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Sun Says OpenSolaris Will Challenge Linux
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 04, 2007 07:57 AM
from the color-us-skeptical dept.
from the color-us-skeptical dept.
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?"
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OpenSolaris (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:OpenSolaris (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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What is the platform? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun's interest in pushing two separate platforms is baffling.
Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:4, Funny)
Dr Tanenbaum, please come back.. all is forgiven [minix3.org]
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Re:What is the platform? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Solaris (Score:4, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
"Isn't it all a bit late?" (Score:5, Funny)
It's rarely ever too late (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
If zfs is not ported to linux due to license problems, Ill install solaris on my home file/backup server.
Parent
Re:It's rarely ever too late (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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What can Sun bring to the table? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, XFS (Score:4, Interesting)
$df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
$df -k .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
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_
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.
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Sure it is fscking late ! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
No big deal. Can easyly be done. (Score:5, Interesting)
2.) Use a pimped zshell as shell with a prime quality default setup and some good-looking, neat tutorials to get the Bash crowd in line for it.
3.) De-suckify the entire grafical desktop stack, unifing GTK and QT with the same, one and only default theme that looks good.
4.) Use APT as distribution system.
5.) GPL Solaris and remove the distinction between Solaris and OpenSolaris.
6.) Build a marketing army to push Solaris as "Mac OS X" for all non-Apple computers and 'the better open Unix variant / the better Linux' at the same time.
There's only one big problem in all this: Sun. They are a technology driven company. Gigs like Apple or Canonical (Ubuntu) are vision driven and have a single boss who's considered king. They have a vision and they convey it to any opinion leader in the industry they care about.
Suns staff wouldn't know a well designed desktop or a constently marketed brand if you showed it in their face. Just look at the video presentations from JavaOne. Anyone delivering such a presentation at Apples MacWorld would lose his job the next day. Sun is putting out CEO computable marketing babble and if at all they will only come through half way.
Mind you, Solaris overtaking Linux is possible. Theoretically. Solaris has the prime advantage of not having an image torn to tiny bits and pieces by a thousand distributions - if Sun would do all the things mentioned above they could seriously capitalize on this distinction to Linux. But as I mentioned allready, they lack the vision and conceptual consitency to really pull through with it. That's my experience anyway.
Re:I remember when they opened the source (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Too late, too irrelevant (Score:4, Informative)
No [tiobe.com], hardly.
It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java;
Not in the business world, where Swing clients are probably second only after Visual Basic. Sun is also currently putting a lot of effort into improving the JVM desktop experience [java.net].
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