Oracle and SUN Archive
In early 2022 I got several Sun SPARC servers for free off of a FreeCycle ad: I was recently called out for not providing any sort of update on those devices… so here we go! ↫ Sidneys1.com Some information on booting old-style SPARC machines, as well as pretty pictures. Nice palate-cleanser if you’ve had to deal with something unpleasant this weekend. This world would be a better place if we all had our own Sun machines to play with when we get sad.
We describe a model for multiple threads of control within a single UNIX process. The main goals are to provide extremely lightweight threads and to rationalize and extend the UNIX Application Programming Interface for a multi-threaded environment. The threads are intended to be sufficiently lightweight so that there can be thousands present and that synchronization and context switching can be accomplished rapidly without entering the kernel. These goals are achieved by providing lightweight user-level threads that are multiplexed on top of kernel-supported threads of control. This architecture allows the programmer to separate logical (program) concurrency from the required real concurrency, which is relatively costly, and to control both within a single programming model. The introduction to a 1991 USENIX paper about SunOS’ multithread architecture. Just the kind of light reading material for an Autumn weekend.
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things). This was a great opportunity for me to learn more about ZFS (because I new ‘nada’ to start with). And I’m happy to share some of the knowledge that I gathered with you on this post. Please keep in mind that I don’t consider myself an expert on ZFS (not even close), but I will try to make things simple and easy to understand for someone, who like me, is just getting started with ZFS. An excellent starting point for diving into ZFS.
Oracle, who distributes an RHEL clone, has responded to Red Hat’s latest source code availability changes. We want to emphasize to Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution. The only good thing about Red Hat’s announced changes is that it will make Oracle’s life harder. That might make it all worthwhile.
In Sun’s ideal world, a user would run programs on a central server (a Sun, of course), having their session follow their smart card seamlessly from terminal to terminal along with any other shared resources they might require. While Sun produced the JavaOS-based JavaStation in 1996 — ironically based on Oracle’s Network Computer concept — it used relatively expensive hardware, being essentially a miniaturized SPARCstation 4. Instead, the new proof of concept for a cheaper, more connected world was the 1997 NetWorkTerminal “NeWT” — one wonders if that abbreviation was a coincidence — based on Sun’s MicroSPARC IIep CPU, and that prototype in turn evolved into the first Sun Ray thin client in 1999, codenamed Corona. Setting up a number of Sun thin clients – both fixed and laptop models – running off a Sun Ultra 45 workstation, with smartcards and all, is basically my retro computing end game. I have always been deeply fascinated by “the network is the computer”, and while there’s quite a few other thin client platforms, it’s the Sun one that feels like the real, original concept. I can’t find a reasonably priced Ultra 45 anywhere – feel free to contact me if you have one on offer – but Sun thin clients are a dime a dozen on eBay. In any event, it will come as no surprise that I love the linked article.
These two men were joined by William Joy and Scott McNealy, and on the 24th of February in 1982, they founded Sun Microsystems. All of these men are Stanford graduates (except for Joy who went to Berkley), and the name “Sun” is derived from Stanford University Network. This is well named as from the start, Sun systems included network capability. Employee 5, John Gage, went so far as to say “the network is the computer,” which became the Sun slogan. Funding for this adventure was provided by Eastman Kodak, AT&T, Olivetti, and Xerox. I have a soft spot for Sun. I don’t care much for Java, but their hardware – especially their workstations and thin clients – were unique and cool, and it’s incredibly sad the company couldn’t keep their workstation business operational. SPARC actually managed to hold on for quite a while – more so than other non-x86 architectures – but Oracle was not at all interested in the workstation market, which was probably the right financial call. I’m still looking for a Sun Ultra 45 that doesn’t cost my me firstborn.
Once upon a time, Apple came very close to releasing ZFS as part of MacOS. Apple did this work in its own copy of the ZFS source base (as far as I know), but the people in Sun knew about it and it turns out that even today there is one little lingering sign of this hoped-for and perhaps prepared-for ZFS port in the ZFS source code. Well, sort of, because it's not quite in code.
I love stories like this - digital archeology focusing on the relatively recent past.
Remember, back in December 2016, when there were rumours Oracle was killing Solaris? And how a month later, Solaris effectively switched to maintenance mode, and then to a "continuous deliver model"?
The news from the ex-Sun community jungle drums is that the January rumours were true and Oracle laid off the core talent of the Solaris and SPARC teams on Friday. That surely has to mean a maintenance-only future for the product range, especially with Solaris 12 cancelled. A classic Oracle "silent EOL", no matter what they claim.
With the hardware deprecated, my guess is that's the last of the Sun assets Oracle acquired written off. Just how good were Oracle's decisions on buying Sun?
Sun's Solaris is dead.
Bryan Cantrill on this news (this Bryan Cantrill):
As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday. When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost on the order of 90% of its people, including essentially all management.
Judging merely by its tombstone, the life of Solaris can be viewed as tragic: born out of wedlock between Sun and AT&T and dying at the hands of a remorseless corporate sociopath a quarter century later. And even that may be overstating its longevity: Solaris may not have been truly born until it was made open source, and - certainly to me, anyway - it died the moment it was again made proprietary. But in that shorter life, Solaris achieved the singular: immortality for its revolutionary technologies. So while we can mourn the loss of the proprietary embodiment of Solaris (and we can certainly lament the coarse way in which its technologists were treated!), we can rejoice in the eternal life of its technologies - in illumos and beyond!
After the recent removal of Solaris 12 from the Solaris road map inspired much speculation on the future of Solaris, Oracle has finally published a blog post detailing the cause of the removal, and the future of Solaris
Oracle Solaris is moving to a continuous delivery model using more frequent updates to deliver the latest features faster, while fully preserving customer and ISV qualification investment in the vast array of ISV applications available on Oracle Solaris 11 today. New features and functionality will be delivered in Oracle Solaris through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases, consistent with trends seen throughout the industry.
In addition, support for current versions of Solaris 11 has been extended to beyond 2030.
The actual updated roadmap is light on details, though, but it does appear that Solaris at least isn't dead just yet.
Early December of last year, I posted the rumour that Oracle was going to end Solaris development. While the company denied these rumours at the time, there still seems to be something going on.
Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a future.
The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris - Solaris 12 - has apparently been cancelled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap. Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next" - and that version is apparently the only update planned for the operating system through 2021.
Read into that what you will. Sounds like maintenance mode to me.
There's a rumour going around that Oracle is close to ending all development of Solaris, effectively killing the operating system.
Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term. All hands meetings being cancelled on orders from legal to prevent news from spreading. Hardware teams being told to cease development. There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4. Orders coming straight from Larry.
It's just rumours for now, but they've been gaining steam over the past few days.
Meanwhile, a young programmer named Larry Ellison had formed a company called Software Development Laboratories, originally to do contract work, but quickly decided that selling packaged software was a far better proposition: doing the work once and reselling it multiple times was an excellent way to get rich. They just needed a product, and IBM effectively gave it to them; because the System R team was being treated as a research project, not a commercial venture, they happily wrote multiple papers explaining how System R worked, and published the SQL spec. Software Development Laboratories implemented it and called it Oracle, and in 1979 sold it to the CIA; a condition of the contract was that it run on IBM mainframes.
In other words, IBM not only created the conditions for the richest packaged software company ever to emerge (Microsoft),
they basically gave an instruction manual to the second.
To enable organizations and developers to more easily and flexibly create and deploy on premises and cloud applications, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.1, the latest release of the world's most popular free and open source, cross-platform virtualization software.
Not a huge release, but, while an Oracle product, it's a must-have in the toolbox of anyone interested in running and playing with older operating systems.
After Oracle's expected and well-deserved loss versus Google, Oracle's attorney Annette Hurst published an op-ed about the potential impact of the case on the legal landscape of the software development industry. The op-ed focuses on one particular aspect of Google's position, which author puts as following:
ecause the Java APIs have been open, any use of them was justified and all licensing restrictions should be disregarded. In other words, if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use.
This position, as she claims, puts GPL in jeopardy: common dual-licensing schemes (GPL+proprietary license) depends on developers' ability to enforce the terms of GPL.
It is pretty obvious that the danger of this case for the GPL and the open source community is heavily overstated - the amount of attention this case have received is due to the fact that the developer community never really considered header files as copyrightable assets. The whole "GPL in jeopardy" claim, as well as a passage saying that "o copyright expert would have ever predicted would be considered fair", is merely an attempt to deceive readers.
The interesting bit is why Oracle's lawyer tries to pose her client's attempt at squeezing some coins from Google as an act of defending the free software community. Does Oracle still think the open source proponents may regard it as an ally, even after Sun's acquisition and the damage it dealt to OpenSolaris, OpenOffice and MySQL projects?
Oracle's chief security officer is tired of customers performing their own security tests on Oracle software, and she's not going to take it anymore. That was the message of a post she made to her corporate blog on August 10 - a post that has since been taken down.
Strangely satisfying to watch this trainwreck unfold. Perhaps because the trainwreck in question is one of the most despicable companies in tech?
Oracle has released
Virtualbox 5.0. Major improvements include: Paravirtualization support for modern Windows and Linux guests, xHCI controller to support USB 3.0 devices, Improved Drag & Drop support, Disk image encryption, Headless and Detachable start option, and numerous UI enhancements.
Larry Ellison has agreed to step down as the chief executive officer at Oracle, ending one of the most entertaining and profitable runs for a leader in business history.
Oracle announced Ellison's departure via a press release delivered on Thursday afternoon after the close of U.S. financial markets. The company said that Ellison will remain chairman of Oracle's board and take on the role of chief technology officer. Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, both presidents at Oracle, will each inherit the CEO title. Catz will remain as chief financial officer as well.
The "master"mind behind the onerous and despicable Java/Android/API patent troll lawsuit versus Google, in which Oracle is trying to actively, willingly, and knowingly cause great harm to developers all over the world. Coincidentally, he is a close, personal friend of Steve Jobs.
Good riddance.
Larry Ellison was one of Jobs' closest friends. Then again, this is the same Ellison who presided over one of the most idiotic and - for Oracle - disastrous lawsuits in technology history.
Update: A few new tidbits from the interview: Google is "completely evil" because of Java, and the mass surveillance by the US government is "absolutely necessary". So, aside from being utterly delusional (the Google and Java thing), he also does not believe in civil rights, and would much rather everyone give up their privacy and right to free speech.
What a tool. No wonder nobody cares about Oracle.
"Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the software maker had considered building its own smartphone to compete with Apple and Google but decided it was a 'bad idea' after a weeks-long cost and market analysis. As part of that exhaustive internal analysis, he said,
Oracle had pondered at one point buying Blackberry-maker RIM and Palm." So, Larry (likely after consulting with his best friend Jobs) decided to try to extort money from Google instead - which isn't working out either. Did you analyse that, too, Larry?
I just emerged, blinking, from the world of Skyrim, only to realise
Sun Oracle
has released the 11th version of Solaris (well, technically it's the 7th, but okay, we'll roll with it). I'll be honest and upfront about it: Solaris is totally out of my league, and as such, it's very hard for me to properly summarise what this release is all about, so I won't even try.
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