4 ms·

What did Solaris do that made it a good choice?

kick 7y ago
Zones, DTrace, leastpriv, ZFS, a bunch of innovations and concepts that influence system development to today.
asveikau 7y ago
Another one not mentioned by the sibling comment: they tried to improve upon the poor scalability of poll(2) before epoll was a thing. Also a bunch of random things in section 2 of your Linux manpages started out as Sun-introduced APIs back in the day. But a bunch of stuff has been ported or integrated elsewhere. Zfs runs well out of the box on freebsd and as a module on linux. "Containers" are a big thing now where zones might have applied. Etc.
scurvy 7y ago
Hot swapping CPU and memory boards was pretty dope in 2000. Can't do that in equivalently priced hardware and servers as easily today.
- robocat 7y ago
  Because the unit of swappability changed to a VM or server... for good reasons.
  - scurvy 7y ago
    If that's the case, why do my VMs in public clouds constantly go down for hardware maintenance? We've definitely regressed despite the buzzwords and hype.
    - zorked 7y ago
      Most of the "hardware maintainance" is defragmenting the workload so that the VMs run in fewer physical machines to retire racks of old hardware. Some load balancing too.
      - IcePic 7y ago
        Or an endless line of Spectre/Meltdown patches needing the hosts to reboot in order to get this weeks firmware into the intel CPUs.
        scurvy 7y ago
        This is what I was getting at. When Sun had issues with CPUs, they sent you new CPU boards and you could hot swap them live without downtime
        zorked 7y ago
        That was indeed cool, but it also belongs to the "pet" phase of computing and this is the "cattle" age.
        scurvy 7y ago
        Not really. It was done at scale, too. Hotmail replaced all of the faulty CPUs live.
fargle 7y ago
I grew up when BSD was kinda mature but SVR4 was the "new thing". People, probably inertia, were hating SVR4 and Solaris vs. SunOS (BSD) too. But it was solid. Solaris 5.5.1 and 5.6 were bulletproof, organized, documented, and worked. I don't know who worked for Sun back then, but to you, Thank You! At the time, many UNIX vendors were sparing, warring even. But Solaris is one of the best, purest SVR4 implementations. On top of that it had a very unique and excellent driver model (one of the first), true multi-threaded kernel, and extremely good compiler. And it ran on an extremely well designed post-RISC CPU (UltraSparc). CDE was ... not really the point... Sadly, while it powered that dot-com bubble, that success led to the failure when $50,000 Sun workstations and servers became available for $0.01. If you're going to fail that is the honest way to do so, in my book.

kick 7y ago

Zones, DTrace, leastpriv, ZFS, a bunch of innovations and concepts that influence system development to today.

Another one not mentioned by the sibling comment: they tried to improve upon the poor scalability of poll(2) before epoll was a thing. Also a bunch of random things in section 2 of your Linux manpages started out as Sun-introduced APIs back in the day. But a bunch of stuff has been ported or integrated elsewhere. Zfs runs well out of the box on freebsd and as a module on linux. "Containers" are a big thing now where zones might have applied. Etc.

scurvy 7y ago

Hot swapping CPU and memory boards was pretty dope in 2000. Can't do that in equivalently priced hardware and servers as easily today.

robocat 7y ago
Because the unit of swappability changed to a VM or server... for good reasons.
- scurvy 7y ago
  If that's the case, why do my VMs in public clouds constantly go down for hardware maintenance? We've definitely regressed despite the buzzwords and hype.
  - zorked 7y ago
    Most of the "hardware maintainance" is defragmenting the workload so that the VMs run in fewer physical machines to retire racks of old hardware. Some load balancing too.
    - IcePic 7y ago
      Or an endless line of Spectre/Meltdown patches needing the hosts to reboot in order to get this weeks firmware into the intel CPUs.
      - scurvy 7y ago
        This is what I was getting at. When Sun had issues with CPUs, they sent you new CPU boards and you could hot swap them live without downtime
        zorked 7y ago
        That was indeed cool, but it also belongs to the "pet" phase of computing and this is the "cattle" age.
        scurvy 7y ago
        Not really. It was done at scale, too. Hotmail replaced all of the faulty CPUs live.

fargle 7y ago

I grew up when BSD was kinda mature but SVR4 was the "new thing". People, probably inertia, were hating SVR4 and Solaris vs. SunOS (BSD) too. But it was solid. Solaris 5.5.1 and 5.6 were bulletproof, organized, documented, and worked. I don't know who worked for Sun back then, but to you, Thank You! At the time, many UNIX vendors were sparing, warring even. But Solaris is one of the best, purest SVR4 implementations. On top of that it had a very unique and excellent driver model (one of the first), true multi-threaded kernel, and extremely good compiler. And it ran on an extremely well designed post-RISC CPU (UltraSparc). CDE was ... not really the point... Sadly, while it powered that dot-com bubble, that success led to the failure when $50,000 Sun workstations and servers became available for $0.01. If you're going to fail that is the honest way to do so, in my book.