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Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.
Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.
Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:57 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216)Parent article: Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register)
Solaris definitely has some nice capabilities. I certainly expect it to be used, especially by current SPARC users who want to switch to much-cheaper x86 boxes.
But Solaris seems to have many of the same problems as the *BSDs, which are also quite mature: No drivers. Sure, it's a "simple matter of coding" a massive number of drivers. But Linux has far more drivers available to it, and I don't see where Solaris is going to get them. They can get a few from *BSDs, but the *BSDs have the same problem: few drivers compared to Linux. I don't see a massive groundswell of independent developers creating the drivers; the CDDL seems to be driving people away, and the CDDL prevents reuse of Linux drivers. Sun could spend the time to develop drivers, but I don't see that level of commitment.
If you decide to use Solaris, and buy the hardware specially for it, then it's certainly a plausible option. But unless there's a massive change, there will always be lots of hardware that Linux runs on, and Solaris doesn't (or only with great pain). Advantage: Linux.
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Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.
Posted Aug 17, 2005 16:26 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
One solution: Sun could dual-license the kernel, under the CDDL and the GPL. They would then immediately have access to all of the Linux device drivers, which would have to be ported, of course, but that wouldn't be hard, especially if they extended their kernel to support the right APIs. Of course, once that's done, any interesting pieces of Solaris can then be adapted and inserted into Linux, and the two separate kernels would gradually blur into each other. Management probably won't go for this, as it means that Solaris would eventually be absorbed into the Linux hive mind.Another solution: Sun could build something like ndiswrapper, to allow the use of Windows device drivers.
Third approach: BSD device drivers.
Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.
Posted Aug 17, 2005 18:02 UTC (Wed) by captrb (subscriber, #2291) [Link]
Sun ports some drivers from BSD. I was checking on driver support for a SCSI card a few weeks ago. The driver documentation explicity stated that the driver was ported from FreeBSD.
Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.
Posted Aug 17, 2005 20:09 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Linux gets SCSI drivers from there, too. (sym53c8xx springs to mind.)
Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.
Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:01 UTC (Thu) by captrb (subscriber, #2291) [Link]
The list of things Linux has gotten from BSD includes far more than just
a few SCSI drivers :-)