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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KristopherKubicki - Thursday, June 30, 2005 - link
Ecmaster76: It wasn't my decision to remove the article, and I agree with your thoughts as well.Kristopher
mastashake57 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
Let me tell you, we have the first generation v40z, and it's a total crusher in comparison to our Dell PowerEdge 6650s. Way to go SUN!Intel XEONs can't hold a candle to it...
Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
that should read:But if there are liability and/or other issues that might come from leaving it up, than I will just have to wait.
Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
KristopherKubickiI think everyone has read the PS3/360 article but me, its been linked on Ars and it was out long enough that someone at MS could have downloaded the whole thing.
But if there a re liability and/or other issues that might come from leaving it up, than I will just have to wait.
Ahkorishaan - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
#11 Solaris 10 is on the graphs, he jsut forgot to add it to the chart.Hey guys in Anandtech, think we could grab a review of the new Sun Ultra 20 workstation? It looks pretty sweet.
prd00 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
Without much pressure from Intel, Sun has been pretty free to do what they want with AMD's processors. Sun is even going a bit on the offensive with Intel trade-in programs. Even though both AMD and Sun have been through some hard times recently, Sun is a great ally for AMD for two reasons; first, Sun knows servers - this is a critical market for AMD. Second, Sun isn't afraid of Intel and doesn't have nearly the problems AMD does with their customers.HEhuehueh... that's the reason why Sun server is still the best AMD server out there. HP and IBM should learn from them on how to build a good Opteron server.Anyway, Cray implementation of Opteron is still unmatched.
themelon - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
One question, why the lack of apples to apples os comparison between the two systems? You talk about S10 for two pages yet you dont list it as being tested on the Dual Core machine. That and you do not use the same linux versions on the two machines.To me that makes this comparison a whole lot less usefull. Granted, the perf should not vary to much between SuSE 9 and 9.1 but to not include S10 in the Dual Core comparo seems kinda silly.
KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
Ecmaster76: Eh, something was messed up with the content management system. PS3 article is pulled for now because Anand is worried about MS tracing his anonymous insider.Kristopher
Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
Ah, rendering problems. Thats why this article isn't on the main page (2461, the console article is a dead link, and it occured to me that number was about three articles to high, easy guess).Shame on you for pulling stuff when you could just leave a little 'were working on it'.
:p
Beenthere - Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - link
FWIW,AMD doesn't have "problems with it's customers" at all. AMD has problems with Intel's illegal Biz practices which have prevented many AMD customers from selling AMD products. With any luck HP, Sony and a Helleva lot of other PC companies will finally put Intel execs in prison where they belong. And you can bet all the companies that have been blackmailed by Intel will be a LOT more interested in selling AMD products now that the shit has hit the fan and they can come out of hiding.