3 ms·

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-a

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?
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Linux evolves really fast and in an unplanned chaotic way. So it partly applies to linux for sure but there are also forces in other directions. Also, linux isn't an OS, its a kernel. The OS is built out of bits and pieces of open source software flying around. With Solaris you get a kernel and a user-land portion of the OS in one package designed together and for each other.
  - cyberpunk 4y ago
    I’ve heard this argument for years but come on how many Linux systems do you have in prod where awk isn’t gawk, sed isn’t gsed, libc isn’t glibc (okay, alpine with musl has a bit of market for containers). I think the Linux userland is pretty much identical across the distros and tbh I only deploy Ubuntu server when we need Linux vms anymore.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Yeah but for a long time there were many different init systems. There are different packaging systems. There are a huge amount of difference above the very basic tools. And I didn't say Linux was bad or anything, its just that there are a lot of hands in the pudding, both in the kernel and in the users space.
    - yakubin 4y ago
      > how many Linux systems do you have in prod where awk isn’t gawk All default Ubuntu installs? Maybe also Debian, I’m not sure.

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?

panick21_ 4y ago
Linux evolves really fast and in an unplanned chaotic way. So it partly applies to linux for sure but there are also forces in other directions. Also, linux isn't an OS, its a kernel. The OS is built out of bits and pieces of open source software flying around. With Solaris you get a kernel and a user-land portion of the OS in one package designed together and for each other.
- cyberpunk 4y ago
  I’ve heard this argument for years but come on how many Linux systems do you have in prod where awk isn’t gawk, sed isn’t gsed, libc isn’t glibc (okay, alpine with musl has a bit of market for containers). I think the Linux userland is pretty much identical across the distros and tbh I only deploy Ubuntu server when we need Linux vms anymore.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Yeah but for a long time there were many different init systems. There are different packaging systems. There are a huge amount of difference above the very basic tools. And I didn't say Linux was bad or anything, its just that there are a lot of hands in the pudding, both in the kernel and in the users space.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    > how many Linux systems do you have in prod where awk isn’t gawk All default Ubuntu installs? Maybe also Debian, I’m not sure.