5 ms·

Perhaps this is a inane question, but why should we care about Solaris? What does it bring to the table over BSD or Linux? If it died tomorrow would your shop

by Corrado 16y ago

Perhaps this is a inane question, but why should we care about Solaris? What does it bring to the table over BSD or Linux? If it died tomorrow would your shop close up and everyone go home? I know some of its features (DTrace and ZFS) are quite impressive but they are not really deal breakers. A kernel is great but it doesn't do much on its own. You still need applications and drivers to have a complete system.

vegai 16y ago
Pretty much no reason. The deal breakers you mention have also been ported to FreeBSD and are said to be rather stable already.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Lack of proper package management (you can't compare ports to yum or apt) is a dealbreaker for me. Ports is minimal and you can, conceivably, grow a real package management system out of it, but it's not one.
  - ssmoot 16y ago
    That's just silly. Having used pkg, pkgutil, pkg-get, apt-get, and ports near daily for awhile ports hands down beats anything on the *solaris platforms. For one, you can find the libraries you want and they actually work. Postgres 8.4 on FreeBSD? No problem. With plperl? No problem. OpenSolaris? Well, if you want to run 32bit Postgres on a system with 48GB of RAM sure. No 64bit for you though. And Oracle shutdown the Postgres build farm servers they were hosting. Just because FreeBSD stores it's package information in makefiles and pkg stores it in a catalog doesn't change the end result. Ports are as easy to use (if you bother to read the very simple README), and offer far more robust support and packages than any flavor of Solaris I'm familiar with. There was a time I'd have agreed about Ports, but 30 minutes later I had read the README and realized I was just being lazy. ;-)
- jcsalterego 16y ago
  As adbge mentions elsewhere, the latest ZFS package in FreeBSD is lagging OpenSolaris's. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 (or scroll down)
  - ssmoot 16y ago
    Data de-dupe is FUBAR. It's why snv_134, which was supposed to be final was scrapped. I hadn't heard of a FreeBSD kernel issue, but if that's true, it might just be for the best for the next 6 months at least. de-dupe is kinda a useless feature if you're not a hosting company anyway. A hosting company could take advantage of storing tons of mostly-the-same VMs. It's not the few hundred GB in our dozens of base VM images that concerns me though. It's the terra-bytes of multimedia and databases. Plus de-dupe takes a lot of RAM. A lot. There was a time where it would've been very nice, but as it stands, it's really a niche product to come up with a situation where it's RAM requirements, and it's rather small storage savings might make sense.
twsted 16y ago
Because in any ecosystem diversity is a good thing (as biodiversity in nature).
rbanffy 16y ago
> why should we care about Solaris? It's the only OS that can boot from a ZFS volume and that also has a sane package management system.
- iambvk 16y ago
  Are you suggesting packaging in debian or fedora has some issues? Can you elaborate in one or two lines? Thanks.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    No. Debian and Fedora have just fine package managers. What they can't do is boot from a ZFS file system. I am implying Solaris and FreeBSD (the other OSs that boot from ZFS, AFAIK) don't have a sane packaging system.
    - wwortiz 16y ago
      I am curious what you find wrong with FreeBSD's package management, or is it in reference to packages and does not include ports?
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        Source-based packaging is slower than binary packages. The binary package system, although it exists, is not as simple to use. In Red Hat-ish distros, I can do "yum update". In Debian-ish distros, I can run "aptitude safe-upgrade". On Debian, I can even do a dist-upgrade and update the box to a new release without having to reinstall it (or boot into the installer). Everything is downloaded, installed and, if needed, restarted. Very close to zero downtime.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Oops... Solaris has a somewhat sane package manager.
- deleted 16y ago
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deleted 16y ago
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nuxi 16y ago
Why should we care about Linux when we have BSD, and vice versa? Competition and versatility of course, they encourage invention - Sun developed NIS, NIS+, NFS, VFS, ZFS and a bunch of other things in the UNIX world.
ssmoot 16y ago
OpenSolaris is the only platform that I'm aware of that supports ZFS and has stable, fast iSCSI Target support. (FreeBSD initiators don't even mount iSCSI LUNs on a reboot. I happen to like FreeBSD anyway, but it's not quite there for iSCSI.) In plain english, OpenSolaris (the right version at least, avoid de-duplication) is the only free platform I'm aware of that will give you a fast, stable, iSCSI server with a file system that's basically impervious to corruption. The only one. Seriously. COMSTAR and ZFS are that big of a deal. They aren't "nice to have"s. They're solutions that allow you to spend a couple grand on a box, put a lot of RAM in it, attach a JBOD, shove in a few SSDs for read-cache and write-logs and you can duplicate the performance million dollar storage systems on the cheap. You can do this with very little effort on commodity hardware. You can start as small as you want and scale as large as you want. You get snapshots, clones and replication with barely any effort. Sun's whole storage strategy (Sun Unified Storage) was built on nothing more than exactly this with a pretty Web interface sitting on top. OpenSolaris is a real pain for a lot of things, but when it comes to storage nothing else comes close (that I'm aware of). Don't be scared that you'll lose an alternative to Linux. OpenSolaris isn't any good as an application host if you're expecting anything close to modern GNU tools. Be scared that you'll lose an alternative to NetApp.

by Corrado 16y ago

vegai 16y ago

Pretty much no reason. The deal breakers you mention have also been ported to FreeBSD and are said to be rather stable already.

rbanffy 16y ago
Lack of proper package management (you can't compare ports to yum or apt) is a dealbreaker for me. Ports is minimal and you can, conceivably, grow a real package management system out of it, but it's not one.
- ssmoot 16y ago
  That's just silly. Having used pkg, pkgutil, pkg-get, apt-get, and ports near daily for awhile ports hands down beats anything on the *solaris platforms. For one, you can find the libraries you want and they actually work. Postgres 8.4 on FreeBSD? No problem. With plperl? No problem. OpenSolaris? Well, if you want to run 32bit Postgres on a system with 48GB of RAM sure. No 64bit for you though. And Oracle shutdown the Postgres build farm servers they were hosting. Just because FreeBSD stores it's package information in makefiles and pkg stores it in a catalog doesn't change the end result. Ports are as easy to use (if you bother to read the very simple README), and offer far more robust support and packages than any flavor of Solaris I'm familiar with. There was a time I'd have agreed about Ports, but 30 minutes later I had read the README and realized I was just being lazy. ;-)
jcsalterego 16y ago
As adbge mentions elsewhere, the latest ZFS package in FreeBSD is lagging OpenSolaris's. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 (or scroll down)
- ssmoot 16y ago
  Data de-dupe is FUBAR. It's why snv_134, which was supposed to be final was scrapped. I hadn't heard of a FreeBSD kernel issue, but if that's true, it might just be for the best for the next 6 months at least. de-dupe is kinda a useless feature if you're not a hosting company anyway. A hosting company could take advantage of storing tons of mostly-the-same VMs. It's not the few hundred GB in our dozens of base VM images that concerns me though. It's the terra-bytes of multimedia and databases. Plus de-dupe takes a lot of RAM. A lot. There was a time where it would've been very nice, but as it stands, it's really a niche product to come up with a situation where it's RAM requirements, and it's rather small storage savings might make sense.

twsted 16y ago

Because in any ecosystem diversity is a good thing (as biodiversity in nature).

rbanffy 16y ago

> why should we care about Solaris? It's the only OS that can boot from a ZFS volume and that also has a sane package management system.

iambvk 16y ago
Are you suggesting packaging in debian or fedora has some issues? Can you elaborate in one or two lines? Thanks.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  No. Debian and Fedora have just fine package managers. What they can't do is boot from a ZFS file system. I am implying Solaris and FreeBSD (the other OSs that boot from ZFS, AFAIK) don't have a sane packaging system.
  - wwortiz 16y ago
    I am curious what you find wrong with FreeBSD's package management, or is it in reference to packages and does not include ports?
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Source-based packaging is slower than binary packages. The binary package system, although it exists, is not as simple to use. In Red Hat-ish distros, I can do "yum update". In Debian-ish distros, I can run "aptitude safe-upgrade". On Debian, I can even do a dist-upgrade and update the box to a new release without having to reinstall it (or boot into the installer). Everything is downloaded, installed and, if needed, restarted. Very close to zero downtime.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Oops... Solaris has a somewhat sane package manager.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

nuxi 16y ago

Why should we care about Linux when we have BSD, and vice versa? Competition and versatility of course, they encourage invention - Sun developed NIS, NIS+, NFS, VFS, ZFS and a bunch of other things in the UNIX world.

ssmoot 16y ago

OpenSolaris is the only platform that I'm aware of that supports ZFS and has stable, fast iSCSI Target support. (FreeBSD initiators don't even mount iSCSI LUNs on a reboot. I happen to like FreeBSD anyway, but it's not quite there for iSCSI.) In plain english, OpenSolaris (the right version at least, avoid de-duplication) is the only free platform I'm aware of that will give you a fast, stable, iSCSI server with a file system that's basically impervious to corruption. The only one. Seriously. COMSTAR and ZFS are that big of a deal. They aren't "nice to have"s. They're solutions that allow you to spend a couple grand on a box, put a lot of RAM in it, attach a JBOD, shove in a few SSDs for read-cache and write-logs and you can duplicate the performance million dollar storage systems on the cheap. You can do this with very little effort on commodity hardware. You can start as small as you want and scale as large as you want. You get snapshots, clones and replication with barely any effort. Sun's whole storage strategy (Sun Unified Storage) was built on nothing more than exactly this with a pretty Web interface sitting on top. OpenSolaris is a real pain for a lot of things, but when it comes to storage nothing else comes close (that I'm aware of). Don't be scared that you'll lose an alternative to Linux. OpenSolaris isn't any good as an application host if you're expecting anything close to modern GNU tools. Be scared that you'll lose an alternative to NetApp.