Oh the irony [LWN.net]

Oh the irony

Posted Jan 17, 2007 2:14 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Oh the irony by Arker
Parent article: Sun to release OpenSolaris under GPL version 3 (Linux-Watch)

Yes. Hardware support is poor.

Also there is a great deal of propriatory drivers that are nessicary to even get to the same point as vanilla Solaris support. A lot of that that had come built-in had to be removed from OpenSolaris.

For instance 3D support is going to be bad.

But it may not be hard to turn around.

Personally I like the Linux kernel very much, but there are lots of aspects of it that make being a driver developer very difficult. I've had plenty of FREE SOFTWARE drivers that I could never get working after kernel upgrades.

Linux is relatively bug-free, but the majority of the problems in terms of stability and other bugs are going to come from the in-kernel drivers themselves.

So maybe people who are good drivers writers can spend their time writing new drivers and getting rid of bugs in old ones in Solaris (due to it's ABI stability) versus those same developers having to spend all their time just keeping up with the rate of churn in Linux.

Also stuff like Dtrace may help getting performance and other issues solved in much simplier ways then is currently possible in Linux. Like being able to write a set of rules and insert them into a running kernel to find problems versus having to patch and recompile a kernel a dozen times.

Who knows?

I know that right now certainly driver support is why you won't see anybody producing 'Desktop OpenSolaris' any time soon.

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Oh the irony

Posted Jan 17, 2007 12:56 UTC (Wed) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

it would be intriguing if we could get a driver compatibility layer (by tweaking OpenSolaris GPLv3 and Linux GPLv2) that would allow drivers to be written once and to run on both. Probably impossible considering the Linux devs have declared Linux to be a moving target and the interwoven nature of drivers and their respective kernel... a guy can dream can't he?

Oh the irony

Posted Jan 17, 2007 14:20 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

This is really just another request for a frozen binary interface in disguise. I think Linux has demonstrated that eschewing a binary interface can work very well, and does work very well for Linux. Trying to lock down the driver interface goes against Linux development practices, which are working fine.

Further, it is _desirable_ that if you are going to have "duplicate" free unix kernel projects that it be possible for their interfaces to diverge, so that different approaches may be explored and ultimately the systems may improve.

In short, I think the benefits for "shared drivers" would be much lower than the benefits for "duplicate drivers", and they might be lower with more manpower in terms of dealing with the unavoidable eventual in-kernel design cruft resulting from frozen interfaces. Solaris certainly has been, in the past, much less willing to change programming interfaces than Linux has been, so maybe Solaris alone will feel more comfortable to you. Personally, I'm hoping that OpenSolaris's openness encourages them to be willing to dump clearly awful solutions (how long was STREAMS the default?) and deploy improvements.