
"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term" - QUFB
https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KBEVoB1
======
dang
Both the site and the article seem like the dodgy kind that we typically
penalize, and it's not clear that this is more than just a rumor. But the
comments below are so good, especially the ones by primary sources, that we've
taken off the penalties.

------
brendangregg
Sad in a way, but no surprise. I recently summarized my opinions on
hackernews[1] in response to why Netflix uses Linux instead of Solaris, which
might be of interest here:

"I worked on Solaris for over a decade, and for a while it was usually a
better choice than Linux, especially due to price/performance (which includes
how many instances it takes to run a given workload). It was worth fighting
for, and I fought hard. But Linux has now become technically better in just
about every way. Out-of-box performance, tuned performance, observability
tools, reliability (on patched LTS), scheduling, networking (including TCP
feature support), driver support, application support, processor support,
debuggers, syscall features, etc. Last I checked, ZFS worked better on Solaris
than Linux, but it's an area where Linux has been catching up. I have little
hope that Solaris will ever catch up to Linux, and I have even less hope for
illumos: Linux now has around 1,000 monthly contributors, whereas illumos has
about 15.

In addition to technology advantages, Linux has a community and workforce
that's orders of magnitude larger, staff with invested skills (re-education is
part of a TCO calculation), companies with invested infrastructure (rewriting
automation scripts is also part of TCO), and also much better future
employment prospects (a factor than can influence people wanting to work at
your company on that OS). Even with my considerable and well-known Solaris
expertise, the employment prospects with Solaris are bleak and getting worse
every year. With my Linux skills, I can work at awesome companies like Netflix
(which I highly recommend), Facebook, Google, SpaceX, etc.

Large technology-focused companies, like Netflix, Facebook, and Google, have
the expertise and appetite to make a technology-based OS decision. We have
dedicated teams for the OS and kernel with deep expertise. On Netflix's OS
team, there are three staff who previously worked at Sun Microsystems and have
more Solaris expertise than they do Linux expertise, and I believe you'll find
similar people at Facebook and Google as well. And we are choosing Linux.

The choice of an OS includes many factors. If an OS came along that was
better, we'd start with a thorough internal investigation, involving
microbenchmarks (including an automated suite I wrote), macrobenchmarks
(depending on the expected gains), and production testing using canaries. We'd
be able to come up with a rough estimate of the cost savings based on
price/performance. Most microservices we have run hot in user-level
applications (think 99% user time), not the kernel, so it's difficult to find
large gains from the OS or kernel. Gains are more likely to come from off-CPU
activities, like task scheduling and TCP congestion, and indirect, like NUMA
memory placement: all areas where Linux is leading. It would be very difficult
to find a large gain by changing the kernel from Linux to something else. Just
based on CPU cycles, the target that should have the most attention is Java,
not the OS. But let's say that somehow we did find an OS with a significant
enough gain: we'd then look at the cost to switch, including retraining staff,
rewriting automation software, and how quickly we could find help to resolve
issues as they came up. Linux is so widely used that there's a good chance
someone else has found an issue, had it fixed in a certain version or
documented a workaround.

What's left where Solaris/SmartOS/illumos is better? 1. There's more marketing
of the features and people. Linux develops great technologies and has some
highly skilled kernel engineers, but I haven't seen any serious effort to
market these. Why does Linux need to? And 2. Enterprise support. Large
enterprise companies where technology is not their focus (eg, a breakfast
cereal company) and who want to outsource these decisions to companies like
Oracle and IBM. Oracle still has Solaris enterprise support that I believe is
very competitive compared to Linux offerings.

So you've chosen to deploy on Solaris or SmartOS? I don't know why you would,
but this is also why I also wouldn't rush to criticize your choice: I don't
know the process whereby you arrived at that decision, and for all I know it
may be the best business decision for your set of requirements.

I'd suggest you give other tech companies the benefit of the doubt for times
when you don't actually know why they have decided something. You never know,
one day you might want to work at one."

I feel sorry for the Solaris engineers (and likely ex-colleagues) who are
about to lose their jobs. My advise would be to take a good look at Linux or
FreeBSD, both of which we use at Netflix. Linux has been getting much better
in recent years, including reaching DTrace capabilities in the kernel.[2] It's
not as bad as it used to be, although to really evaluate where it's at you
need to be on a very new kernel (4.9 is currently in development), as features
have been pouring in.

Also, since I was one of the top Solaris performance experts, I've been
creating new Linux performance content on a website that should also be useful
(I've already been thanked for this by a few Solaris engineers who have
switched.) I've been meaning to create a FreeBSD page too (better, a similar
page on the FreeBSD wiki so others can contribute).

FreeBSD feels to me to be the closest environment to Solaris, and would be a
bit easier to switch to than Linux. And it already has ZFS and DTrace.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12837972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12837972)
[2] [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-27/dtrace-for-
linux...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-27/dtrace-for-
linux-2016.html) [3]
[http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html)

~~~
matt_wulfeck
Has Linux reached parity with BSD in terms of the TCP stack? My understanding
was that it still wasn't as efficient but that info is outdated.

~~~
SEJeff
Linux has been beating BSD for at least 8-10 years when it comes to TCP. When
it comes to new features in TCP-land, Linux easily beats it. Google added
Receive Side Scaling / Receive Flow Steering to Linux years ago, and it is
still a WIP in FreeBSD as an example. Also take a look at much of the
bufferbloat research recently that has been merged into Linux, etc.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
I guess my information was not just outdated, but clearly wrong.

~~~
SEJeff
Don't get me wrong, BSD is still absolutely solid, but for anything cutting
edge, Linux is spanking the pants off of it.

~~~
emaste
As is often the case it depends on the specifics of the application and on
those building a solution. As far as raw performance is concerned FreeBSD
performs very well.

Netflix gets nearly 100Gbps from storage out the network on their
FreeBSD+NGINX OCA appliances. Some details in the "Mellanox CDN Reference
Architecture" whitepaper at [http://www.mellanox.com/related-
docs/solutions/cdn_ref_arch....](http://www.mellanox.com/related-
docs/solutions/cdn_ref_arch.pdf). The closest equivalent I've found on Linux
was a blog post on BBC streaming getting about 1/4 of the performance.

Chelsio has a demo video (with terrible music) using TCP zero copy of 100Gbps
on a single TCP session, with <1% CPU usage
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKTApBf8Oko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKTApBf8Oko).

At SC16 NASA had a "Building Cost-Effective 100-Gbps Firewalls for HPC" demo,
using FreeBSD and netmap:
[https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC16/demos/demo9.html](https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC16/demos/demo9.html)

~~~
SEJeff
You're spot on regarding the app and FreeBSD performing very well. Don't
disagree with you one bit. Also, great link on the Netflix CDN work, they're
doing some really fascinating stuff. It is nice to see the openness.

I work directly with both of the gents who gave this talk about 100G
networking[1] (on Linux) and still find that much of the actual cutting edge
research is done on Linux. Perhaps I'm biased! I've also been to one of
Mellanox's engineering offices (Tel Aviv) to speak with their engineers at my
previous employer 7-8 years ago. They told me they do most all of their
prototyping and initial development on Linux, and RHEL to be specific. Then
then port to other platforms.

Maybe I was wrong on some of this, but my use case (due to my employer's
industry being finance) is lower latency, where Linux absolutely and
positively crushes anything else.

    
    
        [1] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/100G%20Networking%20Toronto_0.pdf

~~~
Annatar
_Maybe I was wrong on some of this, but my use case (due to my employer 's
industry being finance) is lower latency, where Linux absolutely and
positively crushes anything else._

Actually, while we're on the subject, SmartOS with CPU bursting from illumos
is the leader in low latency trading:

[http://containersummit.io/events/sf-2015/videos/wolf-of-
what...](http://containersummit.io/events/sf-2015/videos/wolf-of-what-
containers-on-wall-street)

~~~
SEJeff
That is a slick platform they've built, but I still don't see how it is
competitive with Linux for very low latencies. He mentions trading at
microseconds, but we're building microwave radio networks to trade at
nanoseconds. Unless this has changed extremely recently, Solaris/Illumos and
hence SmartOS still don't have tickless kernels. I recall Solaris having a
100hz tick by default which you could change to 1000hz with a special boot
flag. Linux has had dynticks since fairly early 2.6 kernels and with the
modern 3.x kernels (RHEL7+), you've got full on tickless via the nohz_full
options. Without this, the kernel interrupts the application to use cpu time.

Additionally, I don't believe (Experts please correct me if this is wrong)
SmartOS has an equivalent to Linux's isolcpus boot command line flag (or
cpu_exclusive=1 if you're in a cpuset) to remove a cpu core entirely from the
global scheduler domain. This prevents any tasks from running on that CPU,
including kernel threads. Kernel threads will still occasionally interrupt
applications if you simply set the affinity on pid 1 so that does't count.

These two features, along with hardware that is configured to not throw SMIs,
allow Linux to get out of the way of applications for _truly_ low latency. As
far as I'm aware, this is impossible to do in Solaris/SmartOS. I'm not even
getting into the SLUB memory allocator being better or the lazy TLB in Linux
massively lowering TLB shootdowns, etc, etc. There is a reason why virtually
every single major financial exchange in the world runs Linux (CME in Chicago,
NYSE/NYMEX in New York, LSE in London, and Xetra in Frankfurt), it is better
for the low latency use case.

~~~
bcantrill
You asked for an expert to correct you if you're wrong, so here it is: this is
just completely wrong and entirely ignorant of both the capacity of the system
and its history.

On timers: we (I) added arbitrary resolution interval timers to the operating
system in 1999[1] -- predating Linux by years. (We have had CPU binding and
processor sets for even longer.) The operating system was and is being used in
many real-time capacities (in both the financial and defense sectors in
particular) -- and before "every single major financial exchange" was running
Linux, many of them were running Solaris.

[1] [https://github.com/joyent/illumos-
joyent/blob/master/usr/src...](https://github.com/joyent/illumos-
joyent/blob/master/usr/src/uts/common/os/cyclic.c)

~~~
SEJeff
Thank you Bryan for the correction, I did after all ask for it :)

One final question while I've got you that your response didn't seemingly
address. Does the cyclic subsystem allow turning off the cpu timer entirely
ala Linux's nohz_full? If so, I stand corrected.

~~~
bcantrill
Yes, it does -- the cyclic subsystem will only fire on CPUs that have a cyclic
scheduled, which won't be any CPU that is engaged in interrupt sheltering via
psradm.[1] This is how it is able to achieve hard real-time latency (and
indeed, was used for some hardware-in-the-loop flight simulator systems in the
defense sector that had very tight latency tolerence).

[1] [https://illumos.org/man/1m/psradm](https://illumos.org/man/1m/psradm)

------
bcantrill
From my perspective, if this rumor is true, it's a relief. Solaris died the
moment that they made the source proprietary -- a decision so incredibly
stupid that it still makes my head hurt six years later.

Fortunately, Solaris was open long enough that we in the open source world
were able to fork it with illumos[1]. And because illumos became the home for
many of us that brought Solaris its most famous innovations (e.g., ZFS, DTrace
and zones), it should come as no surprise that we've continued to innovate
over the last six years. (Speaking only for Joyent, we added revolutionary
debugging support for node.js[2], ported KVM to it[3], completed and
productized Linux-branded zones[4], added software-defined networking[5] and
developed first-class Docker integration[6] -- among many, many other
innovations.)

So illumos (and derivatives like SmartOS, OmniOS and DelphixOS) is vibrant and
alive -- but one of our biggest challenges has been its association with the
name "Solaris": I don't think of our system as Solaris any more than I think
of it as "SVR4" or "SunOS" or "7th Edition" or any of its other names -- and
the very presence of Solaris has served to confuse. And indeed, it is my good
fortune to be working with a new generation of engineers on the operating
system -- engineers for whom the term "Solaris" is entirely distant and its
presence as an actual (if proprietary) system befuddling.

So if the rumor is true (and I suspect that it is), it will allow everyone to
know what we have known for six years: Solaris is dead, but its innovative
spirit thrives in illumos. That said, I do hope that Oracle does the right
thing and (re)opens Solaris -- allowing the East Berliners of proprietary
Solaris to finally rejoin us their brethren in the free west of illumos!

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

[2] [https://github.com/joyent/mdb_v8](https://github.com/joyent/mdb_v8)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs)

[5] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2014/09/23/illumos-overlay-
networ...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2014/09/23/illumos-overlay-networks-
development-preview-02/)

[6] [https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-
al...](https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-all-worlds)

~~~
brendangregg
While I'd love to think that illumos will rise and be great like Solaris was
again, after several years I now think that's an incredible long shot.

The death of Solaris may well be a death blow to illumos as well. It sounds
like Oracle, the owners of the Solaris code and copyrights, aren't seeing a
future for it. That's an incredible vote of no confidence from the very owners
of the code. And the positive energy they have put into Solaris at large for
years (marketing, sales, staff) will cease.

While I loved Solaris and illumos back in the day, in the end I'm glad I left
and switched to Linux and FreeBSD. I'm working on similar technical challenges
with much bigger impact. It's been more difficult, but also more rewarding.

~~~
ryao
What would we need to see from Illumos for it to qualify as being great like
Solaris was?

~~~
Annatar
It's already great: SmartOS is the best one can get when it comes to running a
cloud, public or private, and if that cloud must, without compromise, function
correctly in the face of even the most severe failures, hardware or software
wise. Zones + ZFS + fault management architecture (fmadm(1M) / svcadm(1M))
make it possible.

Have a piece of software which must run on GNU/Linux? No problem, it'll
happily run inside of an lx-branded zone with zero performance penalty, where
both it (/usr) and the illumos native commands will be available (/native), so
one can keep one's cake and eat it, too. Otherwise - there are 14,000 packages
ready to run, something Solaris never, ever had.

It's not a desktop operating system, it doesn't have that kind of a mass
adoption. But on the other hand, when one considers just how Windows-like
GNU/Linux became (systemd), it's better that it doesn't: it does one thing and
does it well, and that's powering the high performance, massive clouds. For
desktop, there's macOS, and that's fine.

~~~
RantyDave
FWIW the packages are essentially NetBSD and the dependencies can be
spectacular (pkgin in git). But lx works really, really well.

------
tyingq
I'm actually surprised it took this long. I did unix admin work, including
SunOS and Solaris since the early 90's.

I was a big fan of Solaris, and it had an edge over Linux for quite some
time...as did the Sparc hardware over 32 bit x86.

The writing on the wall was around 2003, when AMD opteron servers came out. 64
bit Linux on dirt cheap, fast, servers.

~~~
kev009
Sun responded swiftly and justly with OpenSolaris for x86. It's a lot easier
to go evaluate this in hindsight and see that cheap x86 was not really a
barrier, OpenSolaris could have become another Java level of ubiquity save
politics and inertia. I remember how tainted things seemed when reading
LWN.net.. which in retrospect were largely FUD around the CDDL and fear of
actual competition. The continued rise of Linux was really just inertia at
that point, it was largely inferior outside desktop use, but had too much sunk
cost investment from IBM, SGI, HP (where a lot of the real scalability culture
was imported from - RCU, NUMA, locking refinements in particular).

UNIX rose to prominence because it's what everyone learned in college in the
'80s. Linux, because you installed it on your laptop or a VM in high school or
college late '90s. Don't underestimate the power of this.

~~~
tyingq
I disagree regarding Solaris x86.

There was a lot of commercial software that either didn't have Solaris x86
binaries at all, or only had 32 bit binaries.

It was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out
better.

~~~
btilly
_It was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out
better._

The commodity always wins. Never forget that.

~~~
tyingq
Steve Jobs might disagree :)

------
akkartik
Since it took me a while to follow:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_for_reduction_in_force)

~~~
djsumdog
I like how the Australians call layoffs "being made redundant"

~~~
resonanttoe
It's actually a legal term. A redundancy in Australia means that the position
you fill is no longer required. You're paid out accordingly to be sacked and
the company cannot hire for that exact position (title, role, job) for some
time.

The determination if a company violates that (as in, they're getting rid of
YOU not the position) becomes a whole set of legal arguments.

But essentially/idealistically;

redundancy = getting rid of the position and it can't come back under another
name.

firing = getting rid of you as a person.

~~~
amyjess
Oddly enough, in the US it's legally advantageous for a company to disguise a
firing as a layoff, but not the other way around.

Why? Because if you get laid off, you can collect unemployment, but if you get
fired for cause, you can't. But if you think the company pretended they had
cause when they didn't, you can appeal, and the company will have to spend
considerable resources defending their position that they had cause. As such,
many employers legally classify all firings as layoffs because it's often not
worth the hassle. And there's no penalties to doing so, either.

So if you get fired but the company officially considers it a layoff, it's a
good thing for _you_ : you dodged a bullet.

~~~
thyrsus
Unemployement benefits, and how they're financed, vary by state. In NC, they
keep track of a company's layoff history, and adjust the unemployment tax
(levied on the employer) according to that history (hypothetically). There was
a series of articles about some companies evading these and other taxes in
2012[0]. I also remember reports about unemployment tax shenanigans in New
Jersey, but I can't find them quickly.

[0] [http://www.newsobserver.com/news/special-reports/the-
ghost-w...](http://www.newsobserver.com/news/special-reports/the-ghost-
workers/article16921211.html)

------
curiousDog
Looks like they're doubling down on cloud. Met with an Oracle recruiter
yesterday. Shit load of money being paid to poach from AWS/Azure. I think
they're too late to start building out a full blow cloud offering.

~~~
wavefunction
AWS just announced their Postgres RDS is HIPAA compliant yesterday. I imagine
the rest of Federal restricted data usages can follow shortly soon after (I
think AWS is already certified in some areas?).

Given that, I see no reason why anyone should indulge Oracle or patronize them
given their revenue-model.

~~~
LordFrith
I believe it was already HIPAA compliant (or else I need to go into hiding).

The path to HIPAA compliance in AWS is just arrange to get a business
agreement with Amazon.

~~~
kstrauser
RDS was only HIPAA for MySQL and SQL Server. PostgreSQL certification is brand
new and a huge deal for some of my projects.

~~~
LordFrith
So I suppose this means storing data in Postgres RDS is HIPAA compliant now by
default? I am not an expert in this, but I do have to sit through a day of
training every year for this.

You should probably be doing a bunch of other things to be HIPAA compliant in
AWS, it's not just a box you check off.

In the past you could be HIPAA compliant and use Postgresql RDS by signing a
business associate agreement and doing things like using dedicated instances
in their own VPC.

~~~
kstrauser
_So I suppose this means storing data in Postgres RDS is HIPAA compliant now
by default?_

At a minimum, you'd still have to sign that BAA with them. I mention that not
for you, but for anyone else at home thinking "oh, I can deploy RDS/PostgreSQL
and be OK with HIPAA without doing anything else!" That's (still) not the
case.

In logic terms, this certification is _necessary_ but not _sufficient_. It's
not sufficient by itself, but it is a hard requirement because RDS hasn't been
covered under their BAA up until the last day or so. That is, it wasn't
covered the last time I checked, maybe a week ago, but it is now today. This
was confirmed by our AWS tech reps when we recently talked to them: they
absolutely did not HIPAA certify PostgreSQL the last time we asked about it.
And oh, how I promise you we talked about it.

 _In the past you could be HIPAA compliant and use Postgresql RDS by signing a
business associate agreement and doing things like using dedicated instances
in their own VPC._

Citation needed. We were told multiple time by our reps and solution architect
that RDS+PostgreSQL was not certified in any way. The only AWS options we had
for HIPAA PostgreSQL were 1) hosting our own instance (that is, _not_ using
RDS in any way, just plain old EC2) or 2) paying a third party for managed
PostgreSQL hosting.

------
amyjess
Well, if not for this being 2016, it would be the saddest news I've heard in a
while, but this came within a week of Ron Glass dying, so I guess it's only
the second-saddest news item this week alone.

I guess it'll still live on in Illumos and its distributions like SmartOS,
OpenIndiana, etc., but still... Solaris brought the computing world so many
innovations (NFS, ZFS, dtrace, etc.), and it's going to take a while for it to
fully sink in that it's gone.

~~~
trhway
Solaris was finally done 10 years ago when instead of responding to what
market needs, they were touting dtrace (and pouring into it all the dev cycle
resources as i could see) as the biggest and shiniest feature. Well, that
small and insignificant from market POV feature was really the biggest and
shiniest thing (if compare to the rest of things :) in Solaris at the time
(and has been since then) ... and that is the issue which did the Solaris. And
the easy install, like insert the disk and go, windows and linux style ... i
think some people still have PTSD from that.

~~~
scarmig
Yeah, Solaris totally should have been focused on actual customer needs, like
containers.

~~~
tw04
They did, they were called zones.

~~~
scarmig
One of those times where a sarcasm punctuation would be useful.

------
scarmig
I suppose it's too much to hope for that Oracle re-opens Solaris.

~~~
rst
Getcher open-source fork of Solaris here:
[http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+Home](http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+Home)

It's been around for a while, initially started by some of the people flooding
out of Sun in the immediate wake of the Oracle acquisition, in a (very
slightly) less messy version of the Hudson/Jenkins split.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
Would you mind pointing me at the Solaris kernel source code? Directly,
please, and not a leaked version of it.

~~~
bcantrill
It's not Solaris -- it's illumos and has been for a long time. And the source
code is available on GitHub.[1]

[1] [https://github.com/illumos/illumos-
gate](https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate)

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
I explicitly asked for a _direct_ link to the _kernel_ source code. Because I
never found that online. Your link is basically a pointer to the haystack.

~~~
mst
Isn't [https://github.com/illumos/illumos-
gate/tree/master/usr/src/...](https://github.com/illumos/illumos-
gate/tree/master/usr/src/uts) as posted by loeg exactly that?

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
Thank you very much, that seems to be what I was looking for. I had feared,
the Solaris kernel hadn't been made publicly available.

------
doughj3
"Oracle says [claims of Solaris being canned] flat out wrong."

[https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/804451784324366336](https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/804451784324366336)

------
mrbill
Sun/Solaris/SPARC and running sunhelp.org was a major part of my life for over
a decade.

This is sad to see, but the acquisition of Sun by Oracle pretty much started
the downhill slide.

~~~
acveilleux
One can probably argue the other way, the downward (market) slide is what led
to the Oracle acquisition.

------
flyinghamster
Sad to see this happen, but I saw this coming. I set up an OpenSolaris NAS at
home just weeks before Oracle closed Solaris 11, and (with the particular
exception of ACLs) loved ZFS. Closing Solaris and offering a "free" download
under vague, menacing terms sealed its fate. My NAS became an OpenIndiana
system for a while, but it's not CentOS 7 + ZoL.

RIP Sun.

------
bebop22
It amazes me that people still do business with oracle.

------
justin66
Thank God we've still got HPUX.

~~~
rbanffy
And AIX.

~~~
coredog64
I can't tell if that's sarcastic.

It used to be said [...] that AIX looks like one space alien discovered Unix,
and described it to another different space alien who then implemented AIX.
But their universal translators were broken and they'd had to gesture a lot.

\-- Paul Tomblin

~~~
tyingq
Grrr. Smit[1]. A non-optional (in many cases) tool to accomplish
administrative tasks on AIX boxes. Making it nigh impossible to script common
stuff that was easy on any other unixish OS.

[1][https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-
smit/](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-smit/)

~~~
nobleach
When you're IBM, you want everything to look like AS/400.... or clunky Java
Swing apps.

~~~
youdontknowtho
I know IBM is weird...but AS/400 or whatever they call it now is still just an
amazing platform. it's one of those things that ends up doing things that are
super critical. in some ways it doesn't have real competitors. OpenVMS? If
there's a infinite amount of money Non-Stop?

~~~
marktangotango
AS/400 was a multi language VM environment long before Java. It really was/is
amazing. I wish there was a way for newer generations to learn about things
like this. I'm not sure how that would look. Maybe a History of Systems book
or something?

~~~
rbanffy
There are many retro computing enthusiast groups around (depending where you
live - none here around Dublin, it seems) but I'm yet to see one dedicated to
midrange or mainframe systems.

It _is_ a shame. Many challenges we find today happen to have been solved in
the 60s. Then in the 70s, then in the 80s...

~~~
SSLy
Exactly – everyone does know their retro consoles and home computers, I can't
find anyone who would have some interest in the systems you mentioned.
Bummers.

~~~
rbanffy
Worst - even platforms that are still in use, such as IBM zSeries and iSeries
are very poorly represented in tutorial space.

~~~
SSLy
I'd love me some IBM i hands on day.

~~~
rbanffy
Is there a Hercules for iSeries?

------
bassman9000
Worked a lot with Solaris 9/10 a few years ago, end of Sun days. Amazing
systems. Reliant AF. Zones and ZFS were a delight. The SPARC/Solaris/JVM combo
worked great in enterprise apps. We had one server running, with some minor
upgrades, with zero issues/reboots, for more than 2 years.

Then... it stopped being great, and a x86 Linux machine running the same JVM
costed a fraction, and equally performed, if not better. Difficult to justify
the licensing and support costs in Oracle days.

Farewell Solaris.

------
pjc50
I'd forgotten that Solaris was still alive. I wonder to what extent their IP
portfolio will linger on, like the zombie corpse that was SCO being used
against Linux.

~~~
digi_owl
SCO was very much alive (though perhaps suffering a severe case of senility)
when it started going after Linux.

~~~
flyinghamster
Here's how I understood it, in a nutshell:

\- SCO decides to sell off it's Unix and becomes Tarantella

\- Established Linux vendor Caldera buys the rights to distribute SCO Unix

\- Caldera changes its name to SCO and subsequently starts filing lawsuits

------
dmm
Is this the end of sparc hardware? I know Oracle has been supporting
Linux/sparc developement, including a distribution:
[https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-
sparc/](https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/).

~~~
protomyth
Fujitsu went with ARM instead of SPARC for their new super computer[1][2]. It
might be another indicator.

1) [https://www.top500.org/news/fujitsu-switches-horses-for-
post...](https://www.top500.org/news/fujitsu-switches-horses-for-post-k-
supercomputer-will-ride-arm-into-exascale/)

2)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018287)

------
garydgregory
Let it live through open source. A donation to Apache?

~~~
robert_foss
That is not the way of the Oracle.

Oracle does not care. Oracle thrives on badwill.

~~~
mrbill
Oracle totally and freely threw away every bit of goodwill that Sun had
fostered over the years, when they bought the company. Chunked it in the
dumpster out back, didn't care.

The "old" Sun: Encouraged hobbyist use of hardware, put out software under a
"free unless you need to pay for support" term, open-sourced Solaris [1], was
generous with hardware donations [2] to various organizations, and realized
that if a sysadmin liked playing with Sun gear at home, they were more likely
to recommend it at work.

The "new" Sun: Oracle flips everyone the bird with both hands, won't even
communicate with you unless it's about a paid support contract.

[1] I was lucky to be one of the 250 people picked as the OpenSolaris
test/release/publicity team; still have my "xxx of 250" poster print on the
wall of my home office. [2] They gave a Netra T1 and a disk shelf to us to run
the Sun-Managers mailing list with, told me to keep a review-unit T1000 to run
sunhelp.org on, and sent me a loaded Ultra 10 after a bit of a
"misunderstanding". These are just three examples of many, many instances. [3]
[http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/](http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/)

~~~
gyjvdf
Unfortunately, the good-will didn't pay the bills

~~~
mrbill
Makes me wonder what would have happened if IBM had been the suitor instead of
Oracle, as I saw rumored.

~~~
rodgerd
Someone in the know at the time claimed to me that IBMs plan was to keep the
hardware and customers, and mitigate anti-trust concerns by spinning off the
software to Red Hat.

Given RHs compulsive open sourcing of aquisitions it's one of the great
tragedies of the software industry that IBM got cold feet over the concerns
that Sun were facing violations of anti-bribery laws.

------
nathankroenert
Great to see that Solaris still generates as much interest at this. Frankly,
given how well the OS works, and how far ahead Oracle has taken the SPARC
hardware, I can't see them just chucking it all away. The M7 and S7's are
freaking awesome.

That, and the whole "Larry like's Larrys stuff more than anyone else's"
thing...

@brendangregg: I'll bet ya $10 that neither Solaris nor SPARC are going away
any time soon. :)

------
jessedhillon
RIF:

 _A generic reduction in force, of undetermined method. Often pronounced like
the word riff rather than spelled out. Sometimes used as a verb, as in "the
employees were pretty heavily riffed"._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff#Common_abbreviations_for_reduction_in_force)

------
shmerl
So, will Oracle open source what they closed after killing OpenSolaris? I'd
also appreciate ZFS with GPL compatible license.

------
dsr_
Prediction: they aren't going to do the decent thing and open-source the whole
thing when they stop it.

~~~
kps
Is there anything interesting left that's not already in illumos?

~~~
ryao
Some of their changes to ZFS that were under development at Sun before
OpenSolaris was killed would be useful to the community. Also, there was a ton
of driver work that they did that the Illumos community could use.

~~~
Annatar
Which drivers? I just looked at a document of theirs which details how they
ripped out a whole bunch of drivers on the i86pc platform. For example, if I
were crazy enough to upgrade to Solaris 11.3, my cadp160(9D) wouldn't work any
more because they ripped it out. All of a sudden, my system could no longer
talk UltraSCSI 160. IPFilter - gone. They ripped out a whole bunch of
libraries like libpng out. Paravirtualization has been ripped out. Cheap
UltraSPARC hardware support like the M3000, T1000, T2000, T5220, T5240, T3-1,
all ripped out. /etc/defaultrouter gone. zone archive formats gone. Adobe
Flash player gone. sysidtool(1M) gone. smdiskless(1M) gone. SmartCard support
gone. lx-branded zones gone and they tell me to use XEN on Linux, no way!
PostgreSQL - gone.

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/end-of-
notices/eon...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/end-of-
notices/eonsolaris11-392732.html)

No thanks.

~~~
ryao
USB 3.0 for one. Then there is their port of Intel's video driver from Linux
and drivers for wireless NICs.

~~~
bcantrill
xhci for SmartOS is actually code-complete and in its final testing.[1]

[1] [https://www.mail-archive.com/smartos-
discuss@lists.smartos.o...](https://www.mail-archive.com/smartos-
discuss@lists.smartos.org/msg04075.html)

~~~
ryao
Awesome. Thanks for letting me know that Robert got this working. It is
probably obvious by now that I am behind on reading mailing lists. I'll try to
catch up before year's end. :)

------
donatj
Oracle is such a destructive force. Getting bought out by Oracle = slowly
being ripped apart limb by limb.

------
Annatar
Hardcore Solaris user here: Solaris 10 on intel is my last Solaris I'm ever
going to run. After:

a) Bart Smaalders (with plenty of help from Glynn Foster and Shawn Walker)
introduced IPS into Solaris

b) they did away with JumpStart(TM)

c) they did away with compressed Flash(TM) archives

d) they did away with sparse zones

e) Oracle closed the source code

I went to illumos / SmartOS and never looked back. I understand from a fellow
engineer who still runs Oracle Solaris that 11.3 is the latest version, and I
couldn't care less. I will never accept IPS because it has no preinstall /
preremove / postinstall / postremove on purpose. Never, ever. I do my own
builds of SmartOS from source code, PXE boot it from the network, and all is
well with the world.

------
bsg75
I wonder what this means for the future of ZFS and it license? Possibly no
change.

~~~
cmurf
OpenZFS is the only meaningful fork now. Unless Oracle open sources the
changes to ZFS from 2010 when OpenSolaris was axed, those changes are lost.
And even if open sourced, I expect those changes would be (selectively) merged
into OpenZFS.

------
hinkley
I wonder how this affects Joyent.

~~~
Annatar
Joyent won, that's how. If this rumor is indeed true, it means Bryan's vision
and perceptiveness beat Larry, albeit indirectly.

Joyent's SmartOS is built on illumos, and illumos is a fork of Solaris Express
/ OpenSolaris / ONNV, and a whole bunch of former Solaris kernel engineers,
who were at key positions at _Sun Microsystems_ , and are now across several
successful companies, still commit fixes and features into the illumos source
code. For example, illumos has OpenZFS and KVM, two major features Snoracle
Solaris doesn't have and can't take back unless they open source the code
again, not that anyone cares what they do.

------
rafaelv
Worse than something like this happening is seeing former Solaris engineers
rushing to gloat on what would be the mass riffing of their former colleagues
(and the remanining Solaris "elders" who helped them become who they are
today).

------
4ad
This is a baseless rumor. I have flagged this submission. It's just someone
trolling the internet.

------
debt
what a brilliant idea for a website. they need to change the homepage to jus
be the latest layoff news.

~~~
makr17
wasn't that the whole point behind
[http://f*ckedcompany.com/](http://f*ckedcompany.com/) back in the late 90s
and early 00s?

------
cakeface
So what you're saying is that there are a bunch of unix engineers looking for
jobs.

------
fredESmite
RIP UNIX

SVR4 / UNIXWARE / SCO / AIX.

Without you Linus would have never been cloned you as his own.

~~~
kev009
Other vendors throwing in the towel interestingly mean AIX will continue on
much longer. The UNIX(r) market is shrinking, but high margin. HP-UX and AIX
are the only UNIX(r) choices, and IBM is a much more stable entity. IBM has a
pretty solid strategy with [Open]POWER embracing Linux while continuing to
sustain i and AIX. AIX is both less sticky and compelling than i, but
nonetheless 27 years to grab niches like DBs and large sw suites mean it will
be around for at least another decade.

------
fredESmite

       Going the way of UNIXWARE / AIX /   
    
       RIP UNIX .

~~~
mishac
AIX is still around.

------
MichaelJ987
The difference between Solaris and Linux is mainly scalability. Linux scales
well on clusters such as SGI UV3000 scale-out servers, or top500
supercomputers. These scale-out clusters serve one scientist starting HPC
number crunching workloads 24-48h. Scale-out workloads are easy to parallelize
doing a calculation on the same set of grid points, over and over again. All
this fits into a cpu cache and can run on each separate compute node. All SGI
UV2000/UV3000 use cases are HPC number crunching, analytics, etc.

OTOH, enterprise business workloads (SAP, OLTP databases, etc) typically serve
thousands of users simultaneously. They do pay roll, accounting, etc etc. Such
workloads can not be cached in the cpu cache, so you need to go out to RAM all
the time. RAM is typically 100ns, which corresponds to 10 MHz cpu. Do you
remember 10 MHz cpus? This means business workloads have huge scalability
problems because you need to place all cpus on the same bus, in one single
large scale-up server. If you try to run business workloads on a scale-out
server, performance will drop drastically as data is shuffled among nodes on a
network, instead on a fast bus.

Thus, business workloads use one single large scale-up servers, with max 16 or
32-sockets. This domain belongs to Unix/RISC and Mainframes. HPC number
crunching use large clusters such as SGI UV3000 which has 10.000s of cores.

The largest Linux scale-up server is the new HP Kraken. It is a redesigned old
Integrity Unix server with 64-sockets. The x86 version of the Integrity maxes
out at 16-sockets only. Other than that, the largest x86 server is vanilla
8-socket servers by IBM, HP, Oracle, etc.

Linux devs only have access to 1-2 socket PCs so Linux can not be optimized
nor tested on large 8-16 socket servers. Which Linux dev have access to
anything larger than 4-sockets? No one. Linus Torvalds? No, he does not work
on scalability on 16-socket servers. There is no Linux dev working on
scalability on 16-socket servers. Why? Because, until last year, 16-socket x86
servers hardly even existed! Google this if you want, try to find a 16-socket
x86 server other than the brand new HP Kraken and SGI UV300H. OTOH, Unix/RISC
and Mainframes have scaled to 64 sockets for decades.

Look at the SAP benchmarks. The top scores all belong to 32-socket UNIX/RISC
doing large SAP workloads. Linux on x86 has the bottom part, doing small SAP
workloads. The HP Kraken has bad SAP scores, considering it has 16-sockets. It
is almost the same as the 8-socket x86 SAP scores. Bad scalability.

Thus, if you want to run workloads larger than 2-4 sockets, you need to go to
Unix/RISC. Linux maxes out at 2-4 sockets or so. The new Oracle Exadata server
sporting SPARC T7 (same as the M7 cpu) runs Linux and it maxes out at
2-sockets. If you want 16-socket workloads, you must go to Solaris and SPARC.
All large business servers, use Unix or Mainframes. No Linux nowhere.

Linux = small business workloads. Solaris = large business workloads. And the
big money is in large business servers. If Oracle kills off Solaris, then
Oracle is stuck at 2-4 sockets (small revenue). Only Solaris can drive large
business servers (big revenue).

It does not make sense to kill of Solaris, because then Oracle can not offer
(expensive) large business servers. Then Oracle will be stuck at small cheap
business servers with Linux and Windows.

Regarding Linux vs Solaris code quality:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux#Kernel_code...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux#Kernel_code_quality)

