A new Oracle Solaris Common Build Environment (CBE) release | Hacker News Reader

A new Oracle Solaris Common Build Environment (CBE) release

blogs.oracle.com

49 pointsnaves38 comments

I suppose they are looking for people who had not previously stuck their hand in the lawnmower.

I was looking up the Sparc S8 mentioned in the article and the first discussion that came up is quickly derailed due to worrying about copyright: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/sparclinux/patch/202511...

Shades of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHW58D-_O64

"You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s

Start at 33:02 for full rant.

Who's the target audience for that announcement?

a. Existing customers already got their hands chopped, their prices raised, or their lawyers poked. They're stuck with an abusive, litigious, opaque vendor and will migrate out when they can. Many are stuck.

b. Prospective customers must have some compatibility need or they'd look elsewhere.

c. Developers won't be fooled so rule them out :)

I wonder where Solaris is still actively being deployed and used.

Solaris proper, not Illumos?

Either way, SPARC and the entire family seem to be entirely dead in the grand scheme of things. I don't know why anyone would develop for this platform.

Solaris and Illumos are available on x86

But illumos doesn't run on sparc... granted I don't have the hardware, but if I did, it would be nice if I could use illumos.

Tribblix does, which is based on illumos - I have a V210 I installed it on, not too long ago...

Nope.

Oracle SPARC S7, T8, and Fujitsu SPARC M12 still supported

supported sure but its an ancient dying platform. sparc was discontinued almost 10 years ago.

Oracle generated $3b in revenue from these systems last year.

it's mostly OmniOS/SmartOS and other Illumos (descendant of OpenSolaris) distributions. All the Solaris 11 deployments i was aware of in mid-late 2010s are now either migrated to some sort of container setup of running on OmniOS.

My employer uses ZFS under AndrewFS (aka AFS) and I would bet dollars to donuts that the OS is Solaris.

I think that OpenIndiana is where those with general interest in Solaris on x86_64 should go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana

SmartOS, for example, is a more specialized application of the scions of OpenSolaris.

Here is a list of other distros that originated from the Illumos efforts after OpenSolaris was terminated:

-DilOS, with Debian package manager (dpkg + apt) and virtualization support, available for x86-64 and SPARC.

-NexentaStor, distribution optimized for virtualization, storage area networks, network-attached storage, and iSCSI or Fibre Channel applications employing the ZFS file system.

-OmniOS Community Edition, takes a minimalist approach suitable for server use.

-OpenIndiana, a distribution that is a continuation and fork in the spirit of the OpenSolaris operating system.

-SmartOS, a distribution for cloud computing with Kernel-based Virtual Machine integration.

-Helios, a distribution powering the Oxide Computer Rack.

-Tribblix, retro style distribution with modern components, available for x86-64 and SPARC.

-v9os, a server-only, IPS-based minimal SPARC distribution.

-XStreamOS, a distribution for infrastructure, cloud, and web development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Distributions

Edit: From this blog entry, this is suspicious: "the committed support for Oracle Solaris until at least 2037" - does Solaris have a 2038 problem?

No 2037 problem. That's just 25 years after they killed the product.

I think Oxide Computer uses it.

A few places, Fujitsu also has Solaris servers, and if you care about security, Solaris SPARC is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging in active use since 2015.

AmpereOne M with MTE is out nowadays

Good to know, still I bet there are more Solaris SPARC deployments on the wild than GNU/Linux on AmpereOne M.

As a former SUN sysadmin/netadmin (from SunOS 4.1.4 days), I vaguely remember the Solaris releases after 2.5.1, maybe to another re-version/branding called Solaris 7, maybe? And then not paying any attention after Oracle absorbed it. I was honestly surprised enough by this headline to click TFA, simply because I did not think Solaris even existed anymore.

>I was honestly surprised enough by this headline to click TFA, simply because I did not think Solaris even existed anymore.

Oracle would never give up the opportunity to continue milking customers until they're comletely dry.

They did kill all future releases and blew up the SPARC roadmap. They also fired everyone working on new features and releases but kept enough of a skeleton crew to charge legacy customers outrageous support fees.

But for all practical intents and purposes, it's dead. One guy releasing things like "ls -sh now actually shows human readable output" being highlighted as a new feature kind of tells you everything you need to know.

One of Australia's bigger universities still had a Solaris server 15 years ago - no idea if it's still in use though.

I recently saw it on a big European bank. The Oracle version.

An of course Oxide is still very active in developing the open source version. They develop upstream first.

Illumos/OpenSolaris etc are great and install about as easily as FreeBSD, on desktop and server systems with Ethernet. Other stuff like WiFi etc is not as well supported.

It’s still my favorite OS, if it fits what I need it for.

What are your needs that it would fit? Oracle have you by the database?

It’s great for ZFS and for Zones, including Linux zones.

I haven't used Solaris since the last time I used it for work over 10 years ago. Agree ZFS and Zones are both exceptional, I would still use Solaris now where it made sense.

It remains one of my favourite UNIX as well, back in the day I mused even to buy one of those Toshiba that came with Solaris.

Other than a others like Irix, QNX or NeXTSTEP, I am not picky in what form UNIX/POSIX gets made available.

Started using Solaris 7 in college when Sun made it available for free. All you had to do was fill out a web form! I absolutely loved it. To this day it remains my favorite OS to use. I love macOS and its ease of use (plus its Unix-ish support) but there's something about Solaris that always made me feel like I was doing "real" work.

I think I'd rather use hpux than deal with oracle

Hpux died on December 31, 2025

Mature Software Product Support without Sustaining Engineering through at least 31-Dec-2028

Apparently, it's out of support the same way RHEL 6 is out of support.

I have not touched anything related to Oracle for as long as I remember.

"We're about to take a bath on these datacenters, do we have any other viable lines of business left?"

The Oracle business model is to rope you into a contract, set you up for failure, ignore you until you violate a license agreement, then sue you and rope you into another contract to avoid the lawsuit. If you're an Oracle customer, prepare to get sued... for something... anything really.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com