘That’s literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.’
——————————————————
Unix was developped in 1969, in 1977 begin a fork of Unix called BSD and developped to the University of California, Berkeley, after legal problems with AT&T any parts was changed and when BSD for long time a company used BSD for its own workstations: Sun Microsystems. At that time others forks of BSD was developped: FreeBSD, After the Flame between Andrew Tanebaum & Linus Torvalds Benedict about MINIX, another kernel was developped: linux in 1985 to the CMU Carnegie Mellon University another microkernel was developped: MACH, the mantainer of MACH was the University of Utah till 1994, between 1985 and 1994, another team of developers asked to the CMU to work over the Microkernel MACH:
Thomas Bushnell & Richard Matthew Stallman, they were interested to create a free software operating system with the Microkernel MACH and HURD as Servers Processes
but the time to wait the changin of license and solving problems of bugs which derivates from communications between one message and the other and one opening that generate a deamon and splits as in fork and closing of another process creates problems, so in 1991 arrived linux kernel. In 1992 if i remember well Steven Jobs ceo Apple Cupertino.Inc take the distance from John Sculley President of Apple Cupertino.Inc and decided to create the Next.Inc At this period Steven Jobs dedicate himself to develop the NextStep an OO called too: Object Oriented which was over the Microkernel Mach, and the Microkernel Mach was available needed to develop a GUI, when John Sculley decided to give in licenses the ROM of Apple 1995, because Apple have had problems with stock opinion that was too much low, when turned back in 1997 Steven Jobs in Apple Cupertino.Inc
removed all the branches of company that have not sense and used the Microkernel Mach + GUI developped in C++ to obtain NextStep and called that Mac Os X, but Mac Os x is not a Microkernel, is the Microkernel Mach + BSD that generate and hybrid Kernel on which there is JAVA http://sun.com , COCOA, QUARTZ, CARBON, QT LIBRARIES http://trolltech.com , OPENGL http://sgi.com Hard Drives Apple are UNIX SVR4 as Sun Microsystem as in System V the firmware openfirmware is developped by Sun Microsystems for many companies too IBM. Apple Cupertino.Inc and Sun Microsystems worked to the develop of OpenStep that on Solaris we know with the old GUI Common Desktop Environement (CDE). OpenStep was used too from Microsoft for Windows NT. In these last years was developped OpenSolaris, then GNU/solaris, but GNU/solaris is not totally free software because there are not the sources codes of kernel and many others packages. Sun developped OpenSolaris without distribute the sources codes of: vi: gimp, gnome… the licenses GPL compatibles are on: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses
at the same time i can say that if i want i can use too GNU/KFreeBSD, GNU/NetBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD because the license of FreeBSD is now compatible with the GNU General Public License:
FreeBSD license
This is the original BSD license with the advertising clause and another clause removed. (It is also sometimes called the ~Ac^AEUR^Aoe2-clause BSD license~Ac^AEUR^A.) It is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL
If you want a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, the FreeBSD license is a reasonable choice. However, please don’t call it a ~Ac^AEUR^AoeBSD~Ac^AEUR^A or ~Ac^AEUR^AoeBSD-style~Ac^AEUR^A license, because that is likely to cause confusion which could lead to use of the flawed original BSD license.
Some may find his comments offensive, but I agree with him, to some extent. My experience : SunOS 2.9; 2.10, T6300 blades && T2000 platform – extremely slow in disk operations, untar-ing 500 MB file takes ~1 minute – Linux – much more poor machine – 10 seconds for the same file. Solaris 10 – hard to maintain – you have to spend weeks and months tuning and understand the OS, no need – there’s Linux already over there. Cost and maintenance – get me the same performance (whatever type of performance you’d like) from T2000 box and compare it, for example with Dell Power Edge with SLES or RHEL for the same price – no way. Flexible tools, human readable format, handy applications, larger community = Linux – can you tell the same about Solaris ? Not really, come on, don’t twist the truth. Certainly, everyone out there is free to try and decide for himself.
The new SPARC cpu Niagara T2 has 8 cores with 64 threads. At best, all of them can run at once! Not like x86, where a thread occupies the entire pipeline. The T2 can run several threads at the same time, in different stages in the pipeline. Each thread has the speed of a Pentium3 @ 1GHz. Not much. But for heavy multi thread, it shines.
The problem is people loads the T2 CPU up with small test data, like 1 GB data or so. Then dual x86 will win easily. But when you load the T2 up with MASSIVE data, where the x86 stalls, the T2 just continues. It degrades a magnitude slower than x86. The key is huge amounts of real production data. Then it will shine.
It will shine because the T2 never waits for stalled pipeline. Intel studies show that a typical x86 server CPU, waits 50-60% for data – under FULL load. The pipeline stalls. The T2 just switches thread to another in 1 clock cycle and continues to do other work while waiting for data. An x86 can not switch thread that quick, it has to wait. So an x86 will stall when workload is big enough. The T2 doesnt care, it continues to work. Try to load T2 up with huge amounts of data, and you will see that one of these will outperform a multi cpu x86 configuration.
DISCLAIMER — I’m not a Sun employee but a very very satisfied customer.
This is a classic FUD-sample that misguides potential users. The Niagara line is known as the throughput-computing platform because of the multi-core architecture. Each core is not a metal-burning heat-generating monstrosity but moderately well performing (1 – 1.4Ghz). The advantage of running apps in this platform is those immensely multi-threaded ones, which can take advantage of the 4 or 8 threads that each core can handle (so instead of running 1 thread super-fast, you run 32 or 64 threads moderately fast). Sure, single-threaded performance is not comparable to the x86/x64 or other sparc procs, but end-result is more computing done faster.
It is very important to choose a right application to do the comparison (there are plenty of benchmarks out there that prove that the Niagara-based systems outperform comparable systems when the workload is appropriate. These are not “one size fits all” solutions, they are specific and highly effective solutions to specific problems.
Solaris ruled the 90’s, and it’s been in a steady decline since. And it’s really only their own fault.
Solaris is pretty niche right now. While it’s technically impressive, they shot their own foot several times and hampered it’s adoption. They’ve made some very laudable efforts to be more open and community-friendly (Open Solaris, free Solaris 10 x86), but it seemed to be too late.
One of the things they did wrong (of course hindsight 20/20 and all that) was to cling to the notion that they could charge $30,000 for a web server (E250 anyone?).
Sure, SPARC is a better processor. But is it worth it to spend 2, 3, 10 times the money? For a big-iron database, sure it is. Web server? Not really. Why spend $200,000 on a web farm, when you can spend $10,000, and get the same user experience, same reliability (you’re using a load balancer anyway). Solaris made x86 its red-headed step child for so long, terrified that it would cut into its SPARC revenues, that people went to Linux for the vast majority of their (non-Windows server) systems. The Linux community grew by bounds, Solaris shrank.
And it used to be the SPARC was a better *and* faster processor. Now, not so much. x86 is mostly way faster, and even with the impressive Niagra chips, most applications aren’t written to take full advantage of them.
Solaris and Open Solaris on x86 hasn’t had quite the adoption rate that Sun had hoped. The current and previous Sun CEOs would wax poetic about how millions of people downloaded OpenSolaris, which is fine and good, but it seems most didn’t keep it installed on anything.
Linux is pervasive, and Linux works. There aren’t enough areas where Solaris is technically superior to make it attractive to go through the trouble of switching over.
Take Cisco, most of their next-gen route/switch platforms have their control planes run not IOS, but Linux with an IOS-like interface on top.
I don’t know what Sun could do at this point to make OpenSolaris a breakaway success. They’re basically waiting for Linux to screw up big. Which, ironically, is how Linux supplanted Solaris: Sun screwed up, bigtime.
Mostly I agree with you. I think SUN tried to protect their cash cow SPARC cpu. But nowadays an ordinary x86 is way faster for single threaded work. And way cheaper. The T2 SPARC shines with multi threaded apps, such as webserver. An T2 SPARC does work ~95% of the time under full load, whereas an x86 server CPU does work 40-50% under full load. So an T2 waits for data 5% of the time whereas an x86 waits for data 50-60%. Under full load.
Say an x86 CPU is running at 3GHz. As it can only work at 50% of it’s capacity because of cache misses, it is something like 1.5GHz. That is not much faster than T2 at 1.4 GHz. Pity though the T2 threads are weak.
But the new SPARC Rock CPU will maybe change that again. It is SUN’s highend CPU and it is supposed to have transactional memory! (Not fully developed transactional memory, it is too hard to do). It seems the ROCK will rock the house seriously:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/28/sun_dziuba_tm/
“Sun Microsystems is about to horsef–k the database world, and nobody sees it coming. Imagine a SQL database that can support the absurd level of concurrency promised by HyTM. Conveniently, Sun owns one of the most popular relational databases in the world: MySQL. If MySQL on a single Rock based system can outperform Oracle or Microsoft spread across many systems, then DBAs worldwide would gladly tell Larry Ellison or Steve Ballmer where to shove it.”
That relies on software and OS:es that can give you 100% binary compatibility.
For the linux platform an simple kernel or package upgrade might render your applications useless.
Solaris is way better for servers than linux is, that is MY opinion.
We’ve already covered this.
But before I address that, I would like to address (again) something that is more important.
Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation has made some undiplomatic and poorly considered remarks which call his judgment into question. If you read here, and also more Linux specific sites like lwn.net, you will see that most of us in the Linux community refuse to condone his gratuitous attacks. Some of us are emailing the Linux Foundation to express our displeasure.
Please decline to participate in or encourage any rock throwing war within our POSIX-like OS community. It’s counterproductive, a waste of time, and plays into the hands of… mumble-mumble.
Now. That said… the Linux kernel’s user space ABI is sacred and has been all the way back to the early 90’s. All the moaning we hear about the *internal* ABI changing often confuses people into thinking otherwise. Furthermore, it has been a *very* long time since I have had a problem involving glibc versions, which would be the next most important case. (The last time I had such a problem, the company providing the app and updates had been ignoring a *loud* glibc deprecation warning for 5 years!) And if you have a proprietary app that *does* depend on old libraries, you still don’t really have a problem since the enterprise distros allow you to stick with the same major version for *at least* 7 years. And then often provide “-compat” packages to get you by for another 7 years.
But if Solaris does an even better job of providing backward compatibility, that’s fine with me, and is likely both a strength and a weakness.
Actually, they’re still coding and doing cool stuff. A new thing I’ve found out reading their flag day page is that they’re implementing fast reboot. That means the kernel makes all devices shut up, drops back to the boot loader and starts the system back up, without doing a full boot (i.e. BIOS POST, etc).
I don’t see dead OSes trying to do new things of that scale.