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.
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.