Sun released the very first version of OpenSolaris this year. OpenSolaris, which emerged from Project Indiana, was created to build a user-friendly desktop distribution on top of the open source Solaris platform. Despite some early friction, the project shows a lot of promise. The second release, which occurred earlier this month, included some impressive functionality, such as a new ZFS snapshot visualization feature.

Zemlin also sees FOSS as remaining strong on the server, with Linux continuing to be the major player. Most of Linux's growth in 2009, he said, will be "at the expense of Sun Microsystems, which is floundering in its business model right now. People look at Linux, and they say, HP, IBM, Dell, Intel and AMD -- these are collectively not going to go out of business any time soon. Then they look at Sun Microsystems, and they say, 'Whoa! This company has some serious financial difficulties, they have an uncertain future -- that's not a safe bet for me.' Nobody is really growing much, but where there is growth, it's going to in Linux."

So why does the world need yet another article about Solaris Zones? Simple. Most publications and sites focus on the consolidation benefits of Solaris Zones. While server and service consolidation is a key use case for Solaris Zones, there is so much more to the technology. Other materials focus on system administration practices related to configuration, installation, management, and troubleshooting. This is incredibly useful information, but there is still an important gap. Namely, many people do not have a full appreciation of the security benefits enabled by Solaris Zones, and sparse root zone configurations more specifically.

I was attracted to OpenSolaris 2008.11 in the first place by a couple of other internet articles, one of which posed a question, the other a bold statement.
The question was: "Will OpenSolaris 2008.11 attract Linux users?"
And the statement was: "OpenSolaris tackles Ubuntu dominance".
Let me deal with the question first by answering simply, 'Yes, if they have any sense'. And as for the statement, my reply is: 'No, it doesn't, not yet - but one day soon it should'.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 is well worth investing some time and disk space on. I think we will be hearing a lot more about this operating system in the future.

So, is it too late to catch Linux? I'm not sure it matters much in that context. It's a big world, and there is room for all of us to fit. We simply have too much work to do learning from Linux in some areas where they are strong, focusing on some of our clear advantages in other areas, transforming the existing Solaris base into an open community, and reaching out to new users and developers who have never even heard of us. It's not too late. Not by a long shot. I just don't view projects from that perspective.

That's 1.07 Gbytes/sec outbound. This includes the network headers, so the NFS payload throughput will be a little less. As a sanity check, we can see from the first screenshot x-axis that the test ran from 03:47:40 to about 03:48:30. We know that 50 Gbytes of total payload was moved over NFS (the shares were mounted before the run, so no client caching), so if this took 50 seconds - our average payload throughput would be about 1 Gbyte/sec. This fits.

10 GbE should peak at about 1.164 Gbyte/sec (converting gigabits to gibibytes) per direction, so this test reaching 1.07 Gbytes/sec outbound is a 92% utilization for the 7410's 10 GbE interface. Each of the 10 client's 1 GbE interface would be equally busy. This is a great result for such a simple test - everything is doing what it is supposed to.

If OpenSolaris spent the next 1-2 years focusing primarily on adopting standardized open source software rather than implementing shiny new features, the project would stand a much better chance of attracting long-time Linux users.

OpenSolaris doesn’t need the exclusive community that Solaris enjoyed all these years, it needs the huge Linux community. I think it will happen; the question is, “how quickly?”

The lofi(7D) driver will gain the ability to encrypt/decrypt the raw blocks. This provides parity with Linux and MacOS X which both have encryption support in their equivalent to the lofi(7D) driver.

Sun shows Microsoft how it's done -Time Slider is what Vista's Previous Versions should have been.

Dass OpenSolaris für diese Aufgabe taugt, haben wir im Vergleich mit anderen Betriebssystemen gesehen: Mit einer Leserate von 111 MByte/s und einer Schreibrate von 86 MByte/s ließ das Sun-Unix alle anderen freien Systeme hinter sich, lag gleichauf mit dem Windows Server 2008 und erreichte Werte nahe dem in einem Gigabit-Netz maximal möglichen Datendurchsatz.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 is a very big step forward for Sun, [...] Sun has some creative solutions to address that problem and clearly has a strong grasp of user expectations. [...] It offers some different technologies, a different community, and a different approach to development. All of those things bring value to the broader ecosystem of open source software platforms. I think that it is impossible to overstate the importance of competition as an instrument of progress.

As Qualcomm's director of IT, Matthew Clark was part of the team that reviewed the Linux option. The company's ratio of administrators to users is currently 500-to-1 (although he plans to lower that to about 450-to-1). "With Linux, it would have been 150- or 175-to-1. We would have had to hire three additional administrators for every administrator we have right now working on Unix," Clark says.

"We won't be as aggressive in replatforming to Linux as we initially thought," he says. But, he adds, "we feel that both platforms will have a place in our infrastructure."

#3 Solaris
See above. Linux has won. Whatever technical merit Solaris has today will be commoditized next year. The innovation around Linux is relentless.

For some file-system/disk-centric testing we had used Bonnie++ with the sequential create, random read, and random delete modes. In all three of the tests, OpenSolaris 2008.11 was the champion and had trenched its competition.

If simply counting which operating system was in first place most frequently, it would be Ubuntu. Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 was in first place eight times, OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC2 was in first place seven times, and FreeBSD 7.1 Beta 2 AMD64 was in first just three tests. Depending upon your system usage, one operating system may appear more favorable, like OpenSolaris with the greater disk performance.

This is a platform-specific module for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, that makes the webserver privileges(5)-aware. This enables the server to be run with enhanced security, and with different settings per virtual host.

Unlike perchild, mod_privileges is not itself an MPM. It works within a processing model to set privileges and User/Group per request in a running process.