Interesting piece from the AMD thread
Message 19536839
Solaris 10 - What's coming in 2004 (SOFTWARE)
By Chris Rijk Tuesday, November 25, 2003 11:07 AM EST
Sun recently confirmed that they will do a full 64-bit port of Solaris to the AMD64 platform. This work started 6 months ago, with a beta expected in spring 2004 and a full release in the summer. Almost certainly, the AMD64 port will start with Solaris 10 - I would expect Solaris 10 to be released for SPARC, x86 and AMD64 on the same day, probably in Q3 2004.
Sun's Opteron systems could ship as early as Q1 2004, with Solaris 9 x86 and AMD64 versions of Red Hat and SuSe. But in the longer run, why would Sun's customers choose Solaris instead of Linux for the Opteron systems? And what new features can SPARC users expect from Solaris 10? If you're particularly interested, early builds of Solaris 10 are already available through the Solaris Express program. Below is a list of features expected in Solaris 10, though they would not necessarily all be available from the initial production release.
DTrace (Sun's BigAdmin DTrace site) DTrace is a powerful tool for "administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs." It is basically a powerful tool and scripting language to help probe every last part of the Solaris kernel at run-time with over 30,000 probes available, and also user programs. This newsgroup post from Bryan Cantrill of the DTrace engineering team gives a detailed worked example of using the tool.
"Fire Engine" TCP/IP stack A complete re-write of Sun's TCP/IP stack, with more features from IPv6 and more performance and scalability. Fire Engine will also support TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) - it is expected that Sun's 8-core Niagara processor will feature this. Without hardware optimisation, the processor demands are quite painful for multiple 1Gbit channels or single 10Gbit Ethernet channels, so expect TOEs to become a common feature of future servers. This article from The Register has good information on Fire Engine.
Solaris Zones ("Project Kevlar") A next generation of the software based partitions in Solaris, which aim for high isolation - they can be individually re-booted, dynamically created and faults outside the kernel won't affect other zones. Future UltraSPARC processors are expected to have (unspecified) hardware features to improve upon this.
"Military grade" security as standard Sun has Trusted Solaris which features security features such as elimination of root user (use job specific "roles" instead), secure by default and on install, "permissions" system for programs (a bit like Java's "sandbox") as well as plenty of paranoia and basic security features. The basic idea is to make hacks as hard as possible and to greatly limit the scope for damage from any "security compromises" or "disaffected employees". Solaris 10 will get all these features as standard, though exactly how it will be on install is unclear. All Solaris 9 binaries will be guaranteed to run however. Trusted Solaris is popular with the military, "three letter agencies" and financial institutions. For example, a Trusted Solaris setup manages information about Air Force One's air-space and is accessed via Sun Ray thin clients requiring multi-factor authentication.
ZFS (Zettabyte File System) ZFS is a completely new POSIX-compliant Unix file-system that aims to push not only performance, scalability and reliability into the next generation, but also manageability - Sun presented two papers at the Self Manage '03 conference. The first is about ZFS's self-tuning abilities and some features that make it simpler to administer in the first place - storage can be very complex to setup and administer, and improving on this is a major goal of ZFS. The second paper is about ZFS's Existential QoS for Storage, a simpler way of specifying QoS (Quality of Service) requirements for storage. Note: a Zettabyte is 270 bytes, or 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes.
And if that wasn't enough... Details are sketchy, but also coming are "Clustrex" single-node fail-over as standard, "FMA/Greenline" self-healing and fault management, Infiniband support, NFS v4, something called "Atomic Operations" (a set of tools or programming libraries?), BART (Basic Audit and reporting Tool) which is like a "lite" version of Tripwire, more advanced NUMA optimisations, and more security/authentication features. The Gnome based Java Desktop System (code-name Mad Hatter) will likely be the default UI, instead of CDE.
Not all of these features will be available with the initial release, and those that don't make it will become availabile in a later quarterly release, under Solaris's "train" release program. This white paper exlains Solaris's development model in detail.
All the above features will also be available on the x86 and Opteron platforms. This is a good time to add some comments about Sun's views on selling Solaris x86 and Linux on their x86 systems: Sun say that the primary reason given (90%) for customers buying Linux x86 systems in general is because Linux is cheap - a low cost way to make good use of "commodity" x86 servers basically. With Red Hat's recent price rises, Solaris x86 would actually be cheaper.
The net result seems likely to be that Sun will promote Solaris ahead of Linux ("cheaper and better") except to customers who already have a large Linux installed base or they specifically want Linux solutions. For Sun customers with SPARC servers, using the same operating system across all servers would make life simpler as well - less complexity means lower TCO. By the end of the year, Sun also plans to publish benchmarks showing Solaris x86 matching, and in some cases beating, Linux on identical hardware.
PS Johan is currently working on a server review article and we hope to publish this within a week.
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