[HN Gopher] Creating a Solaris 10 zone on OpenIndiana
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Creating a Solaris 10 zone on OpenIndiana
Author : zdw
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-12-05 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rqsall.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rqsall.com)
| Up_From_Here wrote:
| I wish I saw more illumos out in the open. The "server UNIX"
| space needs more competition, more unique approaches and
| solutions to the problems in our space.
| aphrax wrote:
| I remember attending the Open Indiana 'launch' after Oracle
| dumped OpenSolaris. I loved both systems, they were actually nice
| for desktop use. I think these days the resources/interest just
| isn't there. Would be great to wrong on this...
| hereforphone wrote:
| This is a good opportunity to discuss Solaris in general. I've
| used Solaris for fun in the past. I couldn't get hooked on it. It
| seemed overly-complex and not very user friendly. I'm a very long
| time Linux user and I use BSD as well.
|
| What were the primary use cases for Solaris in its prime? Is it
| still used anywhere now?
| tonoto wrote:
| I don't know it current position in the market as I haven't
| worked professionally with Solaris for a couple of years, but
| the trend is on decline and I have trouble to see its role in
| new establishments, at least Oracle Solaris. One of the
| frequent use cases was in the finance sector, I believe due to
| stability, observability and security model among some of the
| deciding factors. I still use the open source variant at home
| (illumos), I find it terrific as a hypervisor.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Telco as well: Sun sold NEBS-certified servers. Low
| fire/smoke propagation in components and -48V power supplies
| variants were available for just about any 'standard' model
| Sun offered.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Equipment-
| Building_Sys...
| Bluecobra wrote:
| > What were the primary use cases for Solaris in its prime?
|
| I used to administer many Solaris hosts in the past and they
| were super reliable for hosting enterprise services like mail,
| NFS, NIS, etc. Kernel panics were pretty rare. One really nice
| feature is that there's no concept of out of memory killer. I
| remember one day our LDAP host went haywire and the load
| average shot up to something like 800. I was able to still get
| in as root and kill the offending processes.
|
| I have fond memories of Solaris 10, including ZFS, dtrace,
| zones, SMF. The X4500 "Thumper" storage appliances were pretty
| bad ass back in the day.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > One really nice feature is that there's no concept of out
| of memory killer. I remember one day our LDAP host went
| haywire and the load average shot up to something like 800. I
| was able to still get in as root and kill the offending
| processes.
|
| What does it do when it's out of memory?
| throw0101a wrote:
| Solaris didn't (still doesn't?) allow processes to allocate
| memory when none was available. If a program called
| _malloc()_ and RAM+swap was full, the call returned an
| error (and ideally the program handled it). IIRC, the BSDs
| are the same way as well by default.
|
| Linux is the main Unix-y system that allows over-
| allocation.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Funny, I had the opposite question when I started using
| Linux more often. NetBSD is like Solaris. Running out of
| memory is not a big deal. I use RAM for the filesystem, so
| it does happen occassionally. On Linux, the effect of
| running out of memory was quite a surprise.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Also databases. If you were running Oracle in those days, it
| was almost certainly on Solaris.
| znpy wrote:
| > One really nice feature is that there's no concept of out
| of memory killer.
|
| Interesting... So what happened if you ran out of memory ?
| iso1631 wrote:
| > The X4500 "Thumper" storage appliances were pretty bad ass
| back in the day.
|
| When you dropped it on your toe
|
| I think the instructions suggested a 4 person (5?) lift into
| the bay. Even with a hydraulic trolley to get it to the right
| level we used three people.
| vondur wrote:
| Didn't the Unix workstations of the 90s have more memory
| bandwidth compared to PCs and Mac is the time? Also 3d graphics
| were probably better.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes, that was the main difference between a "workstation" and
| a PC.
| coredog64 wrote:
| What was very helpful about Solaris was that the C library API
| was stable over the entire run. If you had some grotty old
| binary that was running on 2.5 or 2.6, you wouldn't have to
| worry about running it on 8 or 9.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Besides the sibling replies, Solaris on SPARC ADI is one of the
| few OSes that has tamed C, given that it makes use of hardware
| memory tagging for the complete OS.
| iso1210 wrote:
| SPARC hardawre was very good in the 90s and early 00s, and
| Solaris was a solid unix, unlike that upstart linux. Solaris
| came out with ZFS and zones, where were both way ahead of
| anything in the linux ecosystem, however it's restrictive
| licensing meant it generally failed to survive the explosion in
| growth from the cloud boom.
| hereforphone wrote:
| I had some SPARC hardware when it was already old, that I got
| off of eBay. Tons of hackers did in the 90s/00s. What was
| "very good" about the hardware? That it was RISC?
| tw04 wrote:
| Just now Intel is finally starting to get some of the RAS
| features sparc + Solaris had back in the 90s. Sun Sparc
| boxes were far more robust to hardware failure/recovery
| than their x86 counterparts from what I remember.
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19620-01/805-4453/6j47hg5qf/ind
| e...
| iso1210 wrote:
| 64 bit processor in 1995. AMD64 wasn't released until 2000.
| From memory Sun/Solaris kit supported far more memory than
| anything X86 based.
| throw0101a wrote:
| And multi-CPU/socket. The SPARCcenter 2000/2000E had 20
| sockets in ~1995:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun4d#SPARCcenter_2000
| fnord77 wrote:
| It had ECC memory and networking built in. which at the
| time I think was hard to find on PC hardware. And the
| networking just worked. I remember trying to get ethernet
| to work on a PC with early linux. Nightmare.
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