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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

#121

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

helper wrote: post #107
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware support is by far the stupidest complaint that prevails when people talk about operating systems. Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around. There are so many better things operating system authors have to do than to implement thousands of competing proprietary hardware interfaces. Mature support for even 50% of consumer hardware would take a massive team of full time engineers years t…

Illumos has a lot of nice features I'd like to use. But my product is a small low power ARM device and I'd run out of money long before I'd finish adding minimal ARM support to illumos. Things are not as simple as you suggest.

Minimal ARM support would probably be pretty easy. 3 or 4 weekends tops.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#122

Post by rodgerd »

ams6110 wrote: post #59
harry8 wrote: post #50

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…

The Oracle rdbms was at least for a while unmatched. It had programmability, functionality, and tunability that no other database had. If you needed what it provided, and could afford it, there was no real substitute. Today, Postgres has come a long way, and distributed databases are much more developed. There is probably much less technical justification for using Oracle than there was 10+ years ago. Also many compa…

> The Oracle rdbms was at least for a while unmatched. It had programmability, functionality, and tunability that no other database had. If

That's never really been true. From day 1 it's been neck-and-neck with DB2.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#123

Post by pron »

Sudden death? Solaris has been dying for at least a decade. An entire company collapsed after not being able to monetize Solaris-based systems. Solaris wasn't killed by a company; it was killed by the market. A company just stopped trying to resuscitate it after years of CPR.

Cantrill blames "executive whims, shareholder demands, and a fickle public," but not even a little bit the product designers and engineers who are so attuned to the needs and desires of the market that they have somehow missed the collapse of a Fortune 500 company due to their products not selling and years later are still surprised that the product is being shut down?

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#124

Post by rodgerd »

tatersolid wrote: post #82
craigvn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought Oracle's primary goal was to keep Oracle engineers in employment.

Oracles primary goal for the last two decades seems to be the finance of racing sailboats.

So, Ferrari, then.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#125

Post by fimbulvetr »

gruturo wrote: post #14
m_samuel_l wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine something like "shutdown -h now" or the solaris equivalent

Solaris would understand that, but Oracle's move was nowhere that gentle. "uadmin 1 6" was more like it (Immediate poweroff, do not even sync disks)

More like:

lom> poweroff

As that is definitely something the os has no cability to block.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#126

Post by JdeBP »

sintaxi wrote: post #77
erentz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was solid, well laid out, consistent, and it advanced good technology seemingly far ahead of its time. ZFS, dtrace, zones (i.e. containers), FireEngine networking, etc.

I'd add SMF to the list as well which systemd seems to take inspiration from.

Actually, it was SystemXVI that was inspired by the SMF.

* https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770)

systemd was inspired by upstart, according to Lennart Poettering.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#127

Post by emmelaich »

magnawave wrote: post #112

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for…

I always sensed a great tension between the engineers and the business people at Sun, to the detriment of both. The business didn't know how to drive and target sales, and the engineers built brilliant things (ZFS, dtrace, mdb, zones, internal high availability, firewall*) that customers weren't asking for.

[edited to add firewall, that first gen that no-one used because it was so complex]

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#128

Post by eropple »

closeparen wrote: post #102
0xCMP wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally everything you do with memory and disks can also be reduced to CRUD, but that is an extreme example to show my point: a DB does a lot more. A well written DB, in this case a good RDBMS, gives you stronger guarantees that data is saved and accessed in certain ways. That by itself is worth using a better one that gives you better guarantees. But they also provide stronger typing and checking of the data. They…

Do people really not mean types, referential integrity, indexes, transactions, queries, etc. when they say CRUD? If table stakes for a database are more sophisticated than CRUD, what the hell is trivial enough to be CRUD then? Seems like a straw man.

And referential integrity, transactions, and SQL types are only dimly important in a Rails app or something in Node using Sequelize.

Plenty of apps--perhaps more apps than not--use a database as a vaguely typed (MySQL out of strict mode barely gives a nod to them) multiplayer notepad.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#129

Post by asveikau »

privong wrote: post #113
asveikau wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again. I have an ultra 5 in a closet that hasn't been powered on in the current decade. Was thinking of giving it a spin in light of recent news.

That would be fun. Now you have me wondering if I still have those Solaris 7 disks in a drawer somewhere...

If you do and you happen to be in the bay area, I may need to borrow them. :-)

I thought about that machine and I wondered which would be more interesting... Trying to get a recent OS on there or maintaining a more typical 90s setup? Somehow I think the latter is more fun.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#130

Post by bad_user »

magnawave wrote: post #112

At the end of the day, Sun/Oracle has to be able to make revenue from Solaris for them to keep paying those peoples' salaries. Is your startup / company deploying on Solaris? Nope of course you aren't - who is?! Pretty much nobody nowadays - w3techs.com shows Solaris at 0.0005% for webservers for example. Everyone talks about how great it is(to be sure there are some small bits that are pretty dang amazing) - yet for…

If you let the product die with a not giving a fuck attitude, of course nobody is going to use it.

For example when was the last marketing campaign that you can remember for Solaris?

Besides, they've started killing Solaris since 2010: http://garrett.damore.org/2010/08/hand-may-be-forced.html

> And Linux and the BSDs are definitely better for those selective code gifts!

AFAIK DTrace and ZFS can't be used with Linux due to their license being incompatible with GPL.

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