Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
john-millikin.com
john-millikin.com
I really loved solaris. Its such a shame how sun worked out. Oh well. FreeBSD has some of the features we had in 2005 on solaris 10...
And massive multi-thread system that doesn't even have FPU and is a slow in-order core isn't actually useful. Sun CPU deserved to fail.
One example of how things from Solaris aren't as good: tldr: ZFS. Solaris' was good, all others are fragile and unproven.
FreeBSD ported ZFS first from OpenIndiana. They threw that away and adopted ZoL (OpenZFS). ZoL morphed from the OpenIndiana code into an largely untested, hacky manner. Each OS should've thrown it away a long time ago and started with a clean room implementation for each OS, sharing only comprehensive disk specification, user documentation, unit and integration tests, and fuzzing. The OpenZFS initiative tries to serve too many masters, has too many cooks, and no one's validating code adequately.
On Linux, for anything real, I'll take XFS on mdadm. At least I won't lose an array because of shitty ZoL code and lack of support for said shitty code.
Here's someone comparing Solaris 10 to Linux:
> the sysadmin experience on a modern Linux is much better than on Solaris 10. There really is no comparison between, say, apt-get and the official Solaris patch management tools.
> there is much more useful software conveniently available for your average Linux distribution (either as prepackaged binaries or as easy to build source code).
> Solaris's driver support seems lacking. Some things (eg, jumbo frame capable Ethernet drivers) are backwards compared to Linux; others that I would like are just missing, such as drivers for 3Ware Escalade controllers.
> (Note: 'supported in Nevada' doesn't count, except as an indication that it might show up in Solaris 10 at some indeterminate time.)
> I don't know how well Solaris 10 x86 runs on non-Sun x86 hardware, especially recent hardware.
> (Of course, it runs fine on Sun x86 hardware and Sun has competitively priced x86 stuff these days, so this may not matter to you.)
The blog has a whole section for solaris, but the past few years it's just ZFS stuff because Solaris is no longer interesting to them compared to modern Linux.
I’m not buying the network complaints though. I did some really weird networking stuff with Solaris boxes that I still can’t easily do again today. I mean, can you control bandwidth of individual processes from right within systemd? With a single command? We had that in 2011… can you apply vlan tags to a single docker container based on which user started it? Jumbo frames when you talk to the emc array for iscsi but Normal for your db traffic?
Nope. Well, maybe. But nowhere near as easy [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_network_virtualization...
> years upon years of enterprise use at scale with a support organization behind it
Isn't this just as true of enterprise Linux, for coming on twenty years now?
Also, linux isn't an OS, its a kernel. The OS is built out of bits and pieces of open source software flying around.
With Solaris you get a kernel and a user-land portion of the OS in one package designed together and for each other.
And I didn't say Linux was bad or anything, its just that there are a lot of hands in the pudding, both in the kernel and in the users space.
All default Ubuntu installs? Maybe also Debian, I’m not sure.
Yeah, it really does feel like FreeBSD is the best successor:
* ZFS built in
* boot environments
* dtrace
* zone^wjails
(I feel like there was more that I'm forgetting?)
Although I do feel like it's less polished and the desktop support is comparatively lackluster. Oh well.
OpenWindows was supposed to combine x11, SunView and NeWS protocols into one environment but in practice it killed NeWS because there were few applications that targeted it after OpenWindows was releases. I think the document layout program FrameMaker was about the only thing that used NeWS but I could be wrong about that.
The original NeWS environment seems like a holy grail item but it wasn't that impressive in period.
I take your point, but I'd say that the various BSDs are more the successors to Sunos(1-4) than is GNU/Linux.
Since (and it pissed me off at the time) SunOS5+ (Solaris) has a sysV admin/userland (as does GNU/Linux), whereas the BSDs are much closer to what SunOS 4 and its predecessors (based on various Unix/BSD codebases. IIRC, SunOS 4.4 -- the last version that wasn't "Solaris" was based on BSD4.3[0])
All that said, Solaris had some pretty impressive features that Linux is still catching up with. E.g., Zones[1], ZFS[2], etc.
At the same time, there was much more of the "hacker" dynamic with SunOS4 (and its predecessors) than Solaris. Which has also been the case with GNU/Linux.
The former because before Linux (not to mention 386BSD[3]), Unix OS licenses (let alone the hardware it ran on) were way too expensive for widespread use. As such, it was mostly college students using their Sun Boxen to hack on.
But once there was free (as in libre and --well, mostly-- as in beer) Unix (386BSD) and Unix-like (Linux) available for commodity hardware, many, many more folks could access *nix systems to hack on.
From a technical standpoint the BSDs are the real successors to SunOS, but from a Dev/hacker culture standpoint, Linux is (as you point out) a successor as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD [4]
[4] As an aside, I'm enormously grateful to Lynne and Bill Jolitz for 386BSD. It was a joy to be able to own and use it on my own hardware back then. Especially since $job at the time was mostly on Sun/SPARC. With an additional shout out to Yggdrasil Linux[5], the first Linux distro I ever installed and enjoyed that a lot too!
We were supposed to prepare our samples as much as we could in Turbo C 2.0 for MS-DOS. When doing UNIX stuff not available in Turbo C, prepare the code, hopefully the right way.
Then at the university, the system we had on the campus was DG/UX, and Solaris.
They eventually got replaced by Red-Hat Linux around 1997.
During the .com wave until 2005, most of the UNIX stuff I used in production was Solaris, HP-UX and Aix, outside my stay at CERN (which was moving away from Solaris around 2002), GNU/Linux was mostly for private stuff at home.
From all the UNIXes, NeXTSTEP derivates, and Solaris are my favourites, as they are/were more than just yet another UNIX clone (Irix as well, but I only know it from articles and legacy docs).
This hurt them in a few ways, literally every other player in the ecosystem was unified against Sun/AT&T and where there could have been a lot more cooperation, now there was the opposite.
It also massively hurt them in that Solaris was basically shit for a very long time. Many costumers held on to SunOS 4.x for a very long time. Solaris was not popular but that where all the semantic multiprocessor stuff was done. There were people inside of Sun that even in the early 90s still wanted to switch back to SunOS.
Had Sun simply continued to improve SunOS, added multi-processor stuff there, open-sourced things like NEWS (something literally everybody in the company expect a few lawyers wanted) and continued to distribute their compiler for free, it would have become the standard and preferred Unix. They also should have continued with the i386 series of machines.
They put themselves on the path of incredibly proprietary OS and incredibly proprietary CPU that were very high priced as PC compatibles got cheaper and cheaper and x86 got faster and faster.
Solaris was pretty bad up until the >2.5 days. 2.5.1 and above were pretty solid releases. I ran 2.5.1 and 2.6 on my personal desktop (Sparc 10) for a while.
This is the opposite of true. sparcv8 is an IEEE standard. You might have to pay a license fee to Sparc International for certification and logo compliance, but that's it. Sun couldn't and didn't stop you from making them.
So practically speaking, Sun did move to proprietary CPUs. First when they interceded SPARC and then again when they switched to SPARCv9.
Granted a few years in between when there was a slight amount of competition but that was over by the mid-90s before x86 ever took off fully.
Even if v9 isn't an IEEE standard, you can still pay Sparc Intn'l for a license. Try going to intel with a request to make x86 chips.
That was an Autocorrect issue ...
One can say that 'incredibly proprietary' was wrong, it was less proprietary then many other CPU at the time. It doesn't really change the analysis. Practically speaking that gave most Sun costumers very few option, and increasingly less as the 90s went on. There were just to many RISC ISAs competing for to little market. Sun tried to play the vertical integration walled garden game and in that game its really, really damn hard to win.