A Look at Solaris 10 and Sun's Dual Core Fire V40z
by Kristopher Kubicki on June 29, 2005 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
But.... (Solaris 10 Cont.)
Unfortunately, not all was entirely well in Solaris-land. Even though we had a final build of Solaris 10, there were a lot of things broken or "misplaced" from time to time. OpenSSL would segfault out of the box when running the "speed" benchmark, for example. Also, Solaris 10 fragments the user land into several directories based on the nature of the software. For example GNU software is located in /usr/sfw. This non-traditional pathing seems to play havoc on programs that want to be placed in /usr/ and /usr/local.
There were other small dissapointments like the fragmented userland. ZFS, Sun's successor to UFS, is not present in Solaris 10 yet. ZFS will be capable of 128-bit data storage and complete disk virtualization while being completely endian neutral (i.e., you can take ZFS discs from a SPARC or RISC machine and use them in an x86 machine). Unfortunately ZFS missed the ship date of Solaris 10 and it doesn't look like we will see it for a few months still.
We could write another page just about the driver support, but we are somewhat mixed on this issue. Fortunately all of the devices on our V40z are fully supported with drivers that (at least on the surface) appear to be functioning flawlessly. When we took Solaris 10 for a test spin on some off the shelf hardware, things were really hit or miss. There was a deep lack of support for our RAID controllers, something we would expect a server-oriented operating system to focus more on.
Some of the other rough edges include a security advisory that just came out a few days ago concerning Solaris 10's ld.so. It's not to say that Linux or FreeBSD don't have these problems either, but Solaris 10 definitely has the feeling of "unpolished". Zones and DTrace are excellent features but at times they can be a bit overwhelming. With continually better interfaces and maturity, we feel pretty confident the Solaris 10 operating system as a whole will have a pretty strong future as a competitive server OS.
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Den - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Interesting article, I am confused why you are dissapointed in the GCC complile time though. The dual core machine took 369 seconds (with 9 jobs) and the single took 603.18 seconds (with 5 jobs). 603.18/369=1.635 or 63.5% faster which is well in the 50-80% range. Your article says 43% faster, so maybe the GCC compile conclusion is based on a typo?Kilim - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I saw the title to the PS3/XBOX article. It was a different one than the original article from last week. I clicked on it to read it and nothing showed up. It was an article critical of the CPU's on the two systems I believe. Matbe Anand find some insider stuff that was only limited to a few people inside MS. If so, I think the potential rewards of protecting the source is much better long term than getting them in trouble and burning a bridge. Along with the long term effects of insiders trusting Anand.jwbaker - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
You can no longer get v20z via ebay. I managed to buy a half-dozen of them for $1200-$1500 each, although I admit I had to collude with another buyer to do so. Probably Sun has enough traction with the v\d+z series that they no longer need the eBay channel.The only beef I have with the v-series is Sun can ben recalcitrant about supplying the voltage regulator modules. In the v20z there are four removable VRMs and if you bought a single-CPU machine, you only get 2. Additional VRMs sell in pairs for $175 but the lead time is indeterminant and sometimes very long.
Houdani - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
32: The article was pulled in order to protect one of the anonymous sources (see comment #10).hondaman - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Actually, no its not. RHEL is by far and away more widely distributed, and more likely to show results to the people who can most relate to this review.finbarqs - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
i did read the comments, but i still don't know why it was taken down... it just said that it wasn't up to kris to take the article down.Houdani - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
30: What's with the hate?And it was quite obvious to me there were multiple sources.
Questar - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
So that article was based upon one source?!?!translation: It was crap, our source was an idiot.
yacoub - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Is there no performance increase seen with PC3200 RAM over PC2700?PrinceXizor - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
If whomever is really worried about protecting his "insider" source, you might want to contact Google to have them clear the article from their cache (I don't even know if that's possible).P-X