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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kbsartain - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
The Database benchmarks are likely bottlenecked on storage. Attach a high-speed array with multiple disks, and the scaling would be much more linear vs. 2-way.ceefka - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
It would be nice if other Opteron-builders would add to the test so we can get an idea of how well the Opteron is implemented.I'd say webspace is best served with dualcore Opterons. 90% gain! Holy moly!
#23 I have worked as a temporary at Sun in The Netherlands in 1987 when they were about to release their 4/ series. Their 3/ machines were already considered top notch then. They offered workstations with an optical mouse that moved over a special gridpad and full color screens. That was really something special then. No AMD CPUs at that time.
To be perfectly honest as well, I also didn't know them before I worked there ;-)
sprockkets - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
SuSE Linux Enterprise not enterprise enough for u?KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
hondaman: This is why we used SLES this time around instead of RH9. Unfortunately the previous single-core V40z tests were all done a few months ago when we had that machine.Kristopher
Xenoterranos - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Wow, I wish my company had a use for a system like that. I'd take a paycut just to be able to play with it for a while... damned fine enginering on both Sun and AMD's part. And to be prefectly honest, I never really payed Sun that much attention until they started using AMD procs. Everyone else needs to get with the program and give AMD the market share they deserve...oh wait...I'll stop there.slashbinslashbash - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
#21: Read the comments and you'll find your answer.Kristopher: Page 7, "Apache Benchmarks" text:
"It's also interesting to note the difference between Solaris 10 and SLES 9 here. As the threads increased, there was a wider gap between performance of the Solaris configuration and the SLES configuration in favor of Solaris."
The graph on that page shows the opposite, with SLES outperforming Solaris.
finbarqs - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
wait why the xbox360/ps3 article taken down?hondaman - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
can you swap suse with a real enterprise os like rhel?themelon - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
I guess I should have kept reading.Sorry.
I have one of the v40's in my lab with 4 of the 875's. Very nice machine.
Doormat - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Does anyone know if the v20zs were dual core-capable? I heard that if you negotiate with sun (go to sun's ebay sale for the v20z), you can get really good deals. I'd love to just get two 270s if/when the prices come down.