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OpenSolaris One Year On

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jun 13, 2006 08:28 AM
from the what-a-difference-a-year-can-make dept.
Sun Microsystems Software Linux
daria42 writes "In June of last year, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code." From the article: "Sun is yet to release some aspects of Solaris as open source software, although that process is due for completion by the year's end. Meanwhile, non-Sun programmers have to date offered some 165 code contributions to the OpenSolaris project, said Eagleton. Of those, 70 have been accepted into the project's code base, while another 95 are still in the review process. To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long, Sun has a temporary buddy system whereby external contributors are partnered with Sun employees."
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  • This is all good news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pieroxy (222434) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @08:33AM (#15523440) Homepage
    Sun is new to Open Sourcing its proprietary products. Solaris is a good step and a few glitches here and there are likely to be minor youth problems. The important thing is to know whether Sun will find in this experience enough incentive to open source other stuff (Java anyone?)

    --
    Krazy Kat, George Herriman [ignatzmouse.net]

    • Sun is new to open sourcing its proprietary products? That strange, because amongst other things, they open sourced their implementations of RPC and NFS years ago. Sun are by no means new to this open source thing and as well as their own stuff, they've acted as mentors to a number of outside projects. For instance, Sun provided John Ousterhout with an office to use while he worked on Tcl/Tk.

      • Don't forget Staroffice/openoffice, the GNOME bits (particularly i18n, A11Y and docs). Actually there are many opensource projects with contribution from Sun. Methinks the "propietary" label was assigned to Sun by less open competitors.

      • Re:This is all good news (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Darkon (206829) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @08:47AM (#15523513)
        a tiny move could turn them into all-out sharing of code between Linux and Solaris

        Do you really think the sharing would be in anything other than one direction? What incentive would Sun have to see all their crown jewels taken and added to Linux?

        • Do you really think the sharing would be in anything other than one direction?

          Yes.

          What incentive would Sun have to see all their crown jewels taken and added to Linux?

          Some people understand the open source model and some don't. What incentive does any company have to contribute code to open source projects? The answer, free labor from the community and wider adoption of the technologies for interoperability and mind share.

          For example, as a result of Solaris being open sourced, Ubuntu now has reason

          • Re:This is all good news (Score:5, Informative)

            by twiddlingbits (707452) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @09:35AM (#15523814)
            Lets see..things Solaris could add to Linux:
            1. Containers
            2. Zones
            3. Awesome fast TCP/IP Stack
            4. Dtrace
            5. ZFS

            Those five alone would be the bump Linux needed to morph into a really solid Enterprise class O/S that is open source.
            • Which makes me wonder:

              What's Linux got that OpenSolaris doesn't?

              Why do we talk about moving these five pretty huge and fundamental things into Linux, instead of using OpenSolaris and moving the things Linux has into it?

              -F
              • Linux the kernel and GNU/Linux the operating system both have a bunch of things that OpenSolaris doesn't:

                1) Vendor Neutrality. OpenSolaris is closely associated with Sun, but no company has a stranglehold over Linux.

                2) Portability. Linux has been ported to an amazing array of hardware. Ubuntu runs on more architectures than OpenSolaris, even though they dropped most of the archs supported by Debian.

                3) Scalability. Linux scales up to supercomputers and mainframes (where Solaris also has a respectable tra
            • Personally, I'd like to see them open up CDE, since the xfce 4 series largely abandoned the CDE-alike concept. I realize that it's probably problematic due to the Open Group's licensing, and that those of us who have a distinctly uncool idea of cool are limited in number, but I'd still like to have it on my FC5 machine.

              • I think Motif is now open source, but wasn't CDE developed by some huge consortium of big companies back when open source wasn't cool? There might be too much legal wrangling in there between rival companies. It's probably better to bet on GNOME in the longer term. I use Sun's GNOME on Solaris Express (aka fetal Solaris 11) fairly frequently, and it is definitly improving with each update and is pretty well integrated. There are some issues with lesser-used utilities, such as some panel applets, but the
            • Why bother porting to Linux?
              Solaris *IS* better than Linux.
              with Sun's Kernel and everything else that Solaris10 brings to the table, why would you use any of the Linux Variants?
              the ONLY argument that Linux wins is use of crufty hardware.
              Well, if you want a datacenter filled with old PS2 hardware have fun with your Red Hats.
              As for me, running AMD64 using Solaris AND Sun Hardware is the way to go.

              • ALL of those things you mentioned Linux needed, Solaris already has. If Sun shares those technologies then it's NOT stealing, if they don't want them out there they will keep them out of OpenSolaris (however I've not heard they will do that). No, the reason Linux was opensourced was COLLABORATION (aka the power of the community), more eyes, more minds, better ideas, equals better code. FREEDOM has nothing to do with it. Orginally Linux was only shared with and improved by a few dozens of trusted developers

      • Re:This is all good news (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2006, @08:49AM (#15523526)
        It's not Solaris being "intentionally GPL-incompatible" - it's the GPL being intentionally incompatible with everything that isn't the GPL. Get your facts straight instead of spreading FUD.

        • Re:This is all good news (Score:5, Informative)

          by KiloByte (825081) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @09:30AM (#15523784)
          Uhm, "everything"? And BSD? And MIT? And X11? And LGPL? And a vast majority of free licenses in existence?

          Among pieces of software that have significant use, are free according to the DFSG, and are not GPL compatible, I can name just openssl, old apache, core parts of TeX, and that's about it. (Before you correct me, read again the first clause of the previous sentence).
          • i thought new apache was also incompatible (at least according to the fsf but most distros seem to listen to them over the vendors of the other license)

            you already mentioned openssl, add to that anything else under licenses similar to the 4 clause BSD.

            and then there is the mpl and its variants............

        • The GPL has been out for a very, very long time and SUN has obviously been aware of it for a very long time (or at least SUN Engineers have been). Therefore, when SUN created their Open Source license they intenionally made it GPL incompatible. The reverse cannot be said to be true since SUN's Open Source license did not even exist when the GPL was created.
  • Why is this bit of "news" listed under Linix-category?

  • Wishlist: more pkg-get and flexible install (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HighOrbit (631451) * on Tuesday June 13 2006, @08:55AM (#15523563)
    [qualifier]I've been working with Solaris 10, not OpenSolaris itself, but since the next Solaris will be a superset distribution of OpenSolaris, this should apply [/qualifier]

    I've done a few console installs of Solaris 10 on some headless (and ancient) sparc netras. Here are some things that would make my life easier.
    • Make then entire system available as a pkg-get repository, not just the blastwave contributed programs. I don't want to download 4 cds of nonsense. Let me have one CD for a base install and ftp just the parts I want with pkg-get.
    • In line with the above, smpatch update seams to be painfully slow process. Pkg-get update for the base system please!
    • I haven't done any X-based installs, but my main bitch with the console install is that it is fairly inflexible. You get four options for package selection 1)really stripped down 2)stripped down 3)everything, 4)everthing plus OEM drivers. Finer grained control in package selection would be nice. Also nice would be a task-based pre-canned install set a la tasksel in debian or like what anaconda gives you in RH. Example: selecting a DNS task would install BIND but not X.
    • Please add some polish and make the default paths sane. Yes, I know this is a minor thing, but why do I have to spend several minutes adding /opt/sfw/bin:/usr/bin/:/usr/local/bin to my skel and .profile .
    • /root. You should have one. Yes, contrary to popular advice, I don't just su, I sometimes actually find it easier to log in as root. I don't like to clutter the / with junk. please make /root a default. Why do I have to munge /etc/passwd to get myself a /root home?
    • Would somebody please statically compile bash already? I've scoured google and I can't find one. Yes, I know sh and ksh, but I prefer bash and think it to be more capable and easier to use. It would be nice to have it available in single user mode.
    • Rather than statically compiling bash, wouldn't the better choice be to have it's dependencies all available in single user mode?
      • No, because if usr is not mounted, the libs would have to be available somewhere in / and I would be responsible for maintaining and updating them myself (if I bothered to remember to do it at all). That would just increase the PITA factor and I might as well grumble and use sh at that point.

        • Re:Wishlist: more pkg-get and flexible install (Score:4, Informative)

          by allenw (33234) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @10:11AM (#15524119) Homepage Journal
          if usr is not mounted,
          Don't make /usr a separate partition. Seriously. You gain nothing by doing it anymore.

          the libs would have to be available somewhere in /

          They already are. Most of the vital libraries in /usr/lib are softlinks back into /lib.

        • I meant to put the dependency libs in / -- is / not managed by solaris?

          All Linux distros do this (that I know of), since bash is often used early in the boot procedure way before /usr is mounted. It's not like it depends on GTK or anything:

          $ ldd /bin/bash
          linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
          libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0xb7f35000)
          libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7f31000)
          libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7e18000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f9c000)

    • Make then entire system available as a pkg-get repository, not just the blastwave contributed programs. I don't want to download 4 cds of nonsense. Let me have one CD for a base install and ftp just the parts I want with pkg-get.
      You're basically looking for how to setup a jumpstart server. You dump the CD contents onto an NFS server. From there, you can pkgadd till your hearts content.

      pkgadd, BTW, also supports quite a few URL constructs (e.g., pkgadd http://blah/blah [blah]). In this form, the other end of the pkgadd has to be a package stream, however, so that limits its usefulness with the DVD contents.

      I haven't done any X-based installs, but my main bitch with the console install is that it is fairly inflexible. You get four options for package selection 1)really stripped down 2)stripped down 3)everything, 4)everthing plus OEM drivers. Finer grained control in package selection would be nice. Also nice would be a task-based pre-canned install set a la tasksel in debian or like what anaconda gives you in RH. Example: selecting a DNS task would install BIND but not X.
      It's been a while since I've done the text install, but finer grain control has been there in the past. I'd be surprised if it was removed. That said, using Jumpstart combined with a profile will also get you finer grained control without having to do it manually for each install. Information on network-based installs and the like is available here [sun.com] and here [sun.com].

      Please add some polish and make the default paths sane. Yes, I know this is a minor thing, but why do I have to spend several minutes adding /opt/sfw/bin:/usr/bin/:/usr/local/bin to my skel and .profile
      ... except I don't have /usr/local/bin or /opt/sfw/bin on my machines. :) Also, /bin==/usr/bin on Solaris. That said, /usr/ucb really needs to get removed and /usr/sfw/bin and /usr/sbin added. (or perhaps that is what you meant?)

      Would somebody please statically compile bash already? I've scoured google and I can't find one. Yes, I know sh and ksh, but I prefer bash and think it to be more capable and easier to use. It would be nice to have it available in single user mode.
      Solaris 10 and up doesn't come bundled with *any* statically built binaries anymore. The /sbin/sh and friends are all dynamically linked. Building your own statically linked bash puts you at risk from a security perspective unless you rebuild it after every patch installation. This is because the static binary won't be getting fixes that were in the library fix.
      • Thanks for the great advice and information.

        Jumpstart would be great if I was setting up dozens of boxes, but I'm not. Just two or three. I still think pkg-getting off the internet would be the optimal solution if you just want a few boxes (although that would be leeching bandwith depending on how much you are downloading).

        Solaris 10 and up doesn't come bundled with *any* statically built binaries anymore. The /sbin/sh and friends are all dynamically linked.

        That suprises me. Isn't a static /sbin dire

        • What if /usr is down or needs a low-level fsck? I've always been told that that would mean you are totally screwed, unless you have static binaries in /.

          Lots of things to cover... :)

          1. By default, all UFS slices have logging enabled in S9+patches and up. The chances of requiring to do a low-level fsck are fairly remote.
          2. If you do lose /usr, chances are good you're going to want to recover it from backup anyway just to be on the safe side.
          3. In most cases, / and /usr are on the same disk. If you lose one
      • Not to mention that it's pretty hard to build a fully static binary because Solaris 10 does not include static analogs of libc and friends.

  • Sun is doing a thorough job (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bos (25159) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @09:23AM (#15523743) Homepage
    I used to work at Sun, and it's a company with a slow-moving internal culture. Pretty much any organisation that contains 30,000 people will necessarily not be zippy. The lack of speed says nothing about their intentions, though. For example, I've been talking to a number of Sun people over the past several months as they've been choosing a revision control system for OpenSolaris to use, and they've been keenly aware of the benefits of both doing things in an open manner and doing them carefully. They ended up choosing a wonderful revision control tool called Mercurial [selenic.com], but first they spent a few months evaluating the alternatives and, even better, writing up their evaluations and posting them in public. This is a very useful service to the open source community, as few people have time to evaluate tools in such depth, much less write in detail about why they did or not choose any of half a dozen alternatives.

  • OMG! Too long? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WidescreenFreak (830043) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @09:25AM (#15523758) Homepage Journal
    To allay early community concerns that the process of getting external code contributions accepted was taking too long,

    You're kidding, right? Solaris is one of the most mature operating systems out there. It runs some of the most powerful servers on the face of the planet. It is the core for a number of institutions, especially in the financial sector. I am not over-dramatizing when I say that Solaris runs a hell of a lot of crucial systems that make our lives easier in a lot of different ways.

    That being the case, do these people really think that Sun is just going to say, "Oh, I see. You tested it in a limited fashion and we tested it in a limited fashion in the matter of a few months. Okay, we'll release it to the customers who run massive databases and financial applications on our servers because of a few months of limited testing." I would much prefer Sun take a year if need be to make sure that any modifications will be completely compatible with as many of their customers and equipment as possible, particularly the higher-end systems and major corporate environments.

    I understand and share a lot of the aggravation that people feel when it comes to the lack of features, particularly device drivers, in Solaris. This is the one of the main reasons wy I think that Solaris has become so niche, particularly on the x86 side of things. If we're talking about modification to a common tool or enhancements to a graphical interface, okay, I don't see why it would take a year. But if Sun needs a year to make sure that a new device driver doesn't crash a SunFire 25K running a clustered Oracle server during end-of-month, transaction processing, then I'll grant Sun that year.

    • Re:OMG! Too long? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by twiddlingbits (707452) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @09:41AM (#15523860)
      Very good points. I for one don't want minimally tested extensions to Solaris (or any other O/S) to be on any system that controls my money! I wonder why no one mentions that IBM isn't doing ANYTHING to make AIX open source, nor is HP doing anything with HP-UX. And hell will freeze before MS does anything open-source with Windoze.

    • That being the case, do these people really think that Sun is just going to say, "Oh, I see. You tested it in a limited fashion and we tested it in a limited fashion in the matter of a few months. Okay, we'll release it to the customers who run massive databases and financial applications on our servers because of a few months of limited testing."

      That's right, all of the best software engineers in the world are working for Sun and everyone else is on crack ... and Linux is losing to Solaris in such a b

      • Wow. The clue meter is reading zero.

        One of the main reasons behind OpenSolaris is for people outside of Sun to make drivers, tools, utilities, etc. that can be included into future versions of (non-open) Solaris. Because of the nature of the systems that run on Solaris, it's critical for Sun to make sure that changes, regardless of how benign it might seem, have no impact on any kind of potential, mission-critical appliction. What one indeveloper might think is a great driver or enhancement for their p

  • OpenSolaris better run than Darwin (Score:3, Informative)

    by GrumpyOldMan (140072) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @10:25AM (#15524283)
    Sun and Apple both ship a proprietary OS based around an "open source" core. Sun's core is OpenSolaris, and Apple's is Darwin. Sun has done a far better job open sourcing their operating system. I do a 3rd party hardware device driver for both MacOSX and OpenSolaris. To compare Apple's to Solaris' "open source" OS
    is quite interesting:

    - Source code: Darwin: Must sign up for an Apple account to view source, source code for Intel kernel not even available. Solaris: Source code browseable on web, and available to anybody.
    - Installable OS: Darwin was never updated from 8.0.1, which was released over a year ago. Solaris: Solaris Express is released at least monthly.
    - Project direction: Darwin code appears after a MacOSX release. There is no way to see the source code of an upcoming MacOSX version, there is no way to even know what features will be present aside for signing up for a $500/yr ADC account. You are not allowed to talk about this in public. This is in stark contrast to OpenSolaris, where Sun engineers publically debate virtues of different features, and future directions on their forums/mailing lists, and anybody is welcome to contribute.

    In short, OpenSolaris is a real open source project. Darwin is a sham, and would not survive without Apple.

    • Sun and Apple both ship a proprietary OS based around an "open source" core. Sun's core is OpenSolaris, and Apple's is Darwin. Sun has done a far better job open sourcing their operating system.

      Agreed.

      I do a 3rd party hardware device driver for both MacOSX and OpenSolaris. To compare Apple's to Solaris' "open source" OS is quite interesting...

      This merely reflects the interests of the individual companies. Sun wants to sell more servers to both Solaris and Linux users. They are competing in the server

    • Specially from a user point of view, but also for servers and supercomputers, how do Linux and Solaris compare? I know there isn't an easy answer to this, but a knowledgeable person could shed some light on us.

      You're right, there isn't an easy answer. Basically Solaris rocks for some things, sucks for other things. There are situations where I would recommend one over the other, and situations where either one would be fine, and there are even situations where Solaris is the only option. It's not even

      • Or you could say "Anything you can run on Solaris you can run on Linux to some extent (DNS, DHCP, LDAP, Firewall, Apache, MySQL)." seeing as Solaris is older than Linux. :-)

        Though on the subject at hand, I run a cluster of Sun v20z's (and 2 v40z's) which run Solaris 10 x86_64. On the whole it's no different to running one with Linux other than the Sun system management tools for clusters are not as advanced as some of the Linux cluster tools sold (yes, sold for lots of money and are closed source) by the Li
        • It's difficult to compare several thousand task specific GNU/Linux distributions to the 3 or 4 opensolaris distributions. But here is my .02$ oversimplification:
          • GNU/Linux (e.g. SuSE)

          Good: Support for unusual or "cheap" X86 hardware. User-friendly default environment. Excellent package dependency and installation tools. Good support for the casual developer. Enormous number of hobbiest or unique applications packages are available.
          Bad: Poor API stability, short shelf life for drivers and commer

    • Re:So, I Wan't To Know Why... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xtifr (1323) on Tuesday June 13 2006, @09:12AM (#15523671) Homepage
      I don't have first-hand knowledge, but I can certainly think of a number of reasons why they might have done so...
      1. They found that Linux met their specific needs better, or
      2. they found that SUSE in particular met their needs better, or
      3. they got a better deal on support from Novell than Sun was willing to offer, or
      4. they wanted to use SUSE because it is (or was) a German company, while Sun is a US company, or
      5. they discovered that Linux admins are more plentiful/cheaper than Solaris admins in their area, or
      6. their brains exploded when they tried to decypher Sun's convoluted licenses (or maybe that's just me), or
      7. some combination of the above.

      I've used Solaris since...well, since before it was named Solaris, and I've used Linux since not long after the first experimental releases, and BSD for nearly as long, and I think all three are great systems, but they're not interchangable. They each have different strengths and weaknesses. If I had to pick just one, I'd probably pick Linux, as it seems to be the most versatile overall, but I'm very glad I don't have to pick just one, and can instead use the one that's best for a specific job or role.
      • i love it when people try something they have no clue about and call it a piece of crap. Way to blow it!
      • I've been a Unix administrator for 9 years, 7 of which on Solaris. We use linux as work, as well. And I have a lot of linux stuff at home.

        Solaris has its advantages in a big environment. Advantages you would never grasp by having it installed on your machine for an hour. One example is binary compatibility. If it worked on Solaris 2.6, 99% of the time it will work on versions 2.7, 2.8, 2.9 and 2.10. You may not care about that, but we're in a constant cycle of upgrading old systems .. and on Solaris, t

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