OpenSolaris

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OpenSolaris News

Here are some news articles about OpenSolaris. If you see an interesting article that we missed, please send details to news-discuss, and we'll discuss it there. This news page is maintained by the Advocacy Community Group by Terri Molini and Joe G.

HP-UX Shops Not Strongly Interested in HP-UX on X64 | IT Jungle | 07/17/2008

"Sun got lots of street cred with the open source community, lots of public relations, and gave enterprises that use Solaris a reason to believe that Sun was doing the things it needed to do to stay alive in a market increasingly dominated by Windows and Linux." -- Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun-Intel partnership bearing fruit | SD Times, Robert Mullins | 07/16/2008

“Sun’s access to Intel architecture has allowed us to do things in Solaris we hadn’t done before,” said Herb Hinstorff, director of marketing at Sun for Solaris. The collaboration also makes life easier for application developers seeking to optimize their software to run on Intel chips, added Intel’s Dave Stewart, a software engineering manager.

An Early Look At OpenSolaris 2008.11 | Phoronix | 07/15/2008

An early review of the very latest OpenSolaris.

Sun’s ZFS/Flash initiative | ZDNet | 07/15/2008

"Much faster, cheaper, and more reliable storage for big installations." -- Paul Murphy, ZDNet, commenting on a ZFS/Flash article from Adam Leventhal.

Sun’s ZFS/Flash initiative | ZDNet, Paul Murphy | 07/15/2008

Up to now, the coolest thing about ZFS, besides really making RAID cheap and easy to implement, has been its ability to silently correct the bit errors that creep in as data is stored, read, and written - a facility that’s been particularly important to the raidz implementation. In the near future, however, that’s going to change and the coolest thing about ZFS is going to be its ability to make intelligent use of large amounts of flash memory to simultaneously speed disk I/O while letting you lower platter rotational speeds (and thus both wear and power use) to something on the order of 5400 RPM. One of the core developers, Adam Leventhal, has an interesting article in the July ACM on how this going to work - the technology is non obvious, but the bottom line is simple: much faster, cheaper, and more reliable storage for big installations.

More DTrace envy | Blog.ro-design.net | 07/14/2008

Nearly a year ago, we looked at the status of SystemTap in the context of Sun’s much-hyped DTrace tool. Since that time there has been progress, but the basic problem still remains: Linux does not have a good, ready-to-run answer to those wanting the equivalent functionality of DTrace. Due to an apparent disconnect between the developers of SystemTap and the kernel hackers, tracing for the Linux kernelânever mind user space programsâis not up to the competition. Nearly a year ago, we looked at the status of SystemTap in the context of Sun's much-hyped DTrace tool. Since that time there has been progress, but the basic problem still remains: Linux does not have a good, ready-to-run answer to those wanting the equivalent functionality of DTrace. Due to an apparent disconnect between the developers of SystemTap and the kernel hackers, tracing for the Linux kernelânever mind user space programsâis not up to the competition.

c't special Linux am Kiosk | Heise | 07/13/2008

Two OpenSolaris articles and an OpenSolaris DVD. Language: German.

Solaris Express Community Edition Build 93 | Phoronix | 07/12/2008

A review of build 93.

Sun, Intel Push Optimized Solaris | internetnews.com | 07/09/2008

"It has been tremendous to see the results of the collaborative effort of marrying Solaris with Xeons. We're now working with the Sun xVM team to deliver some virtualization optimizations." -- Dave Stewart, Intel engineering manager on OpenSolairs.

ZFS on FUSE | Linux Magazine | 07/02/2008

"Although its features and terminology may seem strange if you’re used to more traditional Linux filesystems, ZFS offers a great deal of flexibility." -- Linux Magazine

Flash Storage Memory | ACM | 07/01/2008

Sun's Adam Leventhal explores if flash memory can become the foundation for a new tier in the storage hierarchy.

OpenSolaris on Think IT Japan | Think IT | 06/25/2008

Four OpenSolaris related articles from Think IT in Japan on installation, packaging, DTrace, and ZFS. Articles are in English

A closer look at Snow Leopard Server | MacWorld | 06/19/2008

"With ZFS, Sun looked far ahead and built a filesystem designed to work not where things had been, but where they were going." -- John C. Welch

Handicapping the Windows 7 alternatives | InfoWorld | 06/17/2008

"OpenSolaris has the pedigree to be a real challenger to Windows." -- Randall Kennedy

OpenSolaris still has some Linux copying to do | The Register | 06/13/2008

"Sun has made good on its promise to deliver OpenSolaris, the company's Unix-based answer to Linux, with a company-supported, commercial update arriving in mid-May. Although far from a complete product, the latest OpenSolaris is impressive and in the long run could prove a viable alternative to Linux." -- Scott Gilbertson

Solaris 2008.05 | BinaryArcade | 05/28/2008

Solaris 2008.05 Yep, there was a big hype about solaris 2008.05. One review even mention it as being ‘What Ubuntu hopes to be someday’. Sorry folks, I’m going to have to disagree. I booted the OS onto my laptop today, and spent the majority of my morning dealing with its various short-comings. The OS has finally evolved into a LiveCD, years after all of it’s Linux competitors have done the same. I was greeted when i first booted up by a console-login and no graphical interface, hopefully just a compatibility issue with the on-board graphics on my laptop, though the GUI worked just fine after logging in with a blank username/password. (I feel like I should be automatically logged in with a LiveCD, maybe I’m just too picky)

DTrace Overhead using SPARC | Java Ranch | 05/28/2008

There's an interesting tidbit on the Solaris Internals wiki regarding Dtrace overhead. Under the section "Dynamic Probes," mdb is used to show dissembled code before and after a probe is enabled on a function. Their example uses an AMD64 system; this entry repeats and extends the exercise using a SPARC system. Re: Dtrace Overhead using SPARC Nice post. Note, however, that the list of modules that mdb lists is the modules for mdb itself that provide dcmds and walkers. Those are based on the objects loaded in the target (in this case the kernel), but it is by no means a full list of resident kernel modules. Comment from Adam Leventhal on May 29, 2008 5:42:54 PM PDT

OpenSolaris: nice try, pity about the licence | IT Wire, Sam Varghese | 05/27/2008

Why would anyone try to introduce an operating system into the existing glut unless it pays off in spades? What can a new entrant give us that the multitude of Linux distributions, the Mac OSX and old, hoary Windows hasn't? Sun Microsystems apparently thinks it has a lot to offer - else the so-called Project Indiana would not have been set up to churn out "a binary distribution of an operating system built out of the OpenSolaris source code."

OpenSolaris: NOT what Ubuntu hopes to be | hackferret | 05/25/2008

OpenSolaris: NOT what Ubuntu hopes to be. Well, naturally - I have already begun testing OpenSolaris 2008/05. In fact, I began today, attempting to install it on my (Currently) Ubuntu Hardy Heron Rack server (Compaq Proliant DL360.) GNOME on Opensolaris seems better themed, and more stable than on Linux - however the tree from which Solaris-Gnome is forked is a little older so that's to be expected. It is also slightly less featured, as a Desktop Environment - but fine for general use. I also noted that the livecd performance was spectacular compared to Ubuntu - which typically hugs the floor like treacle. It's Device Driver Utility made it easy to view device support in the system, and on an installed machine - download drivers for that hardware. Therein lies my problem with OpenSolaris 2008/05. AFTER you install. Not helpful for me, when my two only storage controllers (Compaq SmartArray integrated SCSI RAID, and an Emulex LP8000 PCI Fibre Channel SCSI adapter) both lack support on the CD. This leaves me with a technical challenge.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 | Mandalika's scratchpad | 05/24/2008

Sun Microsystems' own OpenSolaris distribution, OpenSolaris 2008.05, has been available for download for almost 3 weeks on the new web site www.opensolaris.com . Finally I had some time to test the Live CD on my Toshiba Tecra M2 notebook computer. I have been monitoring this effort (project Indiana as Sun calls it) from the beginning - so, I'm not surprised to see the Ubuntu like graphical interface. I spent very little time checking what is working and what is not. I'm quite impressed with the Network Auto-Magic (NWAM). It worked out of the box. NWAM detected the available Wi-Fi networks; and configured the wireless network interface in the first shot. However I could not figure out how to bring up the NWAM GUI, just in case if I need to connect to a different Wi-Fi network. The workaround seems to remove the file /etc/nwam/known_wifi_nets, restart the NWAM daemon (svcadm restart nwam) and to restart the GDM session (simply logout) to see the NWAM GUI window popped with the list of available networks. If that's the case, it needs to be fixed.