The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris • Hacker News Board

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#161

Post by blinkingled » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:25 AM UTC

X86BSD wrote: post #132

blinkingled wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. When I got into IT professionally in 1990 I tolerated dealing with SunOS. It was still BSD'ish. But then when it went full re^h^h SysV I put a bullet in its head for me personally. Never used it again after that. I think the last time I touched a Solaris box was 2001 @ TWA in KC. Then 9/11 happened. It was never anything special in my eyes. I just remember hating having to try to find things and software for…

Oh yeah - you had to buy the compiler separately and GCC SPARC wasn't very good at all - I remember the software we sold sucked at performance benchmarks because we had to compile it with GCC! Solaris though was always a great platform to develop Java/JVM apps on.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#162

Post by mariusmg » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:40 AM UTC

0xCMP wrote: post #93

closeparen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, doesn't everything you do with a database reduce to CRUD? I understand that sometimes you do the composition of many CRUD operations, but this is still CRUD.

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…

>gives you stronger guarantees

Your DB either supports ACID or it doesn't. The term "stronger guarantees" is snake oil. It's either guaranteed or is not. That simple.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#163

Post by cookiecaper » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:41 AM UTC

soapdog wrote: post #68

oxryly1 wrote: post #64

I hate to be facile, but if Sun and Solaris were so great and Oracle was this known bad place, why did they let the Oracle people in the door in the first place? Maybe sell to someone else?

I have read that in the mix between IBM and Oracle they thought that Oracle would lead to less layoffs...

Yes, this is what I remember reading too. Oracle and IBM were competing for Sun, and they sold to Oracle because they felt the employees would be more secure there.

Essentially, Sun's executive team was betting that Oracle had a more stable business future than IBM did.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#164

Post by ssvss » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:44 AM UTC

bcantrill wrote: post #62

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…

While I'm obviously biased, I think you are succumbing to a kind of cargo culting with respect to both commit activity and hardware support. On commit activity, we in illumos don't necessarily have the same values as other projects: we really want to get it correct the first time -- a trait inherited from Solaris that we call "FCS quality all the time."[1] As such, commits have to be tested, thoroughly reviewed (four…

Has anyone tried to boot smartos/illumos in Xeon phi knights landing chip (not the coprocessor card). Does it work.

Also how well does intel's userland network and storage libraries dpdk and spdk, work with smartos.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#165

Post by buserror » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:54 AM UTC

InTheArena wrote: post #65

Solaris, hell, I still mourn the death of SunOS (esp verison 4.1.3) at the hands of Solaris,

Ah... I loved SunOS! Fondly remember my Sun Station 3/80, nothing like that fancy SPARC processor in there, a good solid 68040 like real men used back then ;-)

Mind you, I still use the 'sun' font when booting my linux kernel on framebuffers, I always loved that font.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#166

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 10:20 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#167

Post by rodgerd » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 10:29 AM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #108

rodgerd wrote: post #58

Twenty years ago, if you'd said that the surviving commercial *ixen would be AIX and HP/UX, you'd have been drummed out of the Unix Beard club.

HP/UX is dead too because HP despite apparently having an x86 port won't be porting it off itanium. Random link about it ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project... ). Whether they do a 180 and port it to x86, the fact remains its probably to late, the damage has been done. That leaves AIX, which at least has decent hardware to run on. But its got the OS/2 problem too, you can write your app for…

I was at an IBM conf in 2014 where they were basically telling the AIX guys to get familiar with KVM as it would likely be replacing PowerVM sooner or later. The writing has been on the wall for a while, for better or worse.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#168

Post by dozzie » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 10:39 AM UTC

marvy wrote: post #81

dozzie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who's never used Solaris [...], can someone comment on why [...] I can't, because I'm not somebody who's never used Solaris.

If you have indeed used Solaris, you could have left a more useful comment. Your creative use of ellipsis is totally cheating by the way: you did not preserve the structure of the sentence.

Oh, but I did preserve the structure. It's OP who doesn't understand how this grammatical construction works, and this particular mistake irritates me so much.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#169

Post by snw » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 11:02 AM UTC

There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay.

You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already.

As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions:

- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1]

- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2]

- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3]

- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]

Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine.

[1] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS

[2] http://www.omniosce.org

[3] https://www.openindiana.org

[4] http://www.tribblix.org