Sun'S Linux killer shows promise (Register) [LWN.net]

Sun'S Linux killer shows promise (Register)

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:26 UTC (Wed) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813)
Parent article: Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register)

Yellow journalism from the Reg, it couldn't be...

Solaris on x86 take 2. If I remember correctly, their earlier offering suffered from a lack of device driver support as well. They have probably shot themselves in the foot again with the CDDL, cutting off their access to all of the existing GPL device drivers and the Linux kernel. What does the CDDL mean for their use of the GNU utilities? I wrote SUN off back in 2000, before the dot com boom. One of their highly placed sales reps told me SUN saw Linux as a competitor at that time, I was trying to convince him to get SUN to better support Linux on Sparc. Oh well.

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The Driver Problem

Posted Aug 17, 2005 20:22 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Users can get the best of both worlds by running Solarix as a guest OS on Linux. Then the only device drivers Solarix needs are for the virtual devices Linux presents to guest OSes.

Once your program is tuned, you can move one or the other native. I.e., in production, either run the program directly on Linux, or run Solarix directly on target hardware (for which you happen to have drivers, or which you chose carefully to be certain you would).

Of course the former doesn't do Sun any good unless they sell you tuning services.