Sun Says OpenSolaris Will Challenge Linux

E5Rebel writes "Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open source versions of its Solaris operating system. The company hopes to achieve for Solaris the kind of widespread uptake already enjoyed by Java. This means challenging Linux. 'There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,' according to Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun, who was chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and creator of the Debian Linux distribution. Isn't it all a bit late?"

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris
Won't a new one tear us,
Unless they first
Have Ballmer chair us,
Great documentation--
Now that could scare us.
Burma Shave

Re:OpenSolaris

How long would he have a job if he said "Sun is fifteen years behind Linux in penetration. The distance between Linux and OpenSolaris is insurmountable. We may find a niche with some enterprises, but we will never overtake Linux."

To be honest, I think it's all a good thing. Lots of free operating systems give guys like me more cud to chew, more options to bring to our bosses and/or clients.

Re:OpenSolaris

I recently had to try to read the spagetty which is the OpenSolaris TCP implementation and frankly it felt exactly like this "--". Great documentation--; for very line, through the entire monolythic single multimegabyte .c file.

What? [opensolaris.org] I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but it seems pretty good code to me. It's big, and there are some gotos, but it's all well explained. It definitely doesn't seem as bad as you make out.

Re:OpenSolaris

It is quite entertaining to see Murdock making such claims. He actually forgets that the greatest strength of Linux is that most of its codebase is understandable. While it may be missing some high end enterprise bells and whistles a relative newbe can sit down and understand most of the code straight away. Granted, his attempts at coding anything for it may end up being futile, but he will like it none the less.

I wonder how many Linux users are actually programmers? Like 1%, I guess? Sure, in 1991 when it was released, every user was a programmer. But now it's the opposite. Few users will do so much as recompiling a kernel, and even so, you don't need to be a programmer to do that.

On top of it he has the greatest possible documentation - the code and it is readable.

What? Are you on crack? Code is NOT documentation. You HAVE to add a manual somewhere, else it's "just a program". And that's the biggest problem with Linux. Documentation. There's a million things you can do and very few of them are documented. So you have to google everything. You'll have to end up at some obscure list server (which WILL be offline when you click on it, so pray that web.archive.org has a copy).

The other day I had this situation: A SCSI drive failed and md was degraded (raid-1). The drive was unaccessible, I didn't know that. So I went ahead and installed a new kernel. LILO was bitching about not being able to find /dev/sdb. So I go an run LILO again and forget to add the "-t" switch. WRONG - bootloader is fucked now.
I had to boot Debian Rescue, mount my drive (it's a LVM on MD). I figured, what I had to do was just very simple:

boot
mount the partition
lilo and read the config file from the partition... that didn't work, the files weren't there

ok, so I chroot into the directory. lilo. didn't work either, something about /proc
ls /proc. empty. what the hell? mount /proc. ls /proc. all there. lilo. bingo!

I would love to see a newbie doing all that guesswork just to recover a fucked MBR.

Regarding to the "high end enterprise bells and whistles": ZFS alone made me switch my Linux server to Solaris. I lost, completely lost, 320GB of data due to the piece of shit Truecrypt for Linux, supposedly "stable". Now I have a zpool with iscsi-exported zvols, that took like 2 minutes to make.

The great about solaris is that it WORKS. Right there and then: it just works. If it doesn't work, that's it. They don't pretend that it works only to have it hang at the worst moment (or worse: fuck 320GB of your data). I think that's another problem with Linux: version numbers. Serious programmers put 0.0.1-pre-alpha on their versions, so you kind of know what you can expect. Others just go and version 1.0 (and when you try to run that program, you realize that this isn't a 1.0 version). I don't think corporate folks like beta software, and that's what keeps Linux off the enterprise too.

Linux makes a great LAMP server, Asterisk server, etc. But that's because of the support behind those products. Asterisk, PHP, etc are backed by serious companies.

And don't let me get started on the stupid fights about the scheduler, while this isn't an issue on Solaris (http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/new_linux_sched uler_old_solaris), because that's what really makes me doubt about the Bazaar way of software development. Don't get me wrong, I think that's great, but when shit starts to fly around, I start looking for alternatives.

Re:OpenSolaris

I would love to see a newbie doing all that guesswork just to recover a fucked MBR.

As someone who has had to recover Solaris software raid out of f*** state on multiple occasions I can ensure you that it did not use to be any better. In fact it was worse. Booting, repopulating devices, devices missing, having your MBT f**** up. Yep. Been there seen that. An all of the great three - linux, bsd and solaris. All of them suck equally bad so I will not recommend a newbie doing any software raid in the first place. Disclaimer - I have not tried opensolaris for this though

I lost, completely lost, 320GB of data due to the piece of shit Truecrypt for Linux, supposedly "stable". If you have 320GB of data, if you are brave enough to play with LVM and software RAID and you also smack TrueCrypt on it. Well... You are expected to have enough clue to have backups... If you do not...

The great about solaris is that it WORKS. Right there and then: it just works. May I suggest that you run a couple of hundred of servers with it in an Internet facing environment first. I have suffered from it and I have seen the lot. F*** up filesystems, MBR cockups, software raid bloopers, applications managing to make the kernel through the Sparc equivalent of GPF from the depth of the scheduler (something linux has not done for a very long time), the lot. Granted it has been a while, and most of it was not under OpenSolaris which has supposedly been "improved". Though as people say, once you get burned you stay away from it.

the scheduler, while this isn't an issue on Solaris. Now do not get me started here either. Since the day of 2.5 every Solaris release has been released with a scheduler that has been heralded as the best and above the rest. In every f*** release the marketing droids has screamed that Solaris is right, everyone else is wrong everyone's else scheduler sucks and Solaris is the best. After that they accepted "everyone else" scheduler concepts in the next release. Sorry mate, people here have not forgotten the abomination of lightweight threads. People have not forgotten the screams of Solaris marketing droids about the greatness of the N:M model. There are also people who have had to program the actual scheduler internal priority tables and retune it for job loads different from default. All of this just to find out that the next release completely fucks it up to move to different semantics from the ground up. Rinse, repeat...

Do you like it or not scheduler is always a flamewar because every scheduler sucks. Just it sucks differently for different people so there will always be one to flame away (especially after failing a testcase miserably).

What is the platform?

What's the point of an operating system when you've got Java running on top of whatever is there? The OS is just a bootloader for the Java VM.

Sun's interest in pushing two separate platforms is baffling.

Re:What is the platform?

Sun has a lot more than just Java software, and has a lot to gain from having firster-than-first class support for Java in the operating system (e.g. kernel-level code caching, pushing code into kernel space, etc). Linux can technically have it all now too, with Java being GPLv2'd. But really, Sun has packages like StarOffice, which needs a lot more than just a JVM.

I encourage more competition for Linux. A free market is built on competition. Now that Microsoft is becoming a competitor rather than an oppressive regime, it'll be naturally selected out and increasingly powerful Unix systems will dominate the market. A Linux monopoly is not a good thing either, and whether BSDs or Solaris share the market, we all stand to benefit.

It'd be even better if we had some license consolidation, but hey, that's a pipe dream. I'd rather have license-incompatible code than no code at all because people refuse to use GPLvX.

Re:What is the platform?

we want a lean c one...

Dr Tanenbaum, please come back.. all is forgiven [minix3.org] :-)

Re:What is the platform?

Allow me to clarify. The JVM currently has a lot of clever optimizations like lock coarsening. It's proving it's pretty smart. Now, imagine if the JVM could detect a certain procedure is doing a LOT of user-kernel switches, and therefore can be moved to kernel space. When it needs to communicate memory back to userspace, it can be moved back in, ideally, only one switch. This is a pretty simple optimization which has a lot of room for improving performance. Some processes like servlet containers and their servlets could, in theory, be moved entirely into kernel land, without having to program any kernel code at all. I wonder if this is planned for any JVM?

Re:What is the platform?

The concept of competition does not apply to free software because competition implies a winner and a loser. In OSS, there is no winner, nor is there a loser. OSS projects progress by the input and enthusiasm of the users. There is no reason that a single "monopoly" project would necessarily lead to lower innovation. Since the project itself is not in any competition to lure users away from a competitor, there is no incentive either way to innovate except for the "itch" to keep making the project better.

A monopoly-style OSS project would lead to more innovation, in fact, because with more users wanting more features, the project will have both a larger pool of ideas to choose from as well as a larger pool of developers to implement and grow the project. Growth encourages growth, at least as far as OSS is concerned.

Competition, OTOH, draws finite resources away from the developer pool. While ideas may be freely shared, developer time cannot be, so a project that gets X number of hours of work will have monopolized that time for that project. Sometimes this work can be easily shared among other projects, but most of the time it cannot be shared without significant porting and adaptation. Competition fragments the development effort of all OSS projects.

The only competition that truly exists in OSS is the competition of ideas. The actual implementation of code is where this is fought. If idea A has more support than idea B, it will be idea A that gets implemented. In this way, in democratic fashion, the best ideas (alternatively, the most popular ideas) get turned into reality. When the small group of idea B supporters break away from the main project to proceed with implementing their idea, only time will be able to tell whether idea A or idea B was the right way to go. But it is an unnecessary competition and draws resources away from the improvement of the platform.

Competition against Microsoft or Sun is not the reason Linux improves over time. Rather, it is because users who want to use Linux implement the features that they want so that the platform grows to fit them. As it grows to fit them, it also grows to fit everyone. The additive nature of OSS sees to it that the best ideas stick around and the lousy ones get tossed away. That's not to say that Linux isn't stuck in the Unix rut, because it is. It's that if there were no Linux, there would be something else.

Re:What is the platform?

You've missed an important reality of FOSS development, which is that most projects have a core team (or, often, a Benevolent Dictator) which decides everything. No matter how much the users might want, that core team still decides what gets implemented and widely deployed. Look at Python vs Ruby - they're competing in a very similar space, and both growing in different directions, with uses for both of them. They simply cannot become one project without losing their individual advantages. But they can co-exist rather nicely, and cross-pollinate ideas that are compatible with both.

Linux has Linus as the benevolent dictator. Linux is freakin' awesome, but other projects do things differently, and can often justify them one way or another. If these projects are allowed to bring those ideas into reality, and demonstrate their value, Linux could copy the ideas.

Look at BSD's kqueue, spawned in FreeBSD. It's really good. Around the time it was spawned, Linux still had poll, and then later epoll, but epoll isn't that great. Now Linux is getting new event notification systems, of varying sanity, because kqueue has shown it can be done much better, even if the Linux guys don't quite agree with it in its entirety.

For all we know, Linux might end up re-architecturing to have natural SSI like DragonFly plans to have. DragonFly can be a great proof of concept. And if, a few years from now, the market situation is such that implementing drivers, software support, etc. is easy, the developer resources can focus on making a competitive, usable product instead of playing catchup with basic hardware support. We'll see an explosion of useful, interoperable operating systems, that would have otherwise died just trying to be runnable at all. *Especially* with virtualization platforms reducing the amount of code necessary to get a live kernel, and improving debuggability, deployment flexibility, etc. The mere anticipation floors me.

Re:What is the platform?

In OSS, there is no winner, nor is there a loser.

If 90% of people used a particular open-source program, I'd dare to call that program a winner. And if nobody used a particular open-source program, I'd dare to call that program a loser. The rest is idealistic crap.

Re:What is the platform?

I encourage more competition for Linux. A free market is built on competition. Now that Microsoft is becoming a competitor rather than an oppressive regime, it'll be naturally selected out and increasingly powerful Unix systems will dominate the market. A Linux monopoly is not a good thing either, and whether BSDs or Solaris share the market, we all stand to benefit.

Your faith in Microsoft being 'naturally selected out' is.... amusing. Considering, after years of barely adequate products, they still have 90% plus marketshare of desktops, and last I checked, they were still oppressing various standards bodies, hardware manufacturers, small software houses, etc., I think the corpse is still walking around, talking FUD, and otherwise making a nuisance of itself. The Linux Monopoly you fear is... a bit far-fetched just yet, IMHO. When I start seeing KDE desktops in some of the small offices I walk into, then I'll believe it.

Of course, this move by Sun is to try and make that happen; many non-computer people like 'simplicity', in the sense of getting everything from one computer vendor with minimum fuss on their part, assuming that things will work together more smoothly then. So, Sun offers a machine running OpenSolaris, with StarOffice preinstalled, as well as a really fast JVM. Worth a shot...

Re:What is the platform?

Why do you think Microsoft is scrambling for OOXML standardization? Because the document format lockin is a huge, huge part of Microsoft's monopoly strategy. If they're forced to be an equal player in the office suite space, making Office largely replaceable, then Windows is largely replaceable too. When Linux + KDE + Firefox + OpenOffice.org can replace a Windows + Office + IE setup with lower costs, minimal training and solid vendor support (Canonical, Red Hat, ...), how much incentive is there to run Windows any more?

Gradually the government switches, corporations switch, and finally users switch. The numbers indicate it's happening anyway, and the format war is just going to nail the coffin on Microsoft's monopoly. They never even had a monopoly on servers, gaming technology, etc. so the office is their last stand, and in a matter of days it will be confirmed that they have lost that too.

And of course, as the demand for Linux installations grows, and more vendors sell pre-packaged Linux, then hardware contracts will also require useful drivers or even documentation, and the hardware situation will be largely solved too. Sit back and relax, freedom has won and the liberation continues as planned.

Solaris

The kind of Solaris penetration sun really wants is at the corporate
level. There are a lot of Sun Servers out there so they'd like to increase
that further in companies who want cheaper hardware than the sparcs.
From a TCO point of view, add Solaris X86 to your existing Sparcs isn't
that big of a deal and Sun has made pretty good progress in making Solaris
10 much more on equal footing with Sparc based Solaris so now you only
need admins who are expert at one OS, you've got easier compatibility
with your software etc. Then from there I see a push to companies who
don't use Sparc hardware.

Re:This is basic Business 101 stuff..

If OpenSolaris sees adoption on low end machines, it would provide an incentive to enterprise level customers to go the whole hog and buy Sun hardware to run it on. What could be better from a corporate point of view than having a single vendor to go to for all your support and other issues, not to mention that my experience of Sun support is pretty damn good.

"Isn't it all a bit late?"

I don't think so, but then again, I'm still holding out for an Amiga comeback.

It's rarely ever too late

Consider MS with IE and then Mozilla with Firefox.

MS Word vs WordPerfect 5.1

What about Linux, itself was probably considered "too late" or such at the time "Everything's been invented/done".

What about when Redhat was top dog - who'd have thought that Ubuntu would come along and change a lot of things.

The point is, it's [almost] never too late, just sometimes you have a harder job ahead of you.

Re:It's rarely ever too late

yes, and there is something that solaris has that linux doesnt. ZFS.

If zfs is not ported to linux due to license problems, Ill install solaris on my home file/backup server.

Re:It's rarely ever too late

ZFS is irrelevant to the desktop user, though. (How many desktop users care what filesystem they have?)

However, a stable kernel ABI - which Linux doesn't have - is FAR more important, as it means hardware manufacturers are far more likely to release drivers for your platform that can just be installed with the hardware. If Solaris on the desktop started outnumbering Linux on the desktop, my bets would be it would have everything to do with hardware manufacturers being able to ship a driver for $random_hardware, and little to do with ZFS.

What can Sun bring to the table?

What can Sun Micro Systems bring to the table that rest of the Linux could not? Its name, some kind of relationships with corporations and provide "not a bunch of amateurs in their spare time, this OS is backed by professionals" kind of sales talk. But that niche is already occupied by IBM. As for SUNW's vaunted professionalism, they fumbled the lead they had in unix and are struggling to keep up. As for their corporate vision, these guys never realized until it was too late, that Windows OS was the loss leader, in grocery store parlance, and the real deal is the vendor lock in office documents, email addresses and calender applicaions. MSFT might have fumbled many balls and lacked vision on the technical side of the market, but when it comes to business side, MSFT has been nothing less than visionary in gunning for monopoly and achieving it. Now SUNW is going to take on Linux? yawn. Nothing to see here, move along, folks.

Sure, XFS

I can do XFS too (I know you made a mistake, and mean ZFS). However, I will point out:
$df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /mnt/t/something 16T 1.1M 16T 1% /mnt/t/t
$df -k .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /mnt/t/something 17100669952 1056 17100668896 1% /mnt/t/t

I just ran this on my laptop (an 'average' system, though I assume your system with 16 TB of storage is not really 'average'. I too can have big block devices with a single filesystem, big deal. Go commercial, ala GPFS and you can do bigger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_s ystems). I just have a hard time having enough storage to build such a filesystem. The biggest real block device (not sparse) I have readily available not on GPFS is an 8 TB ext3 filesystem.

ZFS's power is not the filesystem size. It unifies a lot of things historically in different layers. I.e. software raid, storage pools, dynamic new filesystems, long term snapshotting. Most of these can be done without ZFS, but the creating filesystems and long-term snapshotting can be done with such ease and efficiency when all the 'layers' work together, and that is what ZFS brings to the table. I will say ext3cow would give me the single feature that most appeals to me about ZFS, and the rest I can do using LVM and such.

In the end, ZFS is the single point that tempts me in general about Solaris, but I'm not about to jump platforms when I know enough 'tricks' to get 'good enough' out of my existing platform.

How can we lose?

I was first going to write a blurb saying "Great! How can we lose! Let the best OS win!"

But on second thought, I can think of one bad scenario: OpenSolaris and Linux end up with different groups of users, where-as they previously would have mostly used Linux. This makes it harder for *either* open-source OS to get enough market share to attract ISVs, manufacturers writing device drivers, etc.

I guess the best of both worlds is if Linux and OpenSolaris kind of merge, resulting in a single OS with the strengths of both (for example, the goodness of getting dtrace into Linux).

No, I don't think it's too late at all

Isn't it all a bit late?

No, I don't think it's too late at all. If it's a decent operating system and has certain advantages over Linux (regardless as to whether or not Linux in turn has certain other advantages over it), then it will eventually catch on. In the world of software, it's never too late to introduce competing technologies.

Sure it is fscking late !

(Just missed the FP, but still)
this chance was missed a few times. The last one was when Nexenta was treated like a mother-in-law.
If SUN wanted acceptance instead of l33t, GPL(v3) would have been the order of the day.
As long as they dangle about with CDDL, they might as well pass away. Don't get me wrong, CDDL ('cuddle') is quite a good FOSS licence. But it has its problems with a coexistence side-by-side to GPL. And GNU is, love it or hate it, thousands of great applications; and moreover a licence accepted by the majority of FOSS developers.

I hope(d) Ian would have the power to apt-ing Solaris, but he doesn't seem to. And when you read the OpenSolaris lists, you find as much ego-tripping as on OpenBSD or Mac. They rather sink with pkgadd.
And I cry for them, yes, because SunOS is the greatest kernel around, with limited hardware support. Back to licencing and square one.

Re:Sure it is fscking late !

No, the GPL has the problem of co-existing in the same app as CDDL.

Place blame where it belongs - GPL is the one bringing the heavy restrictions creating license incompatibility with EVERYTHING that cannot be converted directly to the GPL (including all BSD style licenses, if you do an exact reading of the GPL and BSD licenses.)

Eivind.

I remember when they opened the source

I remember when Solaris was going open source and everybody was saying how they would over take Linux... well, it hasn't happened... not even close. So why the optimism from Sun now?

Re:I remember when they opened the source

So what you're saying that you expected it to happen overnight?

I recall people saying similar things, only about Linux, back in the 90s. "Linux is the next big thing", Pundits and advocates trumpeted "Corporations will move to Linux as their preferred server/service platform", and so on. That pretty much did happen, but it took the better part of a decade to realize it. It took the one thing that a not even the most talented coders can't create during an all-night coding binge: Time.

OpenSolaris is a hair over 2 years old now. If you think about it, most decently sized shops change out comodity infrastructure every 3-4 years, a time frame pimarily goverened by hardware warranties. If an organization says "Let's try another OS the next time around... lets try Solaris" then the proper time to do that would be consumate with normal upgrade cycles. In other words, no one can reasonably expect one thing (Solaris in this case) to massively gain meaningful, measurable share instantly. It takes time. Just like it did with Linux.

fine

as long as Linux distros and Solaris play nice together. An open source solaris can only be good for the OSS community as a whole and will hopefully guarentee compatibility

Solaris has known stability...

Solaris has known stability in certain supportable configurations. Linux supposedly does too. I know that statement will get a lot of hackles raised but just hold on. I am a continuous Linux user since 0.99pl8 and I love it. But, as time moves on I see some instabilities creeping in as complexity rises and hardware moves on.

One of my boxes downstairs, a recent machine (less than 6 months old) running stock Debian (amd64) without a mod to the sources.lst has a slight instability (almost certainly in a driver) and crashes every week or so.

Now, one could say that I should replace the hardware which has the suspect driver (always seems to be on a disk access). Or I should get on the Debian lists and report it. If it was a Sun Solaris box I would know that the hardware I had was (or was not) supported. The word 'Supported' in the Linux world really (I am sorry) does not mean as much as it does to Sun.

Now I have other Linux boxen, (a little older) which have uptimes of over a year. No problems. But on odd occasions as this I would like to have stability and I can't find it. (Read, maybe don't have the time at the moment). And I need the box UP. I can't rebuild it AGAIN! I am on the 6th distro in an attempt to gain stability. That's an aside.

In Sun's world. You pay a little more for your hardware and 'Know' it is going to work.

I could not case less for Solaris,...

...or *BSD, or Linux. I am working with Linux, I am developing under Linux. My programs compile for *BSD and for Linux. I am pretty sure they would compile and run as fine under Solaris. So why am I using Linux? It has the best driver support, the best documentation, the best software support. Would I change when *BSD or Solaris get the same quality of support? No, why should I? They have to be better and solve at least one problem, I have with Linux. Currently I have no problems with it. Would I change if there was a problem, which one of the others solve? At once. As I said, I could not care less, which one of the three I use.

So please could anyone tell me, what are the USP's of Solaris?

Solaris as Hypervisor for Linux VMs?

After looking at newer Solaris offerings, one thing that struck me as a good option is to use Solaris as my Host/Hypervisor OS, and use Linux within Xen VMs on top of Solaris. You get Solaris advantages at the root { ZFS, Solaris Zones, Stable Unix platform, good management tools } while sti