“Sun officials on Friday offered a sneak peak into its Solaris OS plans, touting incremental improvements in areas such as resource management expected to reach users’ systems within a year. Having just shipped Version 9 of Solaris in May, company officials speaking at Sun’s San Francisco office touted features in the newly released OS and future plans. The next major release of the OS, Solaris 10, is expected in 2004 or 2005.” Read the report at InfoWorld.
Solaris 10 is continuing to evolve into a big iron system.
It clarifies the need within Sun for low-end UNIX, i.e. Linux.
It may turn out that Sun will offer Linux on its workstations as well as its low-end servers.
#m
What is the difference between Big Iron OS’s to low-end Linux systems? It is reported that linux can scale upto 64 or more processors. Why is solaris better for big computers??
Have you ver palyed on an IBM regatte, or sun 10k ?
These machines have N cpus and X Gig of ram. At any momment you can create a “virtual” machine with y cpus (y <N) and z gigs of ram (z<X).
I’ve never heard of such feature being available into linux.
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
Big Iron cpus are called that because they are not cheapskates on HW or SW support, they get to put the best & fastest of everything into the package no matter the cost. That means the fastest cpus in SMP with lots of high performance links between them & or shared memory with the the biggest hard disks almost aways high end scsi with raid striping, redundancy etc. The cpu parts don’t actually clock as fast as the fastest P4 though so their performance comes from no holds barred support HW and that there are so many in the system.
Low end Linux runs on crap HW or good HW more recently but rarely gets a chance to run on something fancy unless it has been optimised to support those features you don’t find on home PCs.
Also IBM runs many instances of Linux I guess 1 per cpu module, but there is no reason why you couldn’t run several instances per cpu each in their own virtual space (like say VirtualPC) or several cpus per instance.
Solaris has been tuned for use of 64 bit apps for 64 bit sparcs for some time now, its needed by big database & CAD SW for one. Linux will gradually take some of this market from Solaris as the Hammer or other x86-64 come out for cost reasons.
Can’t say much more
But I will be interested to see the Sun version of Linux too esp if it runs on the Hammer. I can see that being a capitulation to its own customers demand for cheaper HW, with out losing them to the enemy.
>What is the difference between Big Iron OS’s to low-end
>Linux systems? It is reported that linux can scale upto 64
>or more processors. Why is solaris better for big computers??
There’s a difference between scaling and scaling well.
The Solaris kernel has fine-grained locking, which means
that it can scale well to a large number of processors –
work is underway to add this facility to Linux (and FreeBSD)
but Sun are a number of years ahead.
–Jon
http://www.witchspace.com
No intel support? Sorry not interested.
… and Sun aren’t interested in selling this to you, PC dude, because well, you’re a PC dude.
This is meant to improve the performance on their high-end servers. We’re talking about enterprise stuff here, not some cheap PC crap.
There’s no point in physical memory control for a PC.
Solaris run great on Sun hardware, big and small. It’s enterprise capabilities are impressive, things like live repartitioning with reboots, hot swappable cpu’s and memomy, and multiple virtual OS’s. Solaris on Intel was a bad idea. Solaris sparc had relatively few possible configurations, chipsets etc, so insuring stability was easy compared to the massively diverse word of x86.
Sun Blade 100 workstations start at $995.00 from the Sun web site.
http://www.sun.com/desktop/sunblade100/
I have a blade 100 workstation at work next to my Win2k box and love it. There is just something about it that makes the Linux distros I use at home seem like toys.
.. that sun will call this solaris X?
//There is just something about it that makes the Linux distros I use at home seem like toys.//
Like what?
Add this and replace that, put it apart and build it again.
There are more interesting things in life than recompiling kernel. Even in programmer’s life.
Linux may be scaling to 64 CPUs but do you have Oracle for Linux that scales as well. Or may be SAP R/3 ? As far as i know all big application companies who expressed their support of Linux did it for Linux on x86 which is not 64 CPUs capable (because there is no 64 CPUs SMP Pentium systems).
I wish this roadmap be a bit more elaborated.
Apparently, there is no plans to create Solaris x86 version 10, but Itanium is not x86.
HP-UX is going to run on it and making Solaris for 64-bit Intel’s flagship CPU would be a very interesting competition. Taking into account that Microsoft is also commited to Itanium.
Reserving Physical Memory to applications looks rather strange to me – some kind of deja-vue of pre-VM days.
IP QoS is nice but applications have ot be able to use it –
this is more feature of routers than servers.
Kerberos is practically dead – it was a good technology before Microsoft touched it.
Kerberos is practically dead – it was a good technology before Microsoft touched it.
Isn’t that the case with all good technologies that get fondled by Microsoft?