5 ms·

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

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.

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.