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

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#191

Post by pedrow » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:30 PM UTC

appleflaxen wrote: post #183

bcantrill wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what is FCS? flight control system is the best candidate from reading the link (which doesn't use the acronym) and google.

I believe it's "First Customer Shipment" and it's similar to what Microsoft call RTM "Release To Manufacture". You can see it mentioned in passing at the bottom of this page : https://blogs.oracle.com/patch/solaris-10-0508-update-5-patc...

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#192

Post by Annatar » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:32 PM UTC

appleflaxen wrote: post #183

bcantrill wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what is FCS? flight control system is the best candidate from reading the link (which doesn't use the acronym) and google.

First customer ship. Historically it refers to a first release of a new Solaris (any Solaris) version. That version needed to pass all known regression tests and needed to be suitable for use in mission critical production environments.

Any time a commit to the code base would be made, it needed to satisfy that criteria, else Jeff Bonwick (the father of ZFS, who was the gatekeeper back then) would unceremoniously rip it out. Any kind of breakage, even during normal development, was unacceptable. This engineering ethos lives on in illumos and SmartOS, which is why commits to the code base are all about quality, not quantity. The commits might not be as frequent as elsewhere, but can pack tremendous amounts of functionality and must pass both peer reviews and all kinds of regression testing, not to mention have a complete and usable documentation, before being committed. In addition to all of this, as far as I am aware, no commits to the illumos code base may be made without a corresponding tracking identifier.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#193

Post by Tostino » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:32 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #189

Tostino wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, once I actually started using pl/pgsql, I found it really powerful and a match for T-SQL. Never used PL/SQL though, so can't compare.

And which PostgreSQL developer editor can match SQL Server Management Studio? Because pgAdmin isn't it, specially after it became an Electron app.

You're not wrong there. I miss SSMS.

pgAdmin3 wasn't a terrible application. Nowhere near SSMS, but not terrible (other than stability... it's shit there).

pgAdmin4 is unusable.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#194

Post by rhinoceraptor » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:38 PM UTC

samoright wrote: post #188

snw wrote: post #169

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 on…

How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?

You can run docker containers on hardware instead of on virtual machines.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#195

Post by jen20 » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:38 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #142

tatersolid wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product that built Oracle the company, their RDBMS, is frankly one of the worst pieces of "enterprise" software I've ever encountered. Oracle's only redeeming quality seems to be free golf at nice country clubs paid for by Oracle salespeople.

Open source databases still don't have a developer environment that matches what Oracle or SQL Server offer. Same applies to their stored procedures languages and deployment options.

JetBrain's DataGrip is getting there for a wide variety of databases, including Postgres.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#196

Post by snw » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:45 PM UTC

samoright wrote: post #188

snw wrote: post #169

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 on…

How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?

In my case illumos provided two things:

- zones allowed for a much higher deployment density and better utilisation of our hardware than other virtualization technology would have.

- zfs snapshots. We've integrated those into our product and when a customer messes up they now have button to instantly restore to a known good state.

Doing both of these things would have been a lot harder on another os.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#197

Post by Annatar » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:45 PM UTC

jimktrains2 wrote: post #109

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…

> . Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around. Oh, look at Mr "I don't need to use what's laying around" over here.

It's a lesson one learned fairly quickly in the late 1980's and early-to-mid 1990's on the Commodore Amiga. Since then, I've always chosen my hardware for my software, because software is infinitely more important than the hardware: even the most powerful hardware is utterly useless without the software to enable one to get work done.

Always choose your hardware for your software, never the other way around.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#198

Post by jen20 » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:45 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #110

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…

When you say "choose your hardware for your software", you are assuming the software has already been chosen by the time the hardware is selected. That's not necessarily the case. I already have the hardware, it's been bought years ago, and it works with the software I use. Now if for instance I wanted to evaluate OpenSolaris, but it didn't run on the hardware I have, I would probably pass it up. I wouldn't invest ho…

If you wanted to evaluate it, surely you'd use a virtual machine?

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#199

Post by mysterydip » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:46 PM UTC

samoright wrote: post #188

snw wrote: post #169

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 on…

How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?

A different OS can solve some of the pain points of the mainstream options. Depending on your business, the features a different OS brings could have a large impact on performance or stability.

Potential areas for improvement could be anything from filesystem to process concurrency to virtualization.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#200

Post by Annatar » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:47 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #98

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…

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…

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.

Amen to that!