More DTrace envy

More DTrace envy

Posted Jul 2, 2008 18:26 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
Parent article: More DTrace envy

For that you need everyone pulling in the same exact direction, which may be why Sun is reluctant to turn over much of the governance of Solaris to the community. That may help them develop things more quickly, because there will be fewer barriers, but it won't help them to foster the kind of development community that characterizes Linux.

Perhaps this should have had the word "some" interjected in it?

That may help them develop some things more quickly,

I think that most people would agree that overall linux is developing at a much quicker pace than Solaris. These 2 high profile areas dtrace and ZFS are constantly mentioned as areas where Solaris is ahead of Linux (and I am not disagreeing,) but let's put things in perspective, there are many areas where linux beats the pants off of Solaris, so many that there just doesn't happen to be (only) 2 highly touted ones. :)

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To an extent, it's unfair comparing Solaris with desktop Linux distributions. If you compare
Solaris to RHEL or SLES, it doesn't fare as badly. For instance, desktop Linux distributions
have power management functionality that's still nowhere near present in any shipping versions
of Solaris. Enterprise Linux distributions aren't likely to ship that functionality until next
year, and they're the market that Solaris is competing with.

(Though, really, I expect we'll still be ahead on power management for a long time. Solaris
isn't anywhere near supporting a tickless kernel and that's one of the major factors in the
idle power consumption on modern hardware)