[PLUG] It's Springtime, so Companies are Migrating

Dwight Hubbard dwight at dwightandamy.com
Wed May 18 16:30:42 UTC 2005


>> What _compelling_ advantage does SunOS x86 have over Linux though?
>
> Have you read about the new features in Solaris 10? As I mentioned, they
> have not all been implemented on x86, but I believe Dtrace is already
> there. I can definitely think of some environments where containers would
> be very useful. How about predictive self healing? Again, I don't believe
> it is there for x86 yet, but it will be.

Dtrace is very cool.  However, most of the other functionality in Solaris 10
is playing catchup to the new functionality that is available or will be
soon  available in Linux.

I've been administering Sun equipment for more than 10 years and I have
overall been disappointed with the Solaris 10 release.

I have to admit Dtrace is very nice.

However the Solaris zones are based on the BSD jails.  They are much less
capable and flexable than virtulization technologies on Linux now such as
User Mode Linux.  The only advantage they have over User Mode Linux is they
are a bit more efficient speedwise.  With Xen coming soon that advantage
looks likely to disappear as well.  The fact that Solaris zones share a
kernel means that applications such as oracle which require kernel patches
affect all the zones on the server.  It also means it's not possible to run
different Solaris versions in different zones.  Mind you they aren't bad for
stuff like web sites and stuff but they are a lot less capable than options
on Linux today.

The other major capability of Solaris 10 was supposed to be the Petabyte
Filesystem.  Except that was removed from the first Solaris 10 release. 
Which is to bad, since it supposed to have some real awesome functionality. 
In many ways it sounds like the Tru64 Unix advfs on steroids.

One really nice function of Solaris 10 that gets overlooked is the new
services framework that replaces most of the older SysV startup scripts and
inetd.  The change makes the system start up much faster.

Overall, Solaris 10 looks like an attempt by Sun to play catchup with many
of the new technologies that have recently been added to Linux or are
looking to be available in the near future.

I think Solaris 10 and modern Linux distributions are pretty close to the
same level at this point.  Each has advantages the other doesn't so it
depends on what people are going to use it for.  However, Solaris was way
ahead of Linux 2 years ago, if Sun doesn't step up their pace of innovation
Linux is going to surpass them in the next year or so and Solaris will most
likely never catch back up.





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