Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

[nanonyme]

Case in point... a friggin stripped down kernel doesn't even fit on a floppy anymore. And Linux doesn't do that much more than it did back then... Linux is by design accretive. Linus has even taken note of the decrease in performance and bloat over time... hopefully at some point he says it's time for a clean slate. You certainly can't call Linux minimal anymore... it's been infected with GNUitis. Back around Linux 2.0-2.4 you could fit an entire basic distro on a floppy... 2.2 based distros were even small enough to bundle in an Xserver.

Personally, I think code sprawl is the number one reason your average developer cannot become part of kernel and driver development.

Also remember that you actually pay a price for a large bloated kernel... in wasted cache space... While we sometimes see improvements due to architectural and scalability improvements overall the trend is downward in the performance of the kernel itself.

50k packages... and 2 releases from now half of them won't even exist anymore because they are not that useful. Also Debian tends to break out single packages into like 5 so... that 50k is really only like 10-15k.

Also, I use Gentoo... -_- .... with a custom kernel, ram usage is sitting right at 2250Mb not counting buffers. Thats running Mate, Firefox with about 6 tabs open and KiCAD with a project loaded. That's isn't super bloated... but it is still bloated by and large. It'd probably be way higher if I was running any of Lennart's code. Also XFCE used to be like a 5MB package back when it was considered Light relative to Gnome 2.x for the whole download... so yeah it is about as bloated as Mate is while having a few less features.

And no one cares because floppy drives no longer exist outside really esoteric usages. An entire Linux distro fits on a reasonable-sized USB stick

[Xaero_Vincent]

Hopefully Illumos and OpenIndiana can keep Solaris living on in FOSS land.

[cb88]

Phoronix: Oracle Layoffs Hit Longtime Solaris Developers Hard

It looks like the Oracle layoffs just before the US Labor Day indeed hit the SPARC and Solaris groups hard...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...laris-Hit-Hard

Mass storage has made leaps and bounds of course... but CPU cache has not even if it had... bloated software for no real reason is still just as stupid. If you take just about any modern distro today and slap it on the Sempron 1800 I used back in college.. It'd run like a complete sloth and frankly it was *plenty* fast. The tasks I do today... are not that different at all and yet the basic desktop environment is 10x slower without any reason.

CPUs still commonly only have 256-1MB of L2 and maybe 4-8MB of L3 etc.... the only CPU to buck that trend was the i7-5775C which had 128MB L4 and it drastically improved things.

I understand when things like games, or compiler or what have you have requirements that go up... but things were the utility and usefulness have not increased in 10+ years should not be getting bloatier. As far as that goes... if you take a KDE 2.0 even desktop from 2000 it probably has MORE features than a modern desktop environment today.

If you compare the binary size of various command line applications like ls or top... they are relatively huge. 100k for ls or top!!? The toybox implementation fits nearly enough commands to self host linux (about 100 commands) in under 300-400k. The same thing is occuring in the Linux kernel... completely bonkers bloat all over the place.

My phone has 6x the ram of that sempron machine... and yet it still gets bogged down with only a few apps loaded, everyone knows Android is bloated, but so is Linux it just tends to not get noticed as much since people usually run it on fairly powerful machines, or they know the machine is slow and pick a lighter distro (and loose features they ought to have in the meantime)

[Adarion]

Not really surprised to see Oracle cutting more and more of the good stuff. I was horrified when they took over Sun and already feared the worst. Quickly it became obvious that they were cutting things and probably just after a patent pool and very few other things.
It's so sad to see when a real tech enterprise get swallowed by a pure bullshit-bingo tie-wearing business-clown-"enterprise" and then everything is going down the drain.

I also wonder how some make money at all, I guess the "equation" with 1 engineer and the rest are salesmen, lawyers and "human resources" people is not too far from the truth. Few people who actually are able to create values, to do thing, the rest is just bloat. Metastable bloat that just waits for people to finally see behind the veil of FUD so it will eventually pop.

[sdack]

Mass storage has made leaps and bounds of course... but CPU cache has not even if it had... bloated software for no real reason is still just as stupid. If you take just about any modern distro today and slap it on the Sempron 1800 I used back in college.. It'd run like a complete sloth and frankly it was *plenty* fast. The tasks I do today... are not that different at all and yet the basic desktop environment is 10x slower without any reason.

CPUs still commonly only have 256-1MB of L2 and maybe 4-8MB of L3 etc.... the only CPU to buck that trend was the i7-5775C which had 128MB L4 and it drastically improved things.

I understand when things like games, or compiler or what have you have requirements that go up... but things were the utility and usefulness have not increased in 10+ years should not be getting bloatier. As far as that goes... if you take a KDE 2.0 even desktop from 2000 it probably has MORE features than a modern desktop environment today.

If you compare the binary size of various command line applications like ls or top... they are relatively huge. 100k for ls or top!!? The toybox implementation fits nearly enough commands to self host linux (about 100 commands) in under 300-400k. The same thing is occuring in the Linux kernel... completely bonkers bloat all over the place.

My phone has 6x the ram of that sempron machine... and yet it still gets bogged down with only a few apps loaded, everyone knows Android is bloated, but so is Linux it just tends to not get noticed as much since people usually run it on fairly powerful machines, or they know the machine is slow and pick a lighter distro (and loose features they ought to have in the meantime)

You're just rolling in self-pity, have lost the plot and gone bitter. because you've stopped learning about the advances, lost interest and can no longer get excited about them. You're still using software like it was 1999 and now you want to complain about progress, when really you only feel you've got left behind and never had a say in it. You simply woke up one morning, found some hair on your chest and started growling at the world in hope it might stand still for you, just for once.

I'm laughing at the thought that you want to compare your Sempron 1800 with its 60-70 watt power usage to a mobile phone.

I bet back then did you never even dare to make use of all that memory on your Sempron box, because you knew it's going to bog down. Now you've grown brave and suddenly it's all bad and bloated.

[quikee]

...the only CPU to buck that trend was the i7-5775C which had 128MB L4 and it drastically improved things.

Nope... i7-5775C had 128MB of integrated RAM for the GPU. It drastically improved GPU performance compared to other Intel GPUs with no integrated RAM for obvious reasons (GPU has to go to system RAM all the time, which is always a slow thing for GPU to do in the current architecture), but of course it can't compete with dedicated GPU which are faster and with more GPU RAM.

Other things you say are also all nonsense as well...

[Vistaus]

Case in point... a friggin stripped down kernel doesn't even fit on a floppy anymore. And Linux doesn't do that much more than it did back then... Linux is by design accretive. Linus has even taken note of the decrease in performance and bloat over time... hopefully at some point he says it's time for a clean slate. You certainly can't call Linux minimal anymore... it's been infected with GNUitis. Back around Linux 2.0-2.4 you could fit an entire basic distro on a floppy... 2.2 based distros were even small enough to bundle in an Xserver.

Personally, I think code sprawl is the number one reason your average developer cannot become part of kernel and driver development.

Also remember that you actually pay a price for a large bloated kernel... in wasted cache space... While we sometimes see improvements due to architectural and scalability improvements overall the trend is downward in the performance of the kernel itself.

50k packages... and 2 releases from now half of them won't even exist anymore because they are not that useful. Also Debian tends to break out single packages into like 5 so... that 50k is really only like 10-15k.

Also, I use Gentoo... -_- .... with a custom kernel, ram usage is sitting right at 2250Mb not counting buffers. Thats running Mate, Firefox with about 6 tabs open and KiCAD with a project loaded. That's isn't super bloated... but it is still bloated by and large. It'd probably be way higher if I was running any of Lennart's code. Also XFCE used to be like a 5MB package back when it was considered Light relative to Gnome 2.x for the whole download... so yeah it is about as bloated as Mate is while having a few less features.

Then install KolibriOS. It's small enough to fit on a floppy and is entirely written in Assembly so it's super-duper fast. It's actually an awesome OS IMHO! But don't complain about missing popular software like FF and Spotify though.

[Hi-Angel]

Case in point... a friggin stripped down kernel doesn't even fit on a floppy anymore. And Linux doesn't do that much more than it did back then... Linux is by design accretive. Linus has even taken note of the decrease in performance and bloat over time... hopefully at some point he says it's time for a clean slate. You certainly can't call Linux minimal anymore... it's been infected with GNUitis. Back around Linux 2.0-2.4 you could fit an entire basic distro on a floppy... 2.2 based distros were even small enough to bundle in an Xserver.

What are you talking about? You can easily (easily as in, without searching external patches, or developing something yourself) put 3 kernels to a floppy disk. Quote in case:

Yes we have tools that can automatically reduce the kernel size. We can use LTO with the compiler, etc. LTO is pretty good already. It can typically reduce the kernel size by 20%. If all system calls are disabled except for a few ones, then LTO can get rid of another 20%. The minimal kernel I get is still 400-500 KB in size.

FYI LWN has more articles about kernel shrinking.

[yoshi314]

it's pretty amazing that there were ~1500 people working on this operating system. well, some of them seem to have been involved in sparc - but even 20% of that is a significant number. did it actually have much commercial use?

[sdack]

it's pretty amazing that there were ~1500 people working on this operating system. well, some of them seem to have been involved in sparc - but even 20% of that is a significant number. did it actually have much commercial use?

You mean Solaris? Yes, it did until about 10-15 years ago, until Windows PCs became as powerful as UNIX workstations. Many good workstations, from Dec Alphas to SGI Mips, just couldn't keep up with Intel's CPUs, which broke their dominance. Microsoft had an easy time by riding shotgun with Intel in the driver's seat and swooping in with their horrible Windows NT where previously UNIX dominated the landscape. People stopped caring about what goes on under the hood as their attentions shifted on to the World Wide Web.