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Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org

Posted by michael on Tue Jan 25, 2005 06:09 PM
from the good-faith-effort dept.
Sun Microsystems
An anonymous reader writes "Sun has launched the first version of opensolaris.org, featuring a small initial drop of source code. The idea is to make a display of good faith to the Solaris community while the rest of the source code due diligence is completed. The source code for Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available for download under the terms of the newly OSI-approved CDDL license."
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  • Now that's a concept (Score:5, Funny)

    by lphuberdeau (774176) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:12PM (#11474452) Homepage

    Sun really seems to like the Open-.org naming convention. They are probably trying to oppose Steve Jobs' iNaming.

    • Re:Now that's a concept (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:16PM (#11474505)
      They should revive their "Open Windows" trademark to issue a open source operating system distro - be it Solaris or Linux. That would be a perfect revenge for Microsofts litigation against Lindows.

    • Re:Now that's a concept (Score:4, Funny)

      by kin_korn_karn (466864) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:17PM (#11474520) Homepage
      now they can all merge with a financial services company and be iOpenING.org . har har har

      • Re:Now that's a concept Uh oh (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Octorian (14086) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @08:53PM (#11475917) Homepage
        Sun's been using the term "Open" in their stuff forever. Remember, Sun's X environment was called "OpenWindows", and even though they've since discontinued the old OpenWindows window manager, their X server still resides in "/usr/openwin".

        Though Sun's definition of "Open" has traditionally been "open standards", as opposed to the F/OSS definition which I believe to be "open implementations".

  • Hot-Swappable (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jon_oner (753207) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:12PM (#11474453)
    I just want the cool features of solaris (such as hot-swappable processors on a multi-processor system) to be ported to Linux. Honestly, bot OS can and should merge into one entity. less fork, more merge.

    • Re:Hot-Swappable (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DShard (159067) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:17PM (#11474512)
      Merging solaris code into the linux kernel is a lot more difficult then implementing the feature from scratch. This is largely due to the codebases being wildly different but other difficulties contribute to the problem.

      On the bright side, hot swappable processors, memory and pci cards are already in linux. enjoy!

      • Re:Hot-Swappable (Score:4, Funny)

        by superpulpsicle (533373) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:37PM (#11474718)
        Sun has an aweful track record of maintaining anything on the web. That includes their external website. A small example, you can't even find sun's Burlington Mass address on the site. Trust me, the list is a mile long. I expect this .org site to be well maintained for about a year at most.

    • I thought Linux already had hot swap CPU support. It just depends on the right hardware.

      • There is a big world out there, and not one solution is always right for everything.

        Outside of the knee-jerk reactions on /. , the whole world should not switch overnight to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. Sometimes, other systems are the right answer, for many complex reasons.

        I happen to have a particular fondness for Solaris, having been a fan of their hardware for the last 15 years. It's the Devil I know, and I'm comfortable dancing with him.

        I think it's amusingly disingenuous of the slashdot Linux-s

        • I would agree that any monoculture is bad. The thing you and those who share your view are missing is that of all those in your list, linux is the only one which is NOT a monoculture.

          Just because it's all labeled linux doesn't mean it's all the same. If there are two opposing camps who disagree on how a component is best designed BOTH will be written and available for compilation. There isn't one linux, there are hundreds of linuxes. It may have the same name, but the linux you run on a wristwatch is NOT
        • Linux is a real OS and BSD's end up having to use a Linux "Emulator" to run half the software anyways

          The only thing you need the Linux "emulator" for is Linux *binaries*. If the code is Free Software and isn't kernel specific, just port it instead of emulating it. In reality it's only there for proprietary software like Oracle and Acrobat.

        • Re:Hot-Swappable (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Octorian (14086) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @09:01PM (#11475981) Homepage
          Actually, one thing I really like about Solaris is a forwards-compatable interface for kernel modules (i.e. drivers and such). This is something that Linux feels downright embarassing at (heck, they're not even compatable from one build to another, yet alone a point version), and I'm really not sure how FreeBSD is at this (havn't checked).

          I can take a device driver written for Solaris version X, and chances are pretty good that it "will just work" on Solaris X+1 and maybe even X+2. (heck, I've even seen a single device driver module "supported" on multiple versions by a HW vendor) The only real requirement is that the module be built for the same architecture as the kernel (i.e. a 32-bit module won't work on a 64-bit kernel, and vice versa).
          • Whilst I won't disagree that module compatability is a good thing... this is quite a deliberate move by Linus. After all, the the kernel comes with all the drivers anyway so why not use the driver that comes with the kernel?

            It is also to discourage binary modules, as they impossible to debug if they cause the kernel to crash.
  • I'm glad that the source code is starting to be released, but could someone more knowledgable explain what Dynamic Tracing is? Is it something that would be useful to a normal user?

    • Re:Dynamic Tracing (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Basically, it's a way of debugging programs. A VERY cool way of debugging programs.

    • Re:Dynamic Tracing (Score:5, Informative)

      by nbert (785663) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:16PM (#11474506) Homepage Journal
      From the link provided in the article:
      DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.
      So the answer to your question is: no, it's not useful for a "normal" user.

    • Re:Dynamic Tracing (Score:5, Informative)

      by illumin8 (148082) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:23PM (#11474580) Journal
      The best place to go for this information is the well documented Dtrace FAQs [sun.com].

      From it, I shamelessly lifted the following brief synopsis:

      Q. What is DTrace?

      A. DTrace is a new facility in the Solaris Operating System that adds dynamic instrumentation and tracing to the kernel and can be used on production systems. It's a power tool that can be used by both the entry-level and experienced system administrators to diagnose and resolve problems in hours or minutes that might have previously taken days.


      Q. What are the benefits of DTrace?

      A.
      Faster resolution of performance problems for system administrators
      Quicker time to market and higher quality product for developers
      Greater utilization of existing system resources for IT managers


      Q. What are the key highlights of DTrace?

      A.
      Comprehensive coverage: over 30,000 instrumentation points in even the smallest system; integrated access to both application and kernel data
      Always available: built-in with no need to reboot or otherwise reconfigure system, disable or alter applications, or disable user/client access
      Safe: cannot panic system and has no impact on the system when not being used
      Enable only the trace points you need
      Analyzes data in real time on production systems
      Extensible as new analysis routines can be built for re-use using the D programming language


      Q. What is the performance overhead of DTrace?

      A. When not in use, DTrace has no impact on system performance or other behavior. When being used, DTrace overhead is dependent on the number of probe points being observed.


      Q. How does Sun's DTrace compare with competitive offerings?

      A. DTrace is the only dynamic tracing tool available that eliminates the need for collecting and processing event data. With DTrace a system administrator can query the system experiencing the problem in real time, while in production, and get accurate and precise information regarding the source of the problem. No log files are generated, and there is no data to analyze. This reduces the time it takes to identify and resolve problems by orders of magnitude! Literally from days to minutes.


      Containers are based on software. They offer logical separation with the same OS in each Container. Containers offer enormous scalabilty: while there is no hard coded limit, upto 4000 per OS image are available and is beyond normal requirements today.


      Q. Can DTrace be used without knowing the D language?

      A. You can leverage scripts developed by others (such as those available on the Sun BigAdmin portal). However, it is not difficult to learn D which is very similar to the ANSI C programming language with a special set of functions and variables to make tracing easy.

    • Re:Dynamic Tracing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by burns210 (572621) <maburns@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 25 2005, @07:04PM (#11475007) Homepage Journal
      Basicly, I think of it as the Ultimate Packet Sniffer command line tool, being applied to processes and your system as a whole, along with a scripting language for your pleasure.

      It lets you track/compare/analyze users and processes in real-time to basicly tell you what your computer is really doing and lets you pinpoint who/why it is doing it, system wide, without configuration changes or restarts..

      Look forward to a lot of REALLY powerful scripts coming from this(there is an experimental rootkit coming out even, that used dtrace to sniff out passwords in system memory, etc). Very powerful, very dangerous.

      • Re:Dynamic Tracing (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I would guess not. Most of those weird-named technologies are only useful on multi-processor systems and servers where CPU cycles are really an issue.

        False. DTrace can be used to analyze the operation of any system that runs Solaris 10, from 1 CPU to 100+. It can tell you useful information about a single thread's interaction with the system or 1000 threads' interactions with each other. It can even tell you about things that have nothing to do with either the number of CPUs or the number of threads.

  • Too busy to post (Score:4, Funny)

    by keester (646050) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:14PM (#11474477)
    Is everyone so busy downloading that they don't have time to post their anti/pro solaris comments?

    Shocking, I tell you.

  • Thank you to the folks at Sun... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by illumin8 (148082) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:15PM (#11474490) Journal
    What a lot of Slashdotters might not realize is that Sun has spent literally millions of hours over the last couple of years "unencumbering" Solaris from patented code that was owned by other companies opposed to the open sourcing of their intellectual property. They did this for no reason other than to prove to the open source community that they are serious about open sourcing Solaris, and hopefully to sell some good Sun iron in the process.

    It would be nice to see some Slashdotters give Sun their well deserved props for a change, instead of ripping on them.

    "What? You gave us OpenOffice? That's not good enough..." I hoping this thread doesn't turn into another Sun bash fest because this time they deserve a little respect for giving away what I see as the crown jewels of their company.
    • What a lot of Slashdotters might not realize is that Sun has spent literally millions of hours over the last couple of years "unencumbering" Solaris from patented code that was owned by other companies opposed to the open sourcing of their intellectual property. They did this for no reason other than to prove to the open source community that they are serious about open sourcing Solaris, and hopefully to sell some good Sun iron in the process.

      No. They didn't explictly done this to prove anything. Without
        • I didn't said that. I mean Sun purpose is to be profitable (to live) its main goal is not to gain open source community trust (but it is one of other goals). Especially when you look at it from the perspective of their stance on Linux - usually they spread useless FUD and stuff around Linux, but on the other hand they want the community to trust them, they wish not to opensource Java, but they want your trust. Is it not developers input to Solaris the thing they really want? Trust is secondary thing - this

    • Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by acg6764 (603692) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:28PM (#11474627)

      On a personal level, I agree. On an investor level, your comment scares me a bit. Sun still makes up for a decent percentage of my tech portfolio. I would like to understand what Sun is hoping to achieve through this investment.

      They are continuing to face declining market shares. They could have used the money to build better hardware and marketing campaigns. They could have also provided enhancements to the existing Linux infrastructure to be better compatible with their hardware.

      Still, the geek in me is happy with Sun and I guess that's a start.

      --
      Discount Cartridges [gatewayink.com]

      • Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Wesley Felter (138342) <wesley@felter.org> on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:27PM (#11474612) Homepage
        The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.

        That's not a question; it is not compatible.
                • Wether it is free or not, is not the real issue. Sun has shown a propensity to sue companies and individuals. Lately, they have turned their eye on Linux claiming that it is hurting them (it hurts sales of Solaris, but helps sell sparcs and amd hardware which is where Sun's money is at).

                  Consider the following:
                  1. Sun already once opened Solaris and then closed it ONCE they thought they had the customers locked in.
                  2. Sun has backed SCO with money and buying stocks. More importantly, SCO has some sort of USB co
      • > The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.

        From my understanding it is similar (identical) in spirit, but not compatible, as each license enforces derived works under its own license, with no mixing of licenses allowed.

        Points where GPL and CDDL seem similar in spirit:
        * All source (changed and unchanged) must remain
        available under the license (GPL#2, CDDL#3.1)
        * Any modification must happen under the original
        license (GPL#2b, CDDL #3.2).

        My personal concern is that

      • Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun... (Score:4, Informative)

        by illumin8 (148082) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @08:56PM (#11475935) Journal
        I was kind of under the impression that this move was masterminded by Microsoft (via the multi-billion dollar deal they had with Sun) as an attempt to fragment the Open Source community. I could be very wrong, but it seems to make the most sense that way. The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.

        Microsoft doesn't have any control over Sun at all. You might have thought this because MS paid Sun $2 billion as part of a settlement agreement, but really, they did this because they had to and because Sun was willing to do them a favor and let them off easy. If Sun had wanted to keep fighting that fight forever, they could have, and probably would have ended up with more cash, although they might have gone out of business before any damages were won.

        Believe me, folks at Sun dislike MS business tactics as much as you do.
      • I'm not really sure how difficult it would be to figure out Solaris kernel code. (ok, maybe for Linux developers, but maybe not BSD ones) A couple years ago, I did some investigation into device driver code. One thing I found was that Solaris and FreeBSD device drivers looked VERY similar in structure. The main differences were the names of the callable kernel functions (names, more than functionality), and that Solaris strongly pushed the philosophy of using mutex locks for all data structures.

  • 1,600 patents (Score:3, Informative)

    by SunFan (845761) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:18PM (#11474525)

    Their press release at sun.com said OpenSolaris via the CDDL will make 1,600 patents available to open source.

  • More than 1,600 patents (Score:5, Interesting)

    by finkployd (12902) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:22PM (#11474573) Homepage
    Part of this release is the opening of more than 1,600 patents to the open source community.

    link [yahoo.com]

    IBM just got outdone on their 500 patent release. Let's see them come back with 5,000! Come on, it can be a Sun/IBM "who can give away the most patents to open source" war :)

    Finkployd

  • Blogs on souce code and DTrace (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChrisRijk (1818) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:34PM (#11474688)
    Bryan Cantrill, one of the DTrace developers wrote this blog entry [sun.com] as a general introduction to the source code layout and also to DTrace. This post by Adam Leventhal [sun.com] goes into some more detail.

    82678 lines of C were made public. No registration, no click through license before download. The OpenSolaris FAQ is pretty good [opensolaris.org] btw, and there's also a roadmap page [opensolaris.org].

    According to this blog [cuddletech.com] (the entry dated 15:43), those in the pilot program (more than 100 developers out side of Sun) have today gotten access to the entire Solaris source base, and have already built their own version - screen shot [cuddletech.com].

  • Sun Compiler and Tools (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pchan- (118053) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @07:10PM (#11475074) Journal
    I presume (though I don't really know) that Solaris needs to be built with Sun's C compiler. Is this compiler coming forth as an open source release too? If not, is it going to be freely available? If I remember correctly, you currently need to pay in order to get Sun's cc.

    If it is coming, this is great news. A compiler highly optimized for Sparc may benefit all operating systems that run on it. Who knows, maybe their x86 compiler has some good features too. Sun's libc (probably highly optimized for Sparc) would be a nice thing to have. Anything else?

    • Re:Sun Compiler and Tools (Score:5, Informative)

      by Darren.Moffat (24713) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @07:26PM (#11475205)
      You can (and infact Sun does) compile Solaris with gcc. Our production AMD64 kernel and a large number of the AMD64 libraries are compiled with gcc . However the makefile assume the Sun C compiler but the build environment has a wrapper around gcc to make it look like the Sun compiler.

  • First look at source... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr. Flibble (12943) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @07:20PM (#11475154) Homepage
    So, I downoad the code, and I take a look at it - the first thing through my mind, is "OMG - look at all the spagetti code!"

    Then I realized I opened a C file with Unix returns with notepad.

    Oops.

  • OpenJava.org? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Glomek (853289) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @07:50PM (#11475452)
    Wake me when Java goes Open Source...

  • BEWARE THIS IS SOURCE POISON (Score:3, Informative)

    by shaitand (626655) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @08:24PM (#11475713) Homepage Journal
    Sun reserves the right to enforce the patents if you use code under a different license.

    Although the terms of the license would allow you to fork under the gpl or contribute to a gpl'd project sun could still nail you with the patents.

  • IBM vs. Sun Patent Pledges (Score:4, Informative)

    by augustz (18082) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @11:46PM (#11477161) Homepage
    There is a big difference between the IBM and SUN patent pledges.

    IBM listed a broad range of software licenses, importantly including the GPL, which means linux is covered.

    Sun's license so far is limited to Solaris, or at least it looks that way, where they have contributed code under the CDDL. This means if you take a method (or read about a method) that they use in Solaris and apply it elsewhere you can still get slammed.

    Not a black and white issue though, as the discerning reader will note that the GPL has not patent clause at all, so the CDDL is stronger in one sense there. Not sure if Linux is any worse off.

    But it will be interesting to see how Solaris comes out as open source, incredibly it has gotten to this point for those who remember the Sun of the past (and even some of the current ranting). Losing market share is an incredible motivator it seems :) Fun stuff though, and I think pragmatism will win the day if there good stuff is delivered.
    • It doesn't matter nearly as much if they invented them or not, but it sounds like they're making an IBM-style pledge to use their patents as a shield for the open source community rather than a sword against it.

    • Is Solaris based on BSD or SysV? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rob Y. (110975) on Tuesday January 25 2005, @06:58PM (#11474933)
      If Solaris is based on SCO's System 5 code, then wouldn't opening it's source (whether Sun has the right or not) potentially pollute other open source projects that borrowed from it?

      If Solaris is based on BSD and has no SCO code in it, I guess that's not an issue. But then why did they take out a SCO license? I imagine some conspiracy theorists will say simply to hurt Linux, but that can't be the whole story, can it?

      IBM had a SCO license too, but that's because AIX has SysV code in it. That's not the code they gave to Linux, but if they were to open-source all of AIX and pieces of SCO code migrated to Linux, that would be a problem, no?. So why not with Solaris too?
    • You've got no idea what you're talking about.

      Maybe for you - the geek in his parent's basement and a nervous caffine twitch preventing from typing properly - things like a $10k price gap between sun hardware and tigerdirect hardware is an issue. But not for anyone that needs reliability and support.

      Yes, things like cooperation are a part of why various open-source based companies are doing well. You know why else they're doing well? They've got sound support, sound development, and a good record to back
      • Linux doesn't have a buggy awk, sed or tar.
        Solaris 8 does.
        Most x86 hardware doesn't suffer from the transient error bug that the non-ECC cache of the ultrasparcII processor.
        Linux works on parking meters.
        Solaris doesn't work out of the box with an A1000.
        Most quality nics work out of the box with linux.
        Most netras and ultras have to either be hardset or vice versa, and won't work the other way.

        Don't get me wrong, I like sun hardware (Love LOM), but it and it's software are not perfect.
        • Linux doesn't have a buggy awk, sed or tar. Solaris 8 does.

          Ignoring for a moment the question of whether it's buggy, who gives a damn about Solaris 8? That was the 90s, man. OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the release of which is imminent. It's a boatload of new technology plus two full releases' worth of bug fixes removed from Solaris 8. If you had a bad experience, we're sorry, but please don't continue feeding people misinformation based on a badly outdated release. Should I talk about my exp

      • They already make better products. Better than Linux, at any rate.

        There are various types of better. If I have to deploy an e-commerce site that gets thousands of hits a day then perhaps Sun products are better. For anything that isn't scaled on that level the value proposition favors Linux.
    • You're mistaken, AC. OpenSolaris can co-opt BSD code, because the BSD license specifically allows anyone to use their code for any purpose -- simply put, the BSD license is compatible with any license, as long as credit is given. It's as free, in that respect, as you can get (without going public domain).

      The BSDs, however, cannot use any of OpenSolaris' code, because you cannot relicense CDDL code as BSD (if you could, it would be trivial to put it into Linux -- after all, BSD licensed code may be added

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