Playing With Solaris In 2015

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Playing With Solaris In 2015

This weekend when deciding what extra benchmarks to run and planning more tests for the week ahead, I decided to explore doing some fresh Oracle Solaris benchmarks since my most recent Solaris benchmarks were back in 2012. I also haven't had much (any?) Solaris news to relay recently so wanted to see if there was anything new within the ex-Sun camp.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=21345

[Tenzer]

OmniOS and SmartOS

I don't know if it's because there's a focus on distributions with a graphical interface, but if that isn't needed, people should instead look at OmniOS and SmartOS who have a steady development effort going on. Both of them have regular updates released (weekly and bi-weekly, if I remember correctly) and are open source. The commercial component to SmartOS: SmartDataCenter was even open sourced by Joyent back in November: https://www.joyent.com/blog/sdc-and-...ow-open-source.

Leaving out these distributions may make it look like there isn't much going on in the Solar-ish world, when actually there is.

[bluestealth]

Console Fonts

The console fonts are not horribly ugly unlike some other popular operating systems. I still think I will hate it because it is Solaris, but at least it won't make my eyes bleed.

[eidolon]

OpenIndiana "Hipster" builds are available at http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/. I'm not sure why anyone would want to use Solaris or its derivatives for a desktop, but XStreamOS and Tribblix appear to have made the most progress on that front as of late.

Joyent seems to be the primary post-OpenSolaris success story (I do not believe Nexenta was profitable as of 2013, and I have seen no financial info regarding OmniTI; as for the community-run Solaris derivatives, I don't think any have gained significant traction), but it's hard to see the continued draw of Solaris or its derivatives in the face of alternatives.

I imagine that little has changed since http://openindiana.org/pipermail/oi-...ry/003027.html.

[hiryu]

ZFS!

Might be nice to do a benchmark of ZFS on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris (and perhaps an Illumos distribution) while ALSO benchmarking btrfs.

A lot of the benchmarks I've seen show btrfs as being much faster than ZFS, but it would be interesting to see if part of that gap is due to FreeBSD (although I suspect FreeBSD's ZFS is faster than Solaris's).

That said, Solaris 11 is a _great_ server OS, but with some important caveats:

You need to pay for support to have access to updates
Solaris 11 has libsasl and sendmail... and while sendmail is linked to libsasl... sendmail isn't built in such a way that SMTP AUTH is supported. In order to have SMTP AUTH with sendmail in Solaris 11, you need to install sendmail from elsewhere (such as building your own, installing from opencsw.org, etc).
There's no boost support under Solaris, so you simply can't compile some C++ applications.

There's a bunch of other stuff like this... It's really a shame as Solaris 11 is otherwise pretty good.

Of course, Solaris 11 is also closed source and costs money (and wasn't Larry Ellison talking about how great the NSA is too?).

All the above (and some other reasons) is why I'll be switching away from Solaris within the next few months. Unfortunately, I have to buy new hardware as running BSD or Linux on SPARC doesn't yield the best results. Gcc is HORRIBLY optimized for SPARC. I was unable to find any good Illumos server distributions with SPARC support.

I also did some informal benchmarks a few years back and generally saw that code compiled with gcc was 1/4th the speed of the same code compiled with Sun/Oracle's compiler! I've tried OpenBSD and Linux on this machine, and they definitely feel more sluggish than "Slowaris" does.

I feel like Solaris 11 would probably be in better shape if Oracle hadn't taken over.