OpenSolaris 2008.11 [LWN.net]

OpenSolaris 2008.11

Posted Jan 19, 2009 16:25 UTC (Mon) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804)
In reply to: OpenSolaris 2008.11 by jd
Parent article: OpenSolaris 2008.11

NWAM is a comparatively new project, and so anything but seasoned - it's only enabled in OpenSolaris and not SXCE (the dev version of Solaris). OpenSolaris' IPSec support OTOH is leagues ahead of Linux according to a friend who's trying to set up a link. Interestingly Sun just finished reimplementing sockets without STREAMS (a core System V framework) for performance reasons.

Disk partitioning - this is a hangover of Solaris trying to be the same on SPARC and x86, where a single primary partition (with the same id as Linux swap!) that's then sliced up in the usual BSD way. OpenSolaris confuses things more by only supporting installing to ZFS, which normally uses GPT/EFI partitioning, except for booting where it needs to use the old slices. Support for extended partitions only just got put back (committed in Sun speak) in December, I'm not sure if they plan to support installing/booting from them since the case isn't public.

Qt apps - I haven't looked into this in detail, but my suspicion it's the Sun Studio C++ (sun preferred) vs G++ (lots of open source software only compiles with) ABI incompatibility rearing its head.

(Log in to post comments)

Qt and KDE apps

Posted Jan 20, 2009 5:21 UTC (Tue) by sbishop (guest, #33061) [Link]

The trouble is that Sun's C++ compiler and the non-standard standard library that it comes with don't mix well with the modern C++ used by Qt and KDE. A KDE PIM hacker, Adriaan de Groot, has put a lot of effort into making it all work. You can read about his efforts here:

http://people.fruitsalad.org/adridg/bobulate/index.php?/c...

He's not the only one working on this, of course. But I don't actually follow this closely.