Could anybody summarize what it is that makes opensolaris worth maintaining in this situation, e.g. compared to linux as an alternative?
I hardly know solaris apart from working on a sun mainframe for some time. Are there things opensolaris is particularly good at? Is it a matter of familiarity that makes people want to use that system? Other technical or usage merits? Available software that somehow can't work on linux or alternatives?
Posted Aug 16, 2010 9:35 UTC (Mon) by CChittleborough (subscriber, #60775)
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OpenSolaris has some really nice features, including:
- ZFS, an advanced file system with an integrated storage manager
- DTrace, a universal tracing tool
- Doors, the best IPC facility out there for Unix/Linux
- Service Management Facility
- Solaris Containers
(Wikipedia has articles about all of these. The article about Doors is named "Doors (computing)". Disclosure: I started that article.)
I'm not sure about SMF, but IMO the other items in that list are better than their Linux equivalents (at least for now -- when btrfs is officially released, I expect it to outshine ZFS).
Features like these are aimed at people running high-end servers, not desktops. If you ever have to use Solaris, as opposed to administering it, the first thing to do is install the Gnu userland utilities.
Illumos: new hope for the OpenSolaris community?
Posted Aug 16, 2010 20:52 UTC (Mon) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324)
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Thanks. I forgot about ZFS, should have thought of that with all the btrfs talk. I'll take a look at the other points.
> Features like these are aimed at people running high-end servers, not
> desktops. If you ever have to use Solaris, as opposed to administering
> it, the first thing to do is install the Gnu userland utilities.
That's indeed what I remember doing when I was working on that Sun machine - notably the file utils, tar and find.