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The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

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Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#41

Post by syntheticnature »

pavlov wrote: post #2

I always thought Solaris was a beautiful and memorable name for an operating system. Any connection with the Stanislaw Lem novel (or Tarkovsky movie) was always a bit unclear to me... But I guess a book about futile interactions with a planet-sized alien brain that doesn't care about you other than mysteriously experimenting with your memories is a reasonable metaphor for the Unix user experience.

I figure the connection is probably more about being from a company named "Sun," since it's a Latin word and the source of the English adjective "solar" for 'pertaining to the sun.'

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#42

Post by Keyframe »

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

Nostalgia-wise, SunOS (later Solaris) was my first peek at the 'real' computers which weren't what I was exposed to at home (Commodore/Amiga, Spectrum home computers, occasional DOS). Likewise with IRIX. Also, as others have said - it was a good solid OS.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#43

Post by abetusk »

inopinatus wrote: post #38
type0 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soderberghs version is much more reflective of what happened with the emergence of OpenSolaris and Illumos (not to give away any spoilers but apparently forking is a real thing and it lives on). Tarkovskys movie was such a philosophical drivel that I feel asleep. How is the book - is it worth reading? As I understood it neither of films follow the novel very closely.

Stanislaw Lem deserves a much wider readership. Well, I say that but actually he has a wide readership, just not so much in English-language markets. Besides Solaris , his meditations on life and society in The Cyberiad remain some of my favourite science fiction of all time.

And "His Master's Voice" is one of my favorite books. I totally agree, Lem deserves a place right along Gibson.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#44

Post by noselasd »

jsiepkes wrote: post #31
spilk wrote: post #11

Does the death of Solaris have any implications for the future of SPARC? Seemed like most of the SPARC hardware that Oracle sells/sold exclusively ran Solaris. I could be wrong about that, though.

From what I understand most of the SPARC people got laid of too. So unless Fujitsu really ups it's SPARC game I doubt there is much future for SPARC.

SPARC was released under the GPL license. It might be living on through the LEON processor, at least for a while. It's the processor of choice at the European Space Agency, used for most of their recent satellites and spacecrafts.

LEON pretty neat, you can run it on an FPGA and boot linux on it if you're brave enough.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#45

Post by chii »

ams6110 wrote: post #19
z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

There was a time, so I'm told by Oracle DBAs, that Oracle was developed on Solaris first, then ported to other platforms. So, Solaris had the best support, and least problems. Bugs were fixed there first. To quote, "If you're going to run Oracle, you might as well run it on Solaris" I guess that is not the case any more.

> least problems.

I guess if oracle wants those support contracts, they can't have an operating system that doesn't need it!

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#46

Post by blinkingled »

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

I know many people mentioned dtrace, ZFS, mdb.. in describing Solaris' merits but it was not a very good OS in 1997 when I first got my hands on it. It was slow - the SPARC hardware didn't help and ZFS/MDB/Dtrace did not exist back then. But I think back then for Enterprises Solaris was the most easily accessible platform SPARC hardware came with and it had a good run for a short while.

It was only when Linux started to seriously kick its ass that Sun engineers took it upon themselves to do some great work and make Solaris interesting again - I remember they had a policy - if something is slower than Linux it was a bug. I guess it all came in too late (including the Open Source part ) and people did not like being tied to SPARC hardware and CDDL was a buzz kill for whatever reasons.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#47

Post by Philipp__ »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #33

I wouldn't call illumos "thriving". Commit activity[1] is low for a project of this size (compared to e.g. BSDs) and its hardware support is poor. Probably the biggest problem is the fact that all existing distributions are undermaintained and unpolished. SmartOS is the only exception, but it's not a replacement for Solaris which was a general-purpose server OS. SmartOS is merely a bare-metal hypervisor. I really hop…

I can relate to your statement to some extent. Why illumos is not "thriving" is _maybe_ because it does not have solid general purpose distribution. Tribblix is kinda trying to get there, but I haven't used it for more than few sessions inside VM.

Dream OS for me would be something ala OpenBSD, but built on top of illumos and with all the goods that would come with it.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#48

Post by pmorici »

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

A lot of us that got CS and Engineering degrees in the 90's and early 2000's probably learned to program on Solaris. At least at the school I went to most of the CS department was using Solaris and Sun equipment.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#50

Post by harry8 »

Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill

It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more ignorant boards of directors.

Is there ever a technical reason to use Oracle? If there is what percentage of Oracle sales does it account for? Ie if it really is non-zero I bet it's a single digit percentage. Woeful company from the top down is their reputation and they've earned it.

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