Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register) [LWN.net]

The Register has posted a lengthy review of Solaris 10, with many comparisons with Linux. "To attract the user base and developer interest that will really propel Solaris 10 forward, Sun would do well to think about it as a PC as well as a workstation. Generating enthusiasm and attracting a broad base of developers does involve giving people some fun in return, after all. Making SuSE Pro a fun distro and an excellent PC doesn't make it any less of a workstation, server platform, or development environment, a fact apparently lost on Red Hat."

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How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 13:33 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (3 responses)

According to that, Sun's offer is much better than Linux. Apart from the fact that the sound does not work, but who cares? Ah, and the network card was a pain to setup, but who needs network?

Ah, and for those who don't know, a bug in JavaScript can bring down your SuSE Linux 9.3 box.

Reminds me a quote by Mr Linus Torvalds: "They are smoking crack."

I am nowhere close to moving to any of Sun's stuff!

How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 13:59 UTC (Wed) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link] (1 responses)

It really depends where you'd want to use it. On a desktop I don't think
Solaris would be my first choice, because of lack of support of many
devices that I actually use. But on bigger servers there are features that Solaris has that I don't think will appear in Linux for quite some time.
One of the things that springs to mind is dtrace. The thing about articles like these is that they always focus on one aspect and then extrapolate.

How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:29 UTC (Wed) by ajross (guest, #4563) [Link]

DTrace seems undeniably slick. At least it does for the serious hacker working on system-level performance-limited tasks, which is (very sadly) a rather small and rapidly shrinking demographic. The average IT guy isn't going to get much use out of it.

But as with everything else, if it's really useful it won't be alone for long. The underlying framework for doing this kind of thing in linux is already present in kprobes. I googled the subject; here's someone's blog where they flame a bit about how much better DTrace is than kprobes for the working sysadmin:

http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/08/dtrace-equivalent-for-...

But they also link to this paper from IBM:

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/enable/linux/power/pdfs/lop...

Which points out this project:

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

...who appear to be working right now on a user-friendly front end to kprobes. There's definitely source in there; I have no idea what level of maturity they have reached, or whether their approach will pan out.

How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:12 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

According to that, Sun's offer is much better than Linux.

Where did the article say that? It seems to me it noted both strong and weak points (like the HW problems) compared to Linux. The writer concludes with:

We've had fun with Solaris 10. It's got virtues that we definitely admire. What it needs to compete with Linux will be easier to bring about than what it's already got. It could become a Linux killer, or at least a serious competitor on Linux's turf. The only question is whether Sun has the will to see it through.

I'm not worried. Competition is good (if it is fair). Besides, note the last sentence. Large companies like Sun are known for their talent for turning gold into lead (remember Java).

Sun'S Linux killer shows promise (Register)

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:26 UTC (Wed) by cdmiller (guest, #2813) [Link] (1 responses)

Yellow journalism from the Reg, it couldn't be...

Solaris on x86 take 2. If I remember correctly, their earlier offering suffered from a lack of device driver support as well. They have probably shot themselves in the foot again with the CDDL, cutting off their access to all of the existing GPL device drivers and the Linux kernel. What does the CDDL mean for their use of the GNU utilities? I wrote SUN off back in 2000, before the dot com boom. One of their highly placed sales reps told me SUN saw Linux as a competitor at that time, I was trying to convince him to get SUN to better support Linux on Sparc. Oh well.

The Driver Problem

Posted Aug 17, 2005 20:22 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Users can get the best of both worlds by running Solarix as a guest OS on Linux. Then the only device drivers Solarix needs are for the virtual devices Linux presents to guest OSes.

Once your program is tuned, you can move one or the other native. I.e., in production, either run the program directly on Linux, or run Solarix directly on target hardware (for which you happen to have drivers, or which you chose carefully to be certain you would).

Of course the former doesn't do Sun any good unless they sell you tuning services.

Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:57 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (4 responses)

Solaris definitely has some nice capabilities. I certainly expect it to be used, especially by current SPARC users who want to switch to much-cheaper x86 boxes.

But Solaris seems to have many of the same problems as the *BSDs, which are also quite mature: No drivers. Sure, it's a "simple matter of coding" a massive number of drivers. But Linux has far more drivers available to it, and I don't see where Solaris is going to get them. They can get a few from *BSDs, but the *BSDs have the same problem: few drivers compared to Linux. I don't see a massive groundswell of independent developers creating the drivers; the CDDL seems to be driving people away, and the CDDL prevents reuse of Linux drivers. Sun could spend the time to develop drivers, but I don't see that level of commitment.

If you decide to use Solaris, and buy the hardware specially for it, then it's certainly a plausible option. But unless there's a massive change, there will always be lots of hardware that Linux runs on, and Solaris doesn't (or only with great pain). Advantage: Linux.

Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.

Posted Aug 17, 2005 16:26 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (3 responses)

One solution: Sun could dual-license the kernel, under the CDDL and the GPL. They would then immediately have access to all of the Linux device drivers, which would have to be ported, of course, but that wouldn't be hard, especially if they extended their kernel to support the right APIs. Of course, once that's done, any interesting pieces of Solaris can then be adapted and inserted into Linux, and the two separate kernels would gradually blur into each other. Management probably won't go for this, as it means that Solaris would eventually be absorbed into the Linux hive mind.

Another solution: Sun could build something like ndiswrapper, to allow the use of Windows device drivers.

Third approach: BSD device drivers.

Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.

Posted Aug 17, 2005 18:02 UTC (Wed) by captrb (guest, #2291) [Link] (2 responses)

Sun ports some drivers from BSD. I was checking on driver support for a SCSI card a few weeks ago. The driver documentation explicity stated that the driver was ported from FreeBSD.

Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.

Posted Aug 17, 2005 20:09 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Linux gets SCSI drivers from there, too. (sym53c8xx springs to mind.)

Used, yes. Dominate, doubtful. Eliminate, highly improbable.

Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:01 UTC (Thu) by captrb (guest, #2291) [Link]

The list of things Linux has gotten from BSD includes far more than just
a few SCSI drivers :-)

Desktop Flamebait?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 15:46 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] (6 responses)

KDE is certainly more popular than Gnome among Linux users, and most would agree that it's by far the better of the two desktops.

Is there a source to support this contention or is it just bigoted flaimbait?

Desktop Flamebait?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 16:06 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, see all the gripes about Gnome posted to the GTK article from a few days ago, for starters.

Shrug. I prefer KDE, so for me, KDE is better -- although there are a couple of Gnome apps I use with it. If someone can come up with an objective measurement of "better" for desktops, then we can have a rational discussion about it.

Desktop Flamebait?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 16:15 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't begrudge you a preference for KDE -- or even gripes about Gnome. I happen to prefer Gnome and have gripes about KDE, but whatever. We can agree to disagree. What we must not do is make unsubstantiated factual claims. The article seems to have crossed the line by claiming a vast popularity gap in favor of KDE. That is an objective and measurable claim. Is it also true? Then show me the evidence. Otherwise, don't claim KDE is more popular on the strength of a few local anecdotes.

Desktop Flamebait?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 16:53 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Yeah, it's flamebait for sure.

Five years ago it probably would have generated 100+ comments, and maybe still would on slashdot. But both Gnome and KDE have gotten so big that they've had the fun squeezed out of them. It seems that not many people care to debate this anymore, other than maybe people closely associated with either of the projects. It's sort of like debating which is the better car, a Buick or a Mercury. Who cares.

I find it interesting that keybindings generate more passion now days than either Gnome or KDE.

Desktop Flamebait?

Posted Aug 19, 2005 17:49 UTC (Fri) by acli (guest, #31955) [Link]

Flamebait or not, for non-English users there is an objective test, namely support of their non-English languages.

KDE cannot display Chinese properly in many cases. Case closed.

Desktop Flamebait?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 19:10 UTC (Wed) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

Well, at home I prefer the KDE desktop, but Gnome applications. :-)

And on my 300Mhz laptop I don't have a desktop at all, just a window manger (icewm). I wonder what is the article writer's definition of a desktop?

Btw. The reason why I prefer KDE desktop is KMail as at work I've started to really dislike Evolution (I need to use it at work as on my RedHat for some reason all KDE program crash).

Evolution (1.x version) is full of all kinds of little annoyances; copy of editor window text disappears after the window is closed, it freezes often (mainly with calendar mails, but also with ldap and e.g. when I got 30 000 bugmails from Bugzilla in 5 mins.), opening new mail window is slow etc. On the positive side it has never lost a mail (unlike older Mozilla mailer) and works quite well with MS-Exchange (as compared to e.g. older Thunderbird version), its usage (responsiveness etc.) is just more annoying than of any other mailer.

Desktop Flamebait?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 22:20 UTC (Wed) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]

The Register is the National Enquirer of the IT world. I'd take everything they say with a huge grain of salt and do your own investigation before believing any of their "facts."

Sun Shmun....

Posted Aug 17, 2005 16:43 UTC (Wed) by dreadnought (guest, #27222) [Link]

Solaris is an awesome platform and Solaris 10 and tools are outstanding but Sun is too much into the bait and switch game with its x86 initiatives. Lets face it all they want to do is sell you more expensive hardware, Sun Hardware. For a company with their experience base they could take Linux and make it work for them but instead they have lost touch with the reality of the data centers and IT departments of the world. Linux - warts and all - offers far far more choice than any other vendor out there. This seems to be taking Sun by surprise. Whats customers have choice?!?!?! As a Systems Manager the last thing I want is "Lock in" and Linux works well enough to allow me to do the projects I am handed with the budgets I have on the hardware of my choice.

Sanity check for performance

Posted Aug 17, 2005 16:58 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (1 responses)

Of course a lot of the software is common between Sun's product and our favorite distributions, so all those Sun developers working on userspace count for a lot. Much better that than having Sun waste its efforts on CDE.

But having an alternative, freely-licensed kernel means there's a great opportunity for Linux kernel hackers to get a performance sanity check. As long as you're automatically building and testing new versions of Linux to look for performance issues, why not do daily benchmarks vs. Solaris on the same hardware?

Sanity check for performance

Posted Aug 17, 2005 17:11 UTC (Wed) by JohnBell (guest, #12625) [Link]

... or FreeBSD vs. Solaris 10 x86 vs. Linux for that matter

Basics

Posted Aug 17, 2005 20:41 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Installed Solaris 10 x86 on a test system and it still lacks basic stuff that's been around in modern Linux distros for quite some time:

- decent packaging system
- decent installer
- decent hardware support

Had to go through several boxes before it actually installed.

I'm sure there are goodies in there that aren't in Linux, but unless I really, really needed some of those goodies, I would not bother. On Sparc, well, probably a different story. But that's an island in itself these days. Once you venture in, your choices are really limited.

Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register)

Posted Aug 17, 2005 23:36 UTC (Wed) by neoprene (guest, #8520) [Link] (1 responses)

Sun is a Corporation promoting a Product for profit.

"Linux" is a concept and a community. Ownership of GPL code is certain, it cannnot be taken away from you.

How could you possibly compare a _concept_ to the schemes of a Corporation to extract profit?

"Opening" Solaris may calm current customers eying the free Linux community into not dumping Sun, but why would any current GPL user accept bondage?

"Opening" Solaris_x86 was a good idea commercially speaking. Their current ultrasparky customers will continue to be locked in and they can capture new business with Opterons and expensive add-on services and software. I hope they make a lot of good product and make a ton of money and pay it out to the stockholders.

Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register)

Posted Aug 18, 2005 4:10 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> Ownership of GPL code is certain, it cannnot be taken away from you.

Ownership of CDDL code is certain, it cannnot be taken away from you.

> why would any current GPL user accept bondage?

While I agree that the GPL is better, the CDDL isn't "bondage" by any means; it's a "weak copyleft" somewhat like the LGPL. See http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing/opensolaris_license/:

3.1. Availability of Source Code.

Any Covered Software that You distribute or otherwise make available in Executable form must also be made available in Source Code form and that Source Code form must be distributed only under the terms of this License. ...

But also:

3.6. Larger Works.

You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Software with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product. ...

Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register)

Posted Aug 20, 2005 20:04 UTC (Sat) by brianomahoney (guest, #6206) [Link]

OK this is just a bit better quality journalistic COMMENT than that we
are used to with M$ but:

I cannot remember the last time I could not stop a user land application,
JavaScript, X, Java or anything else or the last time I had to SSH into
a Linux box because <CTL>-<ALT>-<BS> would not restart X or <CTL>-<ALT>-<Fn>
would not give me a text console, where I could (root) login. So this is just FUD.

The driver issue is much more serious, I SUN think that they can just build
Solaris pre-loadable boxes they are in the last decade but one. Please wait till the next release, it will have XXX support.

D-probes is nice, mainly for the POLISH but Kprobes is enaough, and more flexible; but that is not the point, what is is the very obvious marketing x
in house development spin given to it ... "Whey look at what our smart dev-team came up with now, ... it will rock the competition" _not_! The
fundamental reason SOO MANY, ALMOST ALL computer companies have lost their way after the first generation is that, for unexplored,
reasons this marketing + in-house-dev duopoly never produces what the market needs,
in a timely way, and seems positively inimical to good engineering.

The difficult question are (a) do SUN see this, (b) does the OpenSolaris
sponsor have the needed clout?

Sadly, if you just look at Java, you see how hard this is, at so many levels.