How much did Sun pay for that? [LWN.net]

How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 13:33 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018)
Parent article: Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register)

According to that, Sun's offer is much better than Linux. Apart from the fact that the sound does not work, but who cares? Ah, and the network card was a pain to setup, but who needs network?

Ah, and for those who don't know, a bug in JavaScript can bring down your SuSE Linux 9.3 box.

Reminds me a quote by Mr Linus Torvalds: "They are smoking crack."

I am nowhere close to moving to any of Sun's stuff!

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How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 13:59 UTC (Wed) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link]

It really depends where you'd want to use it. On a desktop I don't think
Solaris would be my first choice, because of lack of support of many
devices that I actually use. But on bigger servers there are features that Solaris has that I don't think will appear in Linux for quite some time.
One of the things that springs to mind is dtrace. The thing about articles like these is that they always focus on one aspect and then extrapolate.

How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:29 UTC (Wed) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

DTrace seems undeniably slick. At least it does for the serious hacker working on system-level performance-limited tasks, which is (very sadly) a rather small and rapidly shrinking demographic. The average IT guy isn't going to get much use out of it.

But as with everything else, if it's really useful it won't be alone for long. The underlying framework for doing this kind of thing in linux is already present in kprobes. I googled the subject; here's someone's blog where they flame a bit about how much better DTrace is than kprobes for the working sysadmin:

http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/08/dtrace-equivalent-for-...

But they also link to this paper from IBM:

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/enable/linux/power/pdfs/lop...

Which points out this project:

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

...who appear to be working right now on a user-friendly front end to kprobes. There's definitely source in there; I have no idea what level of maturity they have reached, or whether their approach will pan out.

How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:12 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

According to that, Sun's offer is much better than Linux.

Where did the article say that? It seems to me it noted both strong and weak points (like the HW problems) compared to Linux. The writer concludes with:

We've had fun with Solaris 10. It's got virtues that we definitely admire. What it needs to compete with Linux will be easier to bring about than what it's already got. It could become a Linux killer, or at least a serious competitor on Linux's turf. The only question is whether Sun has the will to see it through.

I'm not worried. Competition is good (if it is fair). Besides, note the last sentence. Large companies like Sun are known for their talent for turning gold into lead (remember Java).