11 ms·

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

dozzie 9y ago
> As someone who's never used Solaris [...], can someone comment on why [...] I can't, because I'm not somebody who's never used Solaris.
- marvy 9y ago
  If you have indeed used Solaris, you could have left a more useful comment. Your creative use of ellipsis is totally cheating by the way: you did not preserve the structure of the sentence.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    Oh, but I did preserve the structure. It's OP who doesn't understand how this grammatical construction works, and this particular mistake irritates me so much.
    - marvy 9y ago
      This preserves the structure better: > As someone who's never used Solaris [...] I'm curious: can someone [...] Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma!
      - dozzie 9y ago
        > Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma! No, I didn't left out anything important to the structure nor did I replace a colon with anything. The thing is that you and I were looking at two different sentences, because OP silently edited his comment (I only noticed that now). The original sentence was "As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits, can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?"
        marvy 9y ago
        Fine :) The fact remains: given you knew what was meant, you could at least have answered the question as intended, in addition to nitpicking. (I would never tell someone to stop nitpicking. Well, almost never.) See also https://xkcd.com/1576/ https://xkcd.com/1576/
erentz 9y ago
It was solid, well laid out, consistent, and it advanced good technology seemingly far ahead of its time. ZFS, dtrace, zones (i.e. containers), FireEngine networking, etc.
- busterarm 9y ago
  dtrace has got to be one of the best and most useful (when you need it) pieces of software ever written, tbh.
- sintaxi 9y ago
  I'd add SMF to the list as well which systemd seems to take inspiration from.
  - JdeBP 9y ago
    Actually, it was SystemXVI that was inspired by the SMF. * https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/ https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770) systemd was inspired by upstart, according to Lennart Poettering.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gedy 9y ago
It was a solid Unix, it added some diversity to our OS choices, and for a time in the 90s Sun had some really stylish hardware that ran Solaris.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ams6110 9y ago
There was a time, so I'm told by Oracle DBAs, that Oracle was developed on Solaris first, then ported to other platforms. So, Solaris had the best support, and least problems. Bugs were fixed there first. To quote, "If you're going to run Oracle, you might as well run it on Solaris" I guess that is not the case any more.
- chii 9y ago
  > least problems. I guess if oracle wants those support contracts, they can't have an operating system that doesn't need it!
  - craigvn 9y ago
    I've always thought Oracle's primary goal was to keep Oracle engineers in employment.
    - tatersolid 9y ago
      Oracles primary goal for the last two decades seems to be the finance of racing sailboats.
      - rodgerd 9y ago
        So, Ferrari, then.
- newscracker 9y ago
  This comment is probably more about Oracle than about Solaris as such. IIRC, there was also a time when Oracle partnered with HP and a joint selling point was that Oracle ran fastest on HP-UX. I can't seem to find a link for this. Later, there was also a bitter fight and a lawsuit between the two companies on Oracle dropping support for Itanium based machines from HP. [1] [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/hp-awarded-3b-in-damages-from-oracle-over-itanium-database-cancellation/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/hp-aw...
somnium_sn 9y ago
For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular. For others, like me, who learned Solaris fairly late (2006), Solaris was a testbed for one of the best operating system technologies out there. Modern filesystem (ZFS), dynamic tracing (dtrace), containerization (zones), dependency management during boot (svc) and virtual network stack (crossbow), have been in solaris way before Linux. Most of modern Linux tools, such as eBPF, systap, btrfs, etc are a direct answer to the research done by Sun. So some are nostalgic as it's their first experience, others, because it felt like a really good operating system a few years ago (despite it's quirks).
- privong 9y ago
  > For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular. This was my case. I was playing around with Linux, both on my own machine at home as well as with a server at my high school (shell accounts being a perk of joining the computer club). While learning about Linux I also picked up some of the history of UNIX. At some point I learned that you could get a copy of x86 Solaris 7 for for < $50 (I can't remember if this was an educational offer or a developer network offer). But I ordered one and was really excited to get to use a real UNIX. I played with it for a while, but ended up going back to Linux for my own computers. Later, in the last year and a half of undergrad and my first year of grad school, I used a Sun Ultra 5 to do the work for and write my first published paper and do much of the work that would end up becoming my MS thesis and my second paper (with some of the heavy lifting outsourced to an Ultra 10 that a postdoc in the research group was using). Every few months I browse ebay and look at SPARC machines. Though it's not really practically useful, I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again.
  - asveikau 9y ago
    > I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again. I have an ultra 5 in a closet that hasn't been powered on in the current decade. Was thinking of giving it a spin in light of recent news.
ajross 9y ago
Sun absorbed most of the original BSD team the drove the Unix breakout from academia. Their hardware wasn't necessarily all that groundbreaking (starting with 68k boxes like everyone else, then moving to an in-house RISC platform that lagged MIPS in most ways), but as software SunOS basically defined Unix for most of a decade. Now, really that product (SunOS) is not the "Solaris" that exists today. Solaris was a somewhat kludgey merger of the early BSD code with the System V tree from AT&T, done as much to settle legal issues as for market reasons. But nonetheless when we all look back to the golden days of unix, we see Sun's logo.
BrainInAJar 9y ago
Sun was a company that very much focussed on correctness. "Good enough", wasn't. Features were delivered complete and solid. The downside of that is that features were delivered infrequently, and they sacrificed a lot of performance to do the correct thing.
Keyframe 9y ago
Nostalgia-wise, SunOS (later Solaris) was my first peek at the 'real' computers which weren't what I was exposed to at home (Commodore/Amiga, Spectrum home computers, occasional DOS). Likewise with IRIX. Also, as others have said - it was a good solid OS.
blinkingled 9y ago
I know many people mentioned dtrace, ZFS, mdb.. in describing Solaris' merits but it was not a very good OS in 1997 when I first got my hands on it. It was slow - the SPARC hardware didn't help and ZFS/MDB/Dtrace did not exist back then. But I think back then for Enterprises Solaris was the most easily accessible platform SPARC hardware came with and it had a good run for a short while. It was only when Linux started to seriously kick its ass that Sun engineers took it upon themselves to do some great work and make Solaris interesting again - I remember they had a policy - if something is slower than Linux it was a bug. I guess it all came in too late (including the Open Source part ) and people did not like being tied to SPARC hardware and CDDL was a buzz kill for whatever reasons.
- bcantrill 9y ago
  Ha -- isn't that ever the truth! When I came to Sun in 1996, Solaris was really good at only two things: scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it. Morale wasn't necessarily high (the early history of Solaris had been brutal, and it had only been due to the budding success of 2.5 and UltraSPARC that engineers were beginning to feel forward-looking), and it took us several more years just to get the house in order. MDB came out of this period, as well as important primordial tooling like lockstat(1M). But as we were getting the OS to work as advertised, we had bigger ideas brewing. In Bonwick's case, it was ZFS, for me it was DTrace, for Tucker it was zones, for Casper it was least-priv, etc. I know that it looks like it was in response to Linux and/or as a result of the dot-com bust (and it's impossible to say to what degree these were contributing factors), but I can tell you that from the epicenter it felt much more like a natural evolution than a competitive response. That said, I know that the competition didn't hurt, and you're certainly right about Linux finally causing us to take small-systems performance and system call latency seriously!
  - blinkingled 9y ago
    > scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it Yep - Only ever had one time when it hosed on us (100 people team, many running JVM based applications and some doing load tests on it - IIRC it was 2.6 days.) And there wasn't a challenger in sight as far as SMP goes(h/w and s/w both).
pmorici 9y ago
A lot of us that got CS and Engineering degrees in the 90's and early 2000's probably learned to program on Solaris. At least at the school I went to most of the CS department was using Solaris and Sun equipment.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
richard_todd 9y ago
If you are interested, this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered, and what was wrong with Oracle's approach, leading to little-known open-source forks. https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc (entitled: Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos)
ericd 9y ago
You never really get over your first love.

dozzie 9y ago

> As someone who's never used Solaris [...], can someone comment on why [...] I can't, because I'm not somebody who's never used Solaris.

marvy 9y ago
If you have indeed used Solaris, you could have left a more useful comment. Your creative use of ellipsis is totally cheating by the way: you did not preserve the structure of the sentence.
- dozzie 9y ago
  Oh, but I did preserve the structure. It's OP who doesn't understand how this grammatical construction works, and this particular mistake irritates me so much.
  - marvy 9y ago
    This preserves the structure better: > As someone who's never used Solaris [...] I'm curious: can someone [...] Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma!
    - dozzie 9y ago
      > Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma! No, I didn't left out anything important to the structure nor did I replace a colon with anything. The thing is that you and I were looking at two different sentences, because OP silently edited his comment (I only noticed that now). The original sentence was "As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits, can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?"
      - marvy 9y ago
        Fine :) The fact remains: given you knew what was meant, you could at least have answered the question as intended, in addition to nitpicking. (I would never tell someone to stop nitpicking. Well, almost never.) See also https://xkcd.com/1576/ https://xkcd.com/1576/

erentz 9y ago

It was solid, well laid out, consistent, and it advanced good technology seemingly far ahead of its time. ZFS, dtrace, zones (i.e. containers), FireEngine networking, etc.

busterarm 9y ago
dtrace has got to be one of the best and most useful (when you need it) pieces of software ever written, tbh.
sintaxi 9y ago
I'd add SMF to the list as well which systemd seems to take inspiration from.
- JdeBP 9y ago
  Actually, it was SystemXVI that was inspired by the SMF. * https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/ https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770) systemd was inspired by upstart, according to Lennart Poettering.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gedy 9y ago

It was a solid Unix, it added some diversity to our OS choices, and for a time in the 90s Sun had some really stylish hardware that ran Solaris.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ams6110 9y ago

There was a time, so I'm told by Oracle DBAs, that Oracle was developed on Solaris first, then ported to other platforms. So, Solaris had the best support, and least problems. Bugs were fixed there first. To quote, "If you're going to run Oracle, you might as well run it on Solaris" I guess that is not the case any more.

chii 9y ago
> least problems. I guess if oracle wants those support contracts, they can't have an operating system that doesn't need it!
- craigvn 9y ago
  I've always thought Oracle's primary goal was to keep Oracle engineers in employment.
  - tatersolid 9y ago
    Oracles primary goal for the last two decades seems to be the finance of racing sailboats.
    - rodgerd 9y ago
      So, Ferrari, then.
newscracker 9y ago
This comment is probably more about Oracle than about Solaris as such. IIRC, there was also a time when Oracle partnered with HP and a joint selling point was that Oracle ran fastest on HP-UX. I can't seem to find a link for this. Later, there was also a bitter fight and a lawsuit between the two companies on Oracle dropping support for Itanium based machines from HP. [1] [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/hp-awarded-3b-in-damages-from-oracle-over-itanium-database-cancellation/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/hp-aw...

somnium_sn 9y ago

For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular. For others, like me, who learned Solaris fairly late (2006), Solaris was a testbed for one of the best operating system technologies out there. Modern filesystem (ZFS), dynamic tracing (dtrace), containerization (zones), dependency management during boot (svc) and virtual network stack (crossbow), have been in solaris way before Linux. Most of modern Linux tools, such as eBPF, systap, btrfs, etc are a direct answer to the research done by Sun. So some are nostalgic as it's their first experience, others, because it felt like a really good operating system a few years ago (despite it's quirks).

privong 9y ago
> For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular. This was my case. I was playing around with Linux, both on my own machine at home as well as with a server at my high school (shell accounts being a perk of joining the computer club). While learning about Linux I also picked up some of the history of UNIX. At some point I learned that you could get a copy of x86 Solaris 7 for for < $50 (I can't remember if this was an educational offer or a developer network offer). But I ordered one and was really excited to get to use a real UNIX. I played with it for a while, but ended up going back to Linux for my own computers. Later, in the last year and a half of undergrad and my first year of grad school, I used a Sun Ultra 5 to do the work for and write my first published paper and do much of the work that would end up becoming my MS thesis and my second paper (with some of the heavy lifting outsourced to an Ultra 10 that a postdoc in the research group was using). Every few months I browse ebay and look at SPARC machines. Though it's not really practically useful, I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again.
- asveikau 9y ago
  > I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again. I have an ultra 5 in a closet that hasn't been powered on in the current decade. Was thinking of giving it a spin in light of recent news.

ajross 9y ago

Sun absorbed most of the original BSD team the drove the Unix breakout from academia. Their hardware wasn't necessarily all that groundbreaking (starting with 68k boxes like everyone else, then moving to an in-house RISC platform that lagged MIPS in most ways), but as software SunOS basically defined Unix for most of a decade. Now, really that product (SunOS) is not the "Solaris" that exists today. Solaris was a somewhat kludgey merger of the early BSD code with the System V tree from AT&T, done as much to settle legal issues as for market reasons. But nonetheless when we all look back to the golden days of unix, we see Sun's logo.

BrainInAJar 9y ago

Sun was a company that very much focussed on correctness. "Good enough", wasn't. Features were delivered complete and solid. The downside of that is that features were delivered infrequently, and they sacrificed a lot of performance to do the correct thing.

Keyframe 9y ago

Nostalgia-wise, SunOS (later Solaris) was my first peek at the 'real' computers which weren't what I was exposed to at home (Commodore/Amiga, Spectrum home computers, occasional DOS). Likewise with IRIX. Also, as others have said - it was a good solid OS.

blinkingled 9y ago

I know many people mentioned dtrace, ZFS, mdb.. in describing Solaris' merits but it was not a very good OS in 1997 when I first got my hands on it. It was slow - the SPARC hardware didn't help and ZFS/MDB/Dtrace did not exist back then. But I think back then for Enterprises Solaris was the most easily accessible platform SPARC hardware came with and it had a good run for a short while. It was only when Linux started to seriously kick its ass that Sun engineers took it upon themselves to do some great work and make Solaris interesting again - I remember they had a policy - if something is slower than Linux it was a bug. I guess it all came in too late (including the Open Source part ) and people did not like being tied to SPARC hardware and CDDL was a buzz kill for whatever reasons.

bcantrill 9y ago
Ha -- isn't that ever the truth! When I came to Sun in 1996, Solaris was really good at only two things: scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it. Morale wasn't necessarily high (the early history of Solaris had been brutal, and it had only been due to the budding success of 2.5 and UltraSPARC that engineers were beginning to feel forward-looking), and it took us several more years just to get the house in order. MDB came out of this period, as well as important primordial tooling like lockstat(1M). But as we were getting the OS to work as advertised, we had bigger ideas brewing. In Bonwick's case, it was ZFS, for me it was DTrace, for Tucker it was zones, for Casper it was least-priv, etc. I know that it looks like it was in response to Linux and/or as a result of the dot-com bust (and it's impossible to say to what degree these were contributing factors), but I can tell you that from the epicenter it felt much more like a natural evolution than a competitive response. That said, I know that the competition didn't hurt, and you're certainly right about Linux finally causing us to take small-systems performance and system call latency seriously!
- blinkingled 9y ago
  > scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it Yep - Only ever had one time when it hosed on us (100 people team, many running JVM based applications and some doing load tests on it - IIRC it was 2.6 days.) And there wasn't a challenger in sight as far as SMP goes(h/w and s/w both).

pmorici 9y ago

A lot of us that got CS and Engineering degrees in the 90's and early 2000's probably learned to program on Solaris. At least at the school I went to most of the CS department was using Solaris and Sun equipment.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

richard_todd 9y ago

If you are interested, this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered, and what was wrong with Oracle's approach, leading to little-known open-source forks. https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc (entitled: Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos)

ericd 9y ago

You never really get over your first love.