In the year 2010

Another year have passed with lots of changes for Solaris users, some of them good but others quite bad. Most of them are of course related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun which completed January 2010.

The not so good things:

• OpenSolaris is dead
• We no longer have insight into the development of Solaris.next
• We no longer have access to the latest ON source.
• Oracle have lost many brilliant and well known engineers from Sun

Oracle is clearly focusing on Solaris but not in the open kind of way that we go used to with OpenSolaris. As I have written before, this will probably make lots of money for Oracle in the short run, but how can it grow the the Solaris customer base as the OpenSolaris model could?

On the bright side:

• Solaris 11 Express 2010.11, the pre-release of Solaris 11 due next year
• illumos, the community driven ON source gate
• Oracle begun to share some Solaris/SPARC roadmaps this fall
• SPARC T3, 16 cores with great throughput but with limited single thread performance

Solaris 11 Express is in reality a rebranded OpenSolaris 2011.11 release and has a huge amount of new features and enhancements compared to the last OpenSolaris release. The SPARC T3 is a good processor for highly threaded applications and we have seen roadmaps with a T4 coming next summer with three times faster single thread performance.

In 2010 the sparcv9 blog have had over 40 000 visitors counted as "unique" by statcounter. Happy new year everyone!

McNealy about Java and Capitalism

Scott McNealy held a keynote at the PostgreSQL database conference. He discussed the Sun acquisition, Java and capitalism. He highlights the points that Sun was trying to do "good" by sharing and working with the community and make money, while Oracle is focuses more on the money part and not so much on sharing.

"Sun was a company of "good capitalists," McNealy said -- implying virtuous as well as effective -- while Ellison is a "great capitalist." The end result is that "he's there and I'm here," meaning Ellison is still running Oracle and McNealy is without a job."

And

""Sharing's not Larry's middle name," McNealy said. But developers can always take the code for open-source projects and fork it into other projects, something he predicted will happen with both OpenSolaris and Java."

Read the full article at computerworld:
Scott McNealy talks Java, Oracle and Larry Ellison

Both Mike and Brendan quits Oracle

The last of the tree DTrace creators are now leaving Oracle, Mike Shapiro, who also was part of the FishWorks core team. Another member of the FishWorks team was Brendan Greg who also resigned from Oracle. Those of you who didn't now about Bredan before probably got to know who he was when he became famous for screaming at disks in a online video.

DTrace and ZFS is the core foundation of the S7000 storage appliance, now the whole team who invented DTrace is gone and so are the two core persons behind ZFS, Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore.

There are a lot of other great people behind these products, but the ones listed above are rare and extremly talented engineers and have all been part of breaking new ground in their area of expertice. The FishWorks team even created a usable web interface, a rare thing comming from Sun.

Mike Shapiro: End of file
Brendan Gregg: G'Day and Goodbye
Brendan Gregg screaming, Unusual disk latency
FishWorks, Now it can be told

Another bright mind leaves Oracle

I can't say it comes as a surprise but another great mind is leaving Oracle. This time it's Jeff Bonwick, the man behind the slab kernel memory allocator in Solaris and more recently (together with others) ZFS. It is indeed disturbing to see that so many of the innovators from Sun, who stayed with the company thought terrible financial times are now leaving.

This means that most high profile persons behind Fishworks (S7000 appliance), DTrace and ZFS have left the red ship. Jeff Bonwick, Adam Leventhal, Bryan Cantrill and Bill Moore. There are of course many good people still at Oracle, but the people I have been following seem to be on the move.

Best of luck Jeff, I'm sure you will continue to break new ground somewhere else.

Free Your Mind,How a Small, Persistent Team Created a Revolutionary File System
Sun Engineer Jeff Bonwick is New Sun Fellow
Now it can be told (Slab allocator)

Webcast available and SPARC roadmap

The webcast is now available at Oracles website

While the presentation for the future SPARC roadmap stretched to 2015 a few things in the next year or so caught my attention. First a CPU with double throughput will be delivered this year. This is obviously the UltraSPARC T3 with double amount of cores than the current generation of T-processors, the UltraSPARC T2. Early next year the M-Series SPARC64 processors will get some additional speed, probably with slightly higher clock-frequency. But next year is when it gets interesting, they plan to deliver three times the single-thread performance in a new generation of T-processors! It must be a whole new core in this chip since the current, more simple cores would have to be clocked far over 4GHz to achieve this. Looking into 2012 a new generation of M-servers are planned, with 8-64 cores, providing 6x the throughput and 1.5x the single-thread performance. The roadmap goes on until 2015 with several times the performance for both T and M series of servers, but we will hopefully have plenty of time to get back to that in the next years.

All this sound good, but the thing I would look forward to the most is the 3x boost of single-thread performance for T-servers, making it possible to use LDOM technology for a much wider range of workloads. By that time we should also have live migration of LDOMs between T-servers available.

I would love to dig deeper into the details in this but it's my last days of vacation and I have an early flight tomorrow morning.

Oracle Systems Strategy Update Fowler

Thoughts on the future direction of Solaris

As a response in a discussion weather Oracle will invest more in Solaris 10 maybe to also use as base for Fishworks or what they doing I wrote something similiar to this in the opensolaris-discuss list:

Solaris 10 Update 9 will indeed contain some new features including a refresh of ZFS, but it will not replace the OpenSolaris kernel in Fishworks, backporting both the CIFS server and COMSTAR is far to much work.

I think Solaris 10 9/10 will be released at OpenWorld together with at least a preview of "Solaris Next", "Solaris 11" or whatever name it will get. Solaris 10 is too old to be doing major development work in, it is time to release a major version soon, some things can't be done without a new major release. This would look good for Oracle and their commitment to Solaris (not OpenSolaris), that they have a new major Solaris release where Sun just keep developing it for year after year (I'm not saying that was bad, but Oracle may put it like that, look at what Larry said about Rock).

What happens with OpenSolaris as a distribution is unclear, my opinion is that they should have released the second respin on 134 without support at least, now they just get bad will from the community, at least until something is released or they decide to spread some light on the situation.

Solaris next not OpenSolaris
Solaris 10 9/10 and second zfs refresh

Larry regarding Rock:
"At the start, ellison shut down one of schwartz’s pet projects -- development of the “rock” microprocessor for sun’s high-end sparc server line, a semiconductor that had struggled in development for five years as engineers sought to overcome a string of technical problems. “this processor had two incredible virtues: it was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy. it was so hot that they had to put about 12 inches of cooling fans on top of it to cool the processor,” said ellison. “it was just madness to continue that project.”

Solaris Next not OpenSolaris?

Many of us have patiently been awaiting the 2010.xx release of OpenSolaris frustrated by the lack of communication from Oracle. After some digging I realized that something quite interesting has been going on for a while. Oracle themselves are not building OpenSolaris anymore, not since build 135. They are building "Solaris Next Development", this is from /etc/release:

Solaris Next Development snv_140 X86
Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Assembled 29 April 2010

This kind of makes sense, since OpenSolaris always have been the development branch for the Solaris.next, but the distributions have been named OpenSolaris for a while. I also found some tags like "osol_2010.05u4" which seems to be related to build 140. So have there been a change in plan for OpenSolaris 2010.xx release or is this just something for the future, "Solaris 11". But since build 134[a|b] which once should have been the release build for the next release still has the old names in them there might sill be a "OpenSolaris" release.

This is also makes sense since Oracle is mostly talking about Solaris, not OpenSolaris, Solaris seems to be the way forward, time will tell (since Oracle doesn't) in which form. It looks like it will become more like a single distribution, Solaris, with some development releases, OpenSolaris had it's own life and even support side by side with Solaris while still being the bed for development.

New Sun volume servers from Oracle

Yesterday Oracle released an overhaul of their volume server (x86) line. The flagship X4800 looks looks really impressive for an x86 system, eight sockets, up to 1TB memory and hot swappable IO. Equipped with Xeon X7560 CPUs it will fully loaded have 64 cores and a total of 128 thread. All PCI boards and power supplies are hot-pluggable and the four CPU modules look fairly hot-pluggable. One can wounder if support for CPU hot-plug come later future since Intel 7500 was the aim for CPU and Memory hot-plug discussed here earlier.

Oracle’s Sun Fire X4800 Server Architecture
Sun Fire X4800 server Data Sheet

First hundred posts

This post is my hundredth entry in this blog, my first entry was in November 2007, but it was not until 2009 I begun to post more frequently. During this time I have also, almost exactly at the same time gotten a sector of 512 subscribers. I had hoped that this entry would be the announcement of 2010.1H, but still seems to be a few weeks or at least days off. If the are quick it will still be a binary number in my posting sequence.

And if you missed any of these the last week they are both worth a read, the first one is Brendan Greggs blog, he has recently had an article published about visualizing latency. The article is also available:
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/visualizing_system_latency

And this is a link to a presentation which includes, again the roadmap for Solaris and OpenSolaris, it mentions both 2010.1H and Solaris 10 update 9:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~bmiller/DE-OSUG/Oracle-Sun.pdf

Oracle Employee Frederic Pariente seems quite enthusiastic in his blog regarding a "Oracle Solaris Day" the 28th of June. We can only hope that it means that some more public information is supposed to be available by this date:

"Lots have been written about Solaris over the past few months. About its continued investment at Oracle, about OpenSolaris, about its licensing policy, about third-party support, etc. It is time you hear directly from the source the true state of Solaris at Oracle and its future. We would like to invite you to attend a half-day seminar on just Oracle Solaris. We will also cover your migration path, as a Sun Partner Advantage member, to Oracle Partner Network so you can continue to receive support from Oracle for your own investment and specialization in Solaris!"

New Sun T4 server?

Recently some references to a T4 server have showed up, it looks like it's Intel based and that it will at least be used as head in the 7000 series of storage appliance. It world be a bit confusing if this will be the final name for the server, since there are already a SPARC(R) chip with the name T2 with a T3 successor in the works. But this would indeed be to carrying on a Sun tradition, Sun had X64 workstations introduced in the Ultra-line with was based on SPARC(R) Ultra processors. We all love marketing don't we?

There are currently not much more information available, we have to wait and see both on what kind of server it is and what the final name will be.

Could OpenSolaris survive on its own?

Recently there have been some discussion about creating a community maintained fork of OpenSolaris, this is of course caused by the frustration of Oracles failure both to release 2010.03 or even provide any information on the release.

I think this is a very bad idea for several reasons, first of all the OpenSolaris community lacks the people and knowledge to keep OpenSolaris competitive in the future. There are several good contributors that have made huge difference, but the majority of the developers are paid by Oracle and they stand for most of the innovation and code contribution in ON.

Secondly, making yet another distribution based on the fork could make it harder for software vendors and companies to embrace OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris is not big enough to get fragmented and needs all the resources focused.

I think it's high time for Oracle to both release the next version and publish what the intend to do with OpenSolaris. They are only losing community members and potential customers. OpenSolaris in itself might not make so much money in it's current state, but it does introduce people to Solaris. The people who are discovering OpenSolaris today might someday want a enterprise operating system at their company. That was something that Sun did quite well before the bubble, putting Solaris in the universities. And besides, OpenSolaris provides a huge amount of beta testers for Solaris and Oracles current and upcoming appliances.

OpenSolaris 2010.+

Just some rambling and lose ends concerning the next OpenSolaris release.

The planed release date for the next release of OpenSolaris has been passed, this date was set by Sun before Oracle took control. Sadly Oracle keeps quiet and are not giving any new dates, explanations or hints for the release. This is of course feeding the uncertainty and frustration in the OpenSolaris community. Even if the date would remain unset they could at least communicate that it has slipped but will be released when it's ready.

I hope this is not the way Oracle will handle the Sun legacy in the future or people might begin to feel blue. The openness of communication was one of the big advantages of OpenSolaris with Sun, sure releases slipped and people got upset but I've never had this feeling of being totally left out of the process.

There are however some several signs that a release is still planned in the near future, the internal name for the release, "2010.1H" is still actively used, that means the first release of 2010, or first half of 2010. A new internal fork for the PKG source was created for this release just a few days ago and a similar tag exists for the Caiman installer

Danek Duvall, April 2 on pkg-discuss:
"The pkg(5) gate is open again for business. Note that we're switching to an internal branch system to keep track of 2010.1H fixes, rather than an external gate like we did for 2009.06."

Here is the Blocker bug for the release at defect.opensolaris.org: Bug 8314.

Notice the original schedule in the comments:
"This is the blocker bug for the OpenSolaris release slated for the second half of 2009. All blocking bugs for this release should set to block this bug."

The 2010.03 branch of the Caiman slim installer (slim_1003) is also actively being updated alongside the default development branch, so the developers are doing their part, just no official statements of the delay, but given the lack of external communications the internal developers may not have been told to stop working on the release.

Update
Well, someone from Oracle has stated what we suspected and it's the same as it was right before the last release, no new dev builds before the 2010.03 release. Allan Coopersmith on opensolaris-discuss:
"Packages for the later builds have been built for all the gates, not just ON, but not published to pkg.opensolaris.org while the 2010.03 release is being finished."

Rumors and FUD

There have been a lot of rumors around OpenSolaris in the recent days, some of them claiming that Oracle will abandon OpenSolaris. I don't think this will be the case, it would damage to Oracle new enterprise operating system and generate lots of bad will. Oracle can however chose to have a different support model or not even sell support for OpenSolaris at all. This would also be bad, especially in the time before the next major release of Solaris is available. There would then be no way to use new features currently only available in OpenSolaris with support a contract.

Meanwhile, the OpenSolaris community is still very much alive with websites and a a steady stream of updates to the source, and releases that getting close to a full 2010.03 release. This is not the case for other projects like Kenai that Oracle chose to end.

I think the rational way to handle this is just to wait a few more weeks to get the official roadmap from Oracle before jumping the gun and spreading rumors about the end of OpenSolaris or anything else that Oracle is taking over with Sun.

"A posting on the company Website implied that OpenSolaris may soon be "end-of-lifed." However, there's no need for app developers and IT managers to worry: Oracle says it is not killing off the freely downloadable community version of Sun's Unix-based Solaris enterprise operating system anytime soon."

Read the full article here: Oracle Explains Unclear Message About OpenSolaris

Update
According to Dan Roberts, director of Solaris product management, Oracle claims to continue to support and invest in OpenSolaris:
OpenSolaris Alive and Well at Oracle

Text based install with OSOL b131!

The Text based installer project have produced preliminary install imaged for both SPARC and X86. Good news but no time to write got to continue to watch the Sun/Oracle webcast

Download links are available on the here.

A first test installation in a OSOL xVM domU works good apart from that I seemed to have some problems with the terminal settings:

No more Sunshine

Sun is no more.

This feels a bit awkward but Oracle has completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems (JAVA, the stock ticker previously known as SUNW). I hope not everyone follows Jonathan's advise and let go of the Sun culture, the products and support are far from the whole value of the company. I also hope that the majority of all the talented people still at Sun will get a chance to continue to produce great hardware and software inside Oracle.

Lets hope something good comes out of this, that Oracle can make more money on the products from Sun and that more resources are spent developing existing and future technologies and products that relate to Unix and Solaris. I also hope that Oracle understands that we need the openness that we have come to learn from Sun in recent years, we want to be part of the development process and have access to the sources and development releases.

We'll have to wait for another hour or so to see the Oracle webcast will shred some light on all this.

Best of luck to all Sun employees and to the new Oracle corporation, goodbye Sun and thanks for the fifteen years I have known you. The next Sunrise will not be purple but pure red.

Read the announcement here.

Green light from EU for Oracle/Sun

Another non-technical post, but it affect most of the things i write about here. As it turns out, the European Commission had nothing to object to the deal after all, it has now been approved. Not much to say about this, it's all over the web by now. Read the whole press release here.

From the press release:
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: "I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products."

News on future Sun/Oracle strategy

Looks like we may get some more answers regarding the future of Oracle and Sun soon, Oracle hosts an event on January 27.

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today that it will host a live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27, 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM PT, at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components - hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications - engineered to work together. The event will be broadcast globally.

I hope we at least will get some concrete answers on how they plan to handle Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Here is the full press release but the above is pretty much it without lots of disclaimers.

Looking back a decade, part 3

This is the last part in the series, bare with me, i'm back to my ordinary posts after his. We are now looking at the time from 2008 to present.

The last year of the decade where very challenging for Sun, forcing more cutbacks and changes, the profit and stock price was no way near where it should be. Sadly, while Sun have had many good technical solutions and technologies they often have failed to profit from them. The crown jewel, Solaris also faced increased competition mainly from open source operating systems forcing it to evolve and change more rapidly.

A few years after Solaris 10 was released, Sun created a new distribution of OpenSolaris, this effort was named Project Indiana. The aim was to create a new packaging system and to make OpenSolaris more user friendly with a new graphical installer. The user environment was also to be updated to make it more similar to what other open source operating systems provided.

So after all the years of success in the nineties and early 2000 why did Solaris need to change except for opening the source? Solaris 10 was solid and combined an unique feature set with good performance, what problems initiated this new project? As I see it there have been three main areas that other operating systems have done better in than Solaris, all impacting new users acceptance of the platform:

Packaging
While SYSV packages have worked well for a long time (sort of) it lacks any function to install software from central repositories and to resolve dependencies between packages. This makes it harder for new users to get their software on the platform. It's not so much of a problem for large deployments where every package is controlled and well tested, but for developers, small companies and hobbyist it can be a bit of a challenge. The old system with patches was equally hard for new users, there where no built-in function in the patching system to find and apply new updates.

Software
Acceptance and integration of free software have been slow in Solaris, other operating systems have had a wider and more current base of packages available for installation in their repositories.

Hardware
Hardware support on the X86 platform have been limited, especially for home assembled systems that might use hardware that is not common in severs or finished systems from larger vendors.

On the bright side, all three points have been improved drastically. Project Indiana (what is now OpenSolaris 20xx.xx) addressed the first two points, the new packaging system IPS support central repositories and much more software is now available that can be directly installed with a simple command, including updates. It also comes with a brand new graphical (and soon text based) installer that makes the installation experience easier and prettier.

Hardware support for X86 platforms have also improved. Sun have developed more drivers and begun to support a wider range of x86 hardware, other vendors such as Intel and AMD have also contributed. There is support for laptops, WiFI chipsets, power management including suspend/resume and pretty all the latest CPUs from ADM and Intel. There is also support for the latest and greatest graphic cards from NVidia.

Solaris have several unique features not matched by any other operating system today, but the three above points have probably made it harder for new users to adapt the platform. Especially in recent years when users have became custom to easy software installation by a single click. In the good old days it could take days of compiling and patching to get any software installed ;)

As happened with many other of Suns inventions such as VFS, NFS, PAM, loadable kernel modules and RPC, the good ones have continued to spread from Solaris to other operating systems. MacOS X now has DTrace (almost got ZFS too) and FreeBSD has successfully ported ZFS.

Beginning with the integration of ZFS Sun became involved in the storage market, Solaris today contains a complete storage stack with ZFS, iSCSI, CIFS, NDMP, FCOE and NFS. This lead to (or probably been driven by) the amber road storage appliance in 2008. OpenSolaris was used as the base for this appliance system, leveraging DTrace and ZFS to the end user with a simple and powerful web user interface, by far the best graphical interface Sun has ever made. Amber road is based on ordinary X64 servers produced by Sun tied together with OpenSolaris and a custom built interface. This is a quite impressive product, and much thanks to that it uses both general propose hardware and most of the Software it's very competitively priced. I've thought we would see more of this, a similar for the MySQL databases for example.

The next challenge for Solaris will be the transformation from Solaris 10 to what today is OpenSolaris. This will not only be a new major release, it will also switch to the new packaging and installation system, both interactive and the succeeder to jumpstart named AI. OpenSolaris still needs some time to mature before it can be the source of the Solaris 11 or what marketing decides to name it. But it's getting closer, especially with the 2010.03 release, especially if it gets all its promised console based installation features.

On the hardware side Sun begun to partner with Intel from previously mainly working with AMD. The long awaited new Rock CPU was canceled in the last minute mid 2009, the launch was probably not long away since even Solaris 10 updates available to customers included some support for Rock. But the following bugid put an end to that: "6858457 Remove Solaris support for UltraSPARC-AT10 processor". Sun now have the Niagara line of CMT processors for throughput computing, but relies on Fujitsu for single thread performance, Rock should have made this gap smaller, delivering CMT with better performance per thread. The current M-class of servers are performing well, the SPARC64-VII processors from Fujitsu have seen several updates in the least years. They will probably continue be competitive for some time to come but SPARC customers need to to be assured with plans and commitment for future generations.

In the last year of the decade it was announced that Oracle intended to buy Sun, and while the deal is not finished, anything else is pretty much unthinkable by now. I think it wold have been better if Sun could have remained independent, but Sun needed increased profit, it's was becoming clear that this downward spiral was nothing Sun could get out of on it's own. The offer discussed right before the Oracle deal was that IBM where to buy Sun, this would most likely have been a disaster for most of Sun products. IBM would have piked the the best parts and then assimilated the rest. And there are several technologies and products from Sun that have a great value besides Solaris, SPARC, Unified Storage, MySQL and Java, for example VirtualBox, NetBeans and SunRay, to name a few.

Solaris and several other products have a good foundation to stand on, but the limbo caused by the Oracle deal is making Sun bleed, the acquisition should have been completed many month ago. OpenSolaris is off to a good start as the base of the next Solaris but more resources are needed in the project. Hopefully Oracle will keep it's promise and continue to invest in Solaris to a even greater extent than Sun has been able to do the last years. The same applies to the hardware, Oracle needs to deliver on it's promise to invest more in SPARC and show a new roadmap, otherwise the future of Solaris will only be on X64 in a few years. This might sadly be the case in the long run anyhow, it looks like we are on a road towards an single desktop and server architecture. If this is the case, please at least include OBP on these servers...

The next month will probably reveal more of the future for Sun and it's products, it will be interesting to see Oracles true intentions once the deal is finished and how Sun will be incorporated into big red.

Looking back a decade, part 2

I've found out that this takes much time and it's hard to sort of the important things out of everything you would want to cover and not going into any depth. But three parts where promised so here's what have had time to write. The events will be dated around 2004-2006.

In the end of January 2005 "s10_74L2" a was finished, the release build of Solaris 10, which still is the active and supported major version. It had several features that changed the way we work with Unix systems. It was also the larges update to Solaris since the move to SVR4 in 2.0. The main focus was on performance but there where also huge improvements in virtualization, fault management and observability.

Previous Solaris releases was sometimes bashed with names such as "slowlaris", especially when run on workstation class machines. Solaris had overhead that needed to be removed and other operating systems did some things faster. The slogan "if another OS is faster, it is a Solaris bug" was used during development and it payed of making Solaris 10 substantially faster than in predecessors. One thing developed to improve performance was a library for microbenchmarking of system calls, libmicro. With performance data on every system call the ones which where slow could be fixed and compared to other operating systems. Another area of improvement was the networking stack, much of this was delivered by two projects, FireEngine for better TCP performance and Yosemite (in update 2) which did the same for UDP.

Solaris 10 was also the first release to contain light weight virtualization in the form of Solaris zones for both security and workload separation. While the initial release had several flaws when upgrading, it was fixed and many more features added in subsequent update releases.

DTrace, Service Management Facility and Fault Manager Daemon was other important additions, especially DTrace which really was, and still is, groundbreaking for debugging and performance tuning. ZFS which was much needed solution for an own modern volume manager and filesystem for Solaris was often mentioned as a major feature long before Solaris 10 was released, for example in the "Ten moves ahead" campaign. But ZFS was not released until over a year later with the second update, Solaris 10 6/06.

All this was crucial for Solaris to survive the competition and Solaris 10 delivered, albeit with somewhat slow adaptation in the beginning due to the large amount of changes. Without all the work put into this release Solaris would probably have lost it's competitive edge and faded away. The improved performance was required for Solaris to continue to be a competitive OS, the improved security and virtualization where needed additions, but what made most impact was probably DTrace and ZFS which both broke new ground.

Something worth a notice is that Oracle did chose Solaris 10 as it's preferred open source 64-bit developer platform in November 2006. So even if the bounds between Sun and Oracle had been stronger, it did still exist.

2005 was not only the year Solaris 10 was released, it was also the year it became free and open, Solaris 10 was made available freely for download and the source was released. As discussed in the first part, this might have been a bit late, especially the free for use bit, the source was probably even harder to rush, but giving people a chance to test Solaris for free should have been given long before Solaris 10, at least on the X86 side.

On the hardware side the dual-core UltraSPARC IV "Jaguar" was in the heart of most SPARC servers shipped. Sun and Fujitsu formed a partnership to develop future SPARC64 systems together. This resulted in Sun canceling it's own UltraSPARC V processor "Millennium" and shifted its focus on developing Chip MultiThreading processors with technology acquired when buying Aftra Websystems. The first CMT processor was released in November 2005, the UltraSPARC T1 with 8 cores and 4 hardware threads per core. Sun also hinted on a much more advanced CMT processor that was under development, named Rock, or the UltraSPARC RK, which would include features such as transactional memory and higher thread performance than the T1. The Fujitsu partnership helped Sun a lot, both by ending the head-on competition with Fujitsu and by giving Sun the CPU they needed for single thread performance while developing it's own line of CMT processors.

In the X86 space Sun bought Kealia which was started by one of the Sun founders, Andy Bechtolsheim. Kealia focused on developing 64-bit AMD opteron servers and became the foundation for the next generation of X86 servers including the 4 unit, 48 disk storage server x4500 "Thumper".

To summarize, Sun spent lots of resources on making Solaris more competitive and making if free, forming a alliance which cut the R&D spending on current SPARC systems while developing the next generation of system based on CMT. This was also the time when the real commitment to X86 servers began, with Kealia.

Looking back a decade, part 1

It's now a new decade and a good time to take a look on the important things that's happened the last 10 years with focus on Sun and Solaris. I'll try reflect on the good things and mention some of the bad things that have forced Solaris and Sun into a series of transitions. I'll split this into three posts. I'll begin around the year 2000, probably in the 1998-2002 range.

The new millennia began with a massive hysteria about the Y2K bug and everybody was upgrading server, storing food and preparing for the final hour. Sun had spent the nineties transforming the business from workstations towards servers and fighting for open standards and network computing. Many Solaris sites where at the time running Solaris 2.6 and applying all the "Y2K" patches to their systems.

Solaris 7 was available, but since it was the first 64-bit release of Solaris, third party development was lagging. Veritas Volume manager (VxVM), which at the time was close to a mandatory part of all enterprise installations was delayed for a very long time. Sun was without a good volume manager for Solaris and UFS was yet to be enhanced for better performance and disk suite had not been kept up to date since Sun even had bundled VxVM. All this was probably enough to have a fresh look at a new storage solution for, i think an early internal name for this project was "pacific", but I might be wrong. Probably as an interim Solution the Solstice volume manager was integrated into the next release, Solaris 8 as the Solaris volume manager.

Apart for the lag in third part drivers the transition to 64-bit was made early in Solaris, and without any of the hassle we are seeing on other platforms today, ten years later. There was one distribution with could run either a 32 or 64 bit kernel and in the later binaries of different bitwidth could execute side by side.

Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7 where dependable and competitive for the time, but compared to what we are used to today it was a bit slower and more of just an standard System V implementation than todays Solaris. It was also more "bare" with little additional software beside the core OS included. Several administrative tools that we take for granted today was not available, some of them was introduced with Solaris 8 such as prstat, pgrep, pkill and mdb. The Solaris development process was much more closed, no source, no blogs about new features, no public ARC cases and no external development builds to test.

On the hardware side the UltraSPARC II was powering the Ultra Enterprise series. While being the first high volume server series from Sun it was dependable and sold very good. The size ranged from the one socket Ultra Enterprise 1 to the 64 socket Ultra Enterprise 10000 (StarFire). With such large systems even in the late nineties it's no surprise that Solaris have had little problem scaling on todays multi core processors. I remember thinking if I could get my hands on a E3000 when it was time for retirement, over ten years later I now have one as beer table beside my armchair, not quite what I intended back then.

Sun had several very good years late nineties, they where the number one Unix vendor and for a short time I think they even one of the top storage resellers, much due to all internal drives. But when the decline began in 2000 sun was hit hard. The investments into research and development did however continue which bare fruit some years later and is still making a difference, but more on that in the next post.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Sun made the decision to make Solaris freely available and open already at this time. It would probably have grown the community and general acceptance much faster since Solaris had more presence outside server environments then. It was more widely used at universities and still had some of the workstation business left. Then again, no other of the big vendor have released their source, it's not available for AIX, Irix, HPUX or Windows. The initial lack of commitment to the X86 platform probably also hurt Sun when it became de-facto standard for small servers, but as long as it did not provide any threat to SPARC, too little effort was put into the alternative hardware platform.