OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H)

...vs two hours for SystemTap on Fedora 13

yum install systemtap
debuginfo-install kernel

It has been quite a while since I futzed around with Solaris (around 2000). Solarites were known to belittle Linux for its lack of sysadmin tools back then. My experience was quite the contrary (with Red Hat in particular). Software updates are almost painless in Linux. Software availability was much better with Linux, either as packages or easy-to-build source (Solaris had its quirks, which required scary stuff like replacing libc for halfway sane operation, plus the customary "GNU > /usr/local" to get a reasonable shell and other basic tools, ...). The "easy to use" tools were such heavy resource hogs, and required Sun's bloated version of X, that they were completely useless in practice. Plus you couldn't even look sideways at the configuration files without giving them fits.

Besides, our Solaris server got compromised remotely due to a long-known vulnerability in said "administration tools", which we specifically had removed. A software update (re)installed them silently... Needless to say, an operating system than can be compromised remotely in a jiffy and stays that way for a couple of years isn't my first option. The machine was soon converted to Linux, and we never looked back.

Have had taking a new look at Solaris 10 on my ToDo list for some time... will set up a virtual machine to do so one of this days.

Yes, I started to read though that and found first of all a (mis)characterization of Linux/OSS advocates as a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics and poking fun at fanatics in general. Entertaining read, that part, but it says nothing relevant about Linux vs Solaris (or open source vs closed source Unices, for that matter). Except that it shows that the Solaris camp has its complement of rabid fanatics too.

Didn't look much further, sorry. A technical comparision by someone who understands the various systems would be most wel come... but I'd probably better get my copy of the ULSAH and a quiet long weekend.

Bah... Solaris 2 (or some such) had disk quotas. That's where I learned about them, in fact.

I already mentioned "nicely packaged up distributions", didn't I?

Yes, but you make it sound like gloss when, in fact, decent package and dependency management is essential, as various other people have already pointed out. It was also a major priority of Project Indiana: you know, the thing where the Debian guy was brought in to add things that people found indispensable in Linux.

One thing I missed is cheaper workforce - more people know Linux, so it's easier to find a sysadmin.

You know, a load of people prided themselves on knowing Solaris and SunOS before it, especially amongst adopters of Linux, so Linux didn't exactly start off with any numerical advantage in this respect.

However, in technical aspects, from filesystems to things as basic as synchronisation (Linux still uses anachronic spinlocks), Solaris is years ahead. Thus my question.

Well, the "years ahead" Solaris isn't seeing that much action in, say, supercomputers, so it doesn't hold all the good cards by any means. Why Linux is used so widely isn't just down to specific technology.

As for the license and company parents - same thing in Linux, except that GPL is more restrictive (according to Stallman's interpretation it's viral) and you have several corporations instead of one; not much of a difference, I think.

You cannot be serious! Firstly, the CDDL is a copyleft licence, but one that isn't compatible with the GPL, which says more about Sun not wanting to relinquish control of their software than it does about the GPL. Secondly, there are corporations developing Linux but they influence the direction of the project mostly on technical merit, not on having a bunch of puppet bureaucracies set up by a single corporation, which have obviously worked out so well for all of Sun's other open source projects, too.

So, apart from various technical essentials that were neglected in Solaris for about a decade or so, plus various community and licensing considerations, what else would make people switch to Linux? Isn't this like asking what the Romans have done for us? Maybe more than you're willing to accept.

However, in technical aspects, from filesystems to things as basic as synchronisation (Linux still uses anachronic spinlocks), Solaris is years ahead. Thus my question.

Exactly the opposite... on our aging SPARC IPX machines at the time Solaris barely crawled, Red Hat ran just fine, and gave that iron a few extra years of useful life (Solaris wasn't updated on them anymore). Linux was fast and lean, Solaris was bloat at its worst.

BTW, what is "anachronic" about spinlocks? They do work, and have low overhead. Sure, it looks like the in-kernel synchronization primitives for Solaris are less (and simpler to use); but if the cost is that the system runs much slower, no thanks.

Filesystems? Like the in-kernel MS-DOS filessytem they had, that was so incredibly awfully slow (I seem to remember minutes copying a few smallish files) that the very first thing we did on any Sun machine here was to install mtools to get bearable floppies? Like all the filesystems Linux handles today (I believe almost all important disk partitioning schemes are supported, as are most filesystems, even very obscure ones), and which Solaris doesn't understand at all?