November, 15 2004. The Solaris 10/NC04Q4 Launch 2004. Dawn in San Jose, CA was a truly beautiful sight to behold on Monday. As the sun rose over the mountains and shed its light on the valley below - the city, which the night before had seemed so unimpressive, suddenly came to life in the shimmer of the sun's rays. It seemed a perfect morning for the launch of Sun's most ambitious project to date. The press and other attendees looked happy, hopeful. Sun's folks were excited - especially the engineers.The Good
Solaris 10 represents the culmination of a half billion dollars investment and the work of 3000 engineers. Sun Microsystem's investment in technology is well evidenced in this version of Solaris - it is all about the technology. According to John Loiacono, Executive Vice President of the Software Group at Sun, the goals for the Solaris Operating System were Performance, Efficiency, Security and Availability. A listing of new features shows that Sun has worked very hard indeed to achieve these goals. New Features include a completely rewritten TCP stack, Dynamic Tracing, Solaris Containers, Linux Application Environment, ZFS, Predictive Self Healing, Solaris Process Rights Management, Guaranteed Source and Binary Compatibility and many others. These eight features alone make it well worthwhile to consider Solaris 10 as an Operating System.
Solaris 10 is FREE. Solaris 10 will be released with a Free Binary Right to Use - RTU. The license will apply to all platforms for end users. It does not come with any technical support other than what is available on the World Wide Web. The freeing of Solaris begins the fulfillment of Scott McNealy's long ago prophetic statement that software would one day be free.
Solaris has a new logo - simple, but nice.
New Features
Rewritten TCP Stack
Sun claims that the new TCP stack is very much improved over previous versions. Simply upgrading from a previous version of Solaris to Solaris 10 will result in a minimum 20% increase in speed according to Mr. Loiacono. Sun is looking to drive 10 Gigabit Ethernet to full saturation and the improved stack is a giant step towards realizing that goal.
Dynamic Tracing
Dynamic Tracing, or DTrace as the console application front end for it is called, is all the rage in development circles. A search on Google results in 35,300 results today. DTrace is the developer and system administrator's ultimate tracing tool. It allows the user to instrument the Operating System so that it can be observed in action. Want to know how many I/O operations are occurring at any given moment, or what process caused the I/O at any level of the application stack? DTrace and its scripting language, D, can tell you - fast! Debugging and performance analysis are likely never going to be the same again. I sat down with the author of DTrace, Sun's Senior Staff Engineer, Bryan Cantrill and asked for a demonstration, what I got was a revelation. In less than 10 minutes I was shown more of the inner workings of the kernel than you would probably be able to navigate in days of debugging or digging through source code. It became clear to me why Sun's engineers were so pumped. According to Bryan, when DTrace is not running, there is zero overhead on the system and when it is running, the load is proportional to the complexity of the observation. Therefore, a simple question will have a negligible impact on the system and a hard question will have a greater impact. To be fair, during the demonstration, I saw no impact on the system, whatsoever.
Solaris Containers
Formerly, N1 Grid Containers, this technology provides separate virtual instances of the Solaris Operating Environment running on a single machine. Containers are an emerging technology of mammoth proportions. Sun did not promote the containers as much as they could have. This is an extremely important technology as it provides isolation, increased utilization of resources and speedy environment restart, cloning, and other cool features with very little overhead - unlike VMWare and other emulation environments. I sat with one of Sun's Senior Technical Product Managers for Solaris Containers/Zones, Angel Camacho, for a lab where we created a number of containers. In a little over 15 minutes we were able to create 3 separate containers, with their own IP addresses and file systems. The containers are impressive, simple to understand, simple to use and very powerful, look for enterprise deployments of container technology soon.
Linux Application Environment
Formerly, Project Janus, LAE is the penguin running on the sun - Linux binaries running unmodified, without emulation, on Solaris. This is one ambitious project that aims at bringing the thousands of Linux applications to the Solaris platform.
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