6 ms·

Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)

112 points by zdw 4y ago

ablyveiled 4y ago
Those installation profiles remind me of `archinstall`. Of course, the choices there are more about the fragmented linux userspace than one's vocation.
cyberpunk 4y ago
Im not going to name names, but i know of a system still using sunos 4 in prod... I really loved solaris. Its such a shame how sun worked out. Oh well. FreeBSD has some of the features we had in 2005 on solaris 10...
- xarope 4y ago
  Sun's attempt to build a massively multi-thread system failed at that time, it's interesting to see the direction we have moved, almost 20 years later again (I say this whilst building a "new" 2nd hand epyc system with 32 cores...)
  - xattt 4y ago
    Would there have ever been a pivot to the consumer market, or would it be stuck behind big iron like with IBM and whatever they have hiding under the hood?
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Sun did this because they had a lot of issue building faster cores. The were very late on out of order processing and generally their CPU were never all that good. And massive multi-thread system that doesn't even have FPU and is a slow in-order core isn't actually useful. Sun CPU deserved to fail.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Nothing will be as good as Solaris because the codebase was proven with years upon years of enterprise use at scale with a support organization behind it. Big-ass paying customers will find more/less all of the edge cases and want their systems fixed with a patchset now. One example of how things from Solaris aren't as good: tldr: ZFS. Solaris' was good, all others are fragile and unproven. FreeBSD ported ZFS first from OpenIndiana. They threw that away and adopted ZoL (OpenZFS). ZoL morphed from the OpenIndiana code into an largely untested, hacky manner. Each OS should've thrown it away a long time ago and started with a clean room implementation for each OS, sharing only comprehensive disk specification, user documentation, unit and integration tests, and fuzzing. The OpenZFS initiative tries to serve too many masters, has too many cooks, and no one's validating code adequately. On Linux, for anything real, I'll take XFS on mdadm. At least I won't lose an array because of shitty ZoL code and lack of support for said shitty code.
  - msla 4y ago
    https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/Solaris10X86VsLinux https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/Solaris10X8... Here's someone comparing Solaris 10 to Linux: > the sysadmin experience on a modern Linux is much better than on Solaris 10. There really is no comparison between, say, apt-get and the official Solaris patch management tools. > there is much more useful software conveniently available for your average Linux distribution (either as prepackaged binaries or as easy to build source code). > Solaris's driver support seems lacking. Some things (eg, jumbo frame capable Ethernet drivers) are backwards compared to Linux; others that I would like are just missing, such as drivers for 3Ware Escalade controllers. > (Note: 'supported in Nevada' doesn't count, except as an indication that it might show up in Solaris 10 at some indeterminate time.) > I don't know how well Solaris 10 x86 runs on non-Sun x86 hardware, especially recent hardware. > (Of course, it runs fine on Sun x86 hardware and Sun has competitively priced x86 stuff these days, so this may not matter to you.) The blog has a whole section for solaris, but the past few years it's just ZFS stuff because Solaris is no longer interesting to them compared to modern Linux.
    - cyberpunk 4y ago
      Yeah well Solaris died. Of course it can’t compete with Linux anymore. I’m not buying the network complaints though. I did some really weird networking stuff with Solaris boxes that I still can’t easily do again today. I mean, can you control bandwidth of individual processes from right within systemd? With a single command? We had that in 2011… can you apply vlan tags to a single docker container based on which user started it? Jumbo frames when you talk to the emc array for iscsi but Normal for your db traffic? Nope. Well, maybe. But nowhere near as easy [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_network_virtualization_and_resource_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_network_virtualization...
  - kjellsbells 4y ago
    Thouroughly enjoyed working with Sun and Solaris back in the day, but I don't follow your logic. > years upon years of enterprise use at scale with a support organization behind it Isn't this just as true of enterprise Linux, for coming on twenty years now?
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > FreeBSD has some of the features we had in 2005 on solaris 10... Yeah, it really does feel like FreeBSD is the best successor: * ZFS built in * boot environments * dtrace * zone^wjails (I feel like there was more that I'm forgetting?) Although I do feel like it's less polished and the desktop support is comparatively lackluster. Oh well.
  - hestefisk 4y ago
    + A clean, stable base system
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      Which meant that on this Unix system you had to compile a completely new Unix system (with the GNU tools and libraries) to be able to use any software that wasn’t hopelessly outdated.
- cleanchit 4y ago
  What features are missing from freebsd?
  - cyberpunk 4y ago
    Kern features were integrated in unexpected places. Like, for instance, I could run some command on my Solaris server and create a resource pool of processors and memory; and it was so integrated that this contract could be applied to individual network connections. I could allocate half a processor or some memory to, say, an oracle process for licensing reasons right within the smf, one command. Sure, I can do these things on modern Linux and bsd, and I make my living doing complex things with k8s these days, but it all seems like such a hacked together mess compared to what we had.
InTheArena 4y ago
This brings back memories. It's simplicity and elegance was awesome. I really view Linux as the ultimate successor to SunOS4 (as opposed to Solaris / SunOS 5).
- johnisgood 4y ago
  I miss OpenSolaris! (I know about OpenIndiana)
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Apparently Oxide is using a Solaris derivative for their systems, naturally given the founders.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      At this point with SmartOS and whatever Oxide is using, its basically a hypervisor OS. That is great because it means a lot of the underlying bits are still getting updated and maintained and you some of it gets up-streamed.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    http://www.tribblix.org/ http://www.tribblix.org/
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >This brings back memories. It's simplicity and elegance was awesome. I really view Linux as the ultimate successor to SunOS4 (as opposed to Solaris / SunOS 5). I take your point, but I'd say that the various BSDs are more the successors to Sunos(1-4) than is GNU/Linux. Since (and it pissed me off at the time) SunOS5+ (Solaris) has a sysV admin/userland (as does GNU/Linux), whereas the BSDs are much closer to what SunOS 4 and its predecessors (based on various Unix/BSD codebases. IIRC, SunOS 4.4 -- the last version that wasn't "Solaris" was based on BSD4.3[0]) All that said, Solaris had some pretty impressive features that Linux is still catching up with. E.g., Zones[1], ZFS[2], etc. At the same time, there was much more of the "hacker" dynamic with SunOS4 (and its predecessors) than Solaris. Which has also been the case with GNU/Linux. The former because before Linux (not to mention 386BSD[3]), Unix OS licenses (let alone the hardware it ran on) were way too expensive for widespread use. As such, it was mostly college students using their Sun Boxen to hack on. But once there was free (as in libre and --well, mostly-- as in beer) Unix (386BSD) and Unix-like (Linux) available for commodity hardware, many, many more folks could access *nix systems to hack on. From a technical standpoint the BSDs are the real successors to SunOS, but from a Dev/hacker culture standpoint, Linux is (as you point out) a successor as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD [4] [4] As an aside, I'm enormously grateful to Lynne and Bill Jolitz for 386BSD. It was a joy to be able to own and use it on my own hardware back then. Especially since $job at the time was mostly on Sun/SPARC. With an additional shout out to Yggdrasil Linux[5], the first Linux distro I ever installed and enjoyed that a lot too! [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smackeyacky 4y ago
I used the old HotJava browser (in Solaris, not SunOS) to do initial file transfers when I was playing with QEMU, but both operating systems should have a working install of tftp that you can use instead. https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/10/time-machine-solaris-26-on-qemu.html https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/10/time-machine-solari...
jdworrells 4y ago
So many great memories. My first sysadmin job was a dev shop ruled by Sun Sparcstation 5, 10, and 20 pizza boxes. My mentor gifted me a Sun 3 workstation and I spent many hours installing and reinstalling SunOS 4 and later Solaris 2.x. Ahhh. I guess I have a project for next weekend!
mananaysiempre 4y ago
Is OpenWindows on SunOS 4 as mentioned in the article the closest one can get to running NeWS, or is there an actual NeWS environment you can convince to run in an emulator? (I searched for this some months ago and didn’t have much success, but then I never saw the physical thing and have little idea of what to look for.)
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  Sort of. OpenWindows was supposed to combine x11, SunView and NeWS protocols into one environment but in practice it killed NeWS because there were few applications that targeted it after OpenWindows was releases. I think the document layout program FrameMaker was about the only thing that used NeWS but I could be wrong about that. The original NeWS environment seems like a holy grail item but it wasn't that impressive in period.
  - NikkiA 4y ago
    The most common use of NeWS was probably the various printers Sun sold in the early to mid 90s that used an sbus raster card and NeWS to generate an image for the laser to put on the drum.
  - boutell 4y ago
    I just remember everything getting much, much slower when all that showed up. Then we got the faster sparcs and it wasn’t as bad. Then I wound up with a job coding in XView, ironically enough. I never did code for Motif. Anyway it’s all fast compared to Electron
icedchai 4y ago
This does bring back memories! I remember installing SunOS 4.x on a real Sparc, back in 1995 or so. I eventually did move to Solaris (2.x, SunOS 5.x kernel) Solaris 2 wasn't really much good until 2.5, IIRC.
boutell 4y ago
Nice! Can it run Sunview?
- DVRC 4y ago
  Yes, it comes in bundle with SunOS, since that one part of it it's implemented in the kernel IIRC. I've also been able to run NeWS 1.1 (which was before the X/NeWS merg) inside QEMU, although the keyboard input is not working (and for some reason the patch to add the Sun Type 4 breaks everything).

112 points by zdw 4y ago

Those installation profiles remind me of `archinstall`. Of course, the choices there are more about the fragmented linux userspace than one's vocation.

cyberpunk 4y ago

Im not going to name names, but i know of a system still using sunos 4 in prod... I really loved solaris. Its such a shame how sun worked out. Oh well. FreeBSD has some of the features we had in 2005 on solaris 10...

xarope 4y ago
Sun's attempt to build a massively multi-thread system failed at that time, it's interesting to see the direction we have moved, almost 20 years later again (I say this whilst building a "new" 2nd hand epyc system with 32 cores...)
- xattt 4y ago
  Would there have ever been a pivot to the consumer market, or would it be stuck behind big iron like with IBM and whatever they have hiding under the hood?
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Sun did this because they had a lot of issue building faster cores. The were very late on out of order processing and generally their CPU were never all that good. And massive multi-thread system that doesn't even have FPU and is a slow in-order core isn't actually useful. Sun CPU deserved to fail.
1letterunixname 4y ago
Nothing will be as good as Solaris because the codebase was proven with years upon years of enterprise use at scale with a support organization behind it. Big-ass paying customers will find more/less all of the edge cases and want their systems fixed with a patchset now. One example of how things from Solaris aren't as good: tldr: ZFS. Solaris' was good, all others are fragile and unproven. FreeBSD ported ZFS first from OpenIndiana. They threw that away and adopted ZoL (OpenZFS). ZoL morphed from the OpenIndiana code into an largely untested, hacky manner. Each OS should've thrown it away a long time ago and started with a clean room implementation for each OS, sharing only comprehensive disk specification, user documentation, unit and integration tests, and fuzzing. The OpenZFS initiative tries to serve too many masters, has too many cooks, and no one's validating code adequately. On Linux, for anything real, I'll take XFS on mdadm. At least I won't lose an array because of shitty ZoL code and lack of support for said shitty code.
- msla 4y ago
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/Solaris10X86VsLinux https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/Solaris10X8... Here's someone comparing Solaris 10 to Linux: > the sysadmin experience on a modern Linux is much better than on Solaris 10. There really is no comparison between, say, apt-get and the official Solaris patch management tools. > there is much more useful software conveniently available for your average Linux distribution (either as prepackaged binaries or as easy to build source code). > Solaris's driver support seems lacking. Some things (eg, jumbo frame capable Ethernet drivers) are backwards compared to Linux; others that I would like are just missing, such as drivers for 3Ware Escalade controllers. > (Note: 'supported in Nevada' doesn't count, except as an indication that it might show up in Solaris 10 at some indeterminate time.) > I don't know how well Solaris 10 x86 runs on non-Sun x86 hardware, especially recent hardware. > (Of course, it runs fine on Sun x86 hardware and Sun has competitively priced x86 stuff these days, so this may not matter to you.) The blog has a whole section for solaris, but the past few years it's just ZFS stuff because Solaris is no longer interesting to them compared to modern Linux.
  - cyberpunk 4y ago
    Yeah well Solaris died. Of course it can’t compete with Linux anymore. I’m not buying the network complaints though. I did some really weird networking stuff with Solaris boxes that I still can’t easily do again today. I mean, can you control bandwidth of individual processes from right within systemd? With a single command? We had that in 2011… can you apply vlan tags to a single docker container based on which user started it? Jumbo frames when you talk to the emc array for iscsi but Normal for your db traffic? Nope. Well, maybe. But nowhere near as easy [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_network_virtualization_and_resource_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_network_virtualization...
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  Thouroughly enjoyed working with Sun and Solaris back in the day, but I don't follow your logic. > years upon years of enterprise use at scale with a support organization behind it Isn't this just as true of enterprise Linux, for coming on twenty years now?
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> FreeBSD has some of the features we had in 2005 on solaris 10... Yeah, it really does feel like FreeBSD is the best successor: * ZFS built in * boot environments * dtrace * zone^wjails (I feel like there was more that I'm forgetting?) Although I do feel like it's less polished and the desktop support is comparatively lackluster. Oh well.
- hestefisk 4y ago
  + A clean, stable base system
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Which meant that on this Unix system you had to compile a completely new Unix system (with the GNU tools and libraries) to be able to use any software that wasn’t hopelessly outdated.
cleanchit 4y ago
What features are missing from freebsd?
- cyberpunk 4y ago
  Kern features were integrated in unexpected places. Like, for instance, I could run some command on my Solaris server and create a resource pool of processors and memory; and it was so integrated that this contract could be applied to individual network connections. I could allocate half a processor or some memory to, say, an oracle process for licensing reasons right within the smf, one command. Sure, I can do these things on modern Linux and bsd, and I make my living doing complex things with k8s these days, but it all seems like such a hacked together mess compared to what we had.

InTheArena 4y ago

This brings back memories. It's simplicity and elegance was awesome. I really view Linux as the ultimate successor to SunOS4 (as opposed to Solaris / SunOS 5).

johnisgood 4y ago
I miss OpenSolaris! (I know about OpenIndiana)
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Apparently Oxide is using a Solaris derivative for their systems, naturally given the founders.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    At this point with SmartOS and whatever Oxide is using, its basically a hypervisor OS. That is great because it means a lot of the underlying bits are still getting updated and maintained and you some of it gets up-streamed.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  http://www.tribblix.org/ http://www.tribblix.org/
nobody9999 4y ago
>This brings back memories. It's simplicity and elegance was awesome. I really view Linux as the ultimate successor to SunOS4 (as opposed to Solaris / SunOS 5). I take your point, but I'd say that the various BSDs are more the successors to Sunos(1-4) than is GNU/Linux. Since (and it pissed me off at the time) SunOS5+ (Solaris) has a sysV admin/userland (as does GNU/Linux), whereas the BSDs are much closer to what SunOS 4 and its predecessors (based on various Unix/BSD codebases. IIRC, SunOS 4.4 -- the last version that wasn't "Solaris" was based on BSD4.3[0]) All that said, Solaris had some pretty impressive features that Linux is still catching up with. E.g., Zones[1], ZFS[2], etc. At the same time, there was much more of the "hacker" dynamic with SunOS4 (and its predecessors) than Solaris. Which has also been the case with GNU/Linux. The former because before Linux (not to mention 386BSD[3]), Unix OS licenses (let alone the hardware it ran on) were way too expensive for widespread use. As such, it was mostly college students using their Sun Boxen to hack on. But once there was free (as in libre and --well, mostly-- as in beer) Unix (386BSD) and Unix-like (Linux) available for commodity hardware, many, many more folks could access *nix systems to hack on. From a technical standpoint the BSDs are the real successors to SunOS, but from a Dev/hacker culture standpoint, Linux is (as you point out) a successor as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD [4] [4] As an aside, I'm enormously grateful to Lynne and Bill Jolitz for 386BSD. It was a joy to be able to own and use it on my own hardware back then. Especially since $job at the time was mostly on Sun/SPARC. With an additional shout out to Yggdrasil Linux[5], the first Linux distro I ever installed and enjoyed that a lot too! [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

smackeyacky 4y ago

I used the old HotJava browser (in Solaris, not SunOS) to do initial file transfers when I was playing with QEMU, but both operating systems should have a working install of tftp that you can use instead. https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/10/time-machine-solaris-26-on-qemu.html https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/10/time-machine-solari...

jdworrells 4y ago

So many great memories. My first sysadmin job was a dev shop ruled by Sun Sparcstation 5, 10, and 20 pizza boxes. My mentor gifted me a Sun 3 workstation and I spent many hours installing and reinstalling SunOS 4 and later Solaris 2.x. Ahhh. I guess I have a project for next weekend!

mananaysiempre 4y ago

Is OpenWindows on SunOS 4 as mentioned in the article the closest one can get to running NeWS, or is there an actual NeWS environment you can convince to run in an emulator? (I searched for this some months ago and didn’t have much success, but then I never saw the physical thing and have little idea of what to look for.)

smackeyacky 4y ago
Sort of. OpenWindows was supposed to combine x11, SunView and NeWS protocols into one environment but in practice it killed NeWS because there were few applications that targeted it after OpenWindows was releases. I think the document layout program FrameMaker was about the only thing that used NeWS but I could be wrong about that. The original NeWS environment seems like a holy grail item but it wasn't that impressive in period.
- NikkiA 4y ago
  The most common use of NeWS was probably the various printers Sun sold in the early to mid 90s that used an sbus raster card and NeWS to generate an image for the laser to put on the drum.
- boutell 4y ago
  I just remember everything getting much, much slower when all that showed up. Then we got the faster sparcs and it wasn’t as bad. Then I wound up with a job coding in XView, ironically enough. I never did code for Motif. Anyway it’s all fast compared to Electron

icedchai 4y ago

This does bring back memories! I remember installing SunOS 4.x on a real Sparc, back in 1995 or so. I eventually did move to Solaris (2.x, SunOS 5.x kernel) Solaris 2 wasn't really much good until 2.5, IIRC.

boutell 4y ago

Nice! Can it run Sunview?

DVRC 4y ago
Yes, it comes in bundle with SunOS, since that one part of it it's implemented in the kernel IIRC. I've also been able to run NeWS 1.1 (which was before the X/NeWS merg) inside QEMU, although the keyboard input is not working (and for some reason the patch to add the Sun Type 4 breaks everything).