[COLUG] Open Solaris and the Borg

[Andrew Barr]

On Sunday 29 October 2006 20:18, Stephen P. Potter wrote:
> Jim wrote:
> > Stephen Potter wrote:
> >> Or are you guys going to start running me out if I keep
> >> bringing up too much OpenSolaris.  ;-)
> >
> > Solaris (open or closed) is so _nineties_. In '06 it's moot.
> > Solaris has some good features.
> > Linux will absorb them and move on.
> > Resistance is futile.
>
> Linux has, so far, failed to absorb the good features Solaris has had
> _since_ the 90s.  And, I'm not
> necessarily just talking about technologies, I'm talking about real
> features, such as solid engineering
> and design principles, inherent security, and backwards compatibility.
> Do you realize I can take a
> binary that I compiled on SunOS 4 (last released in '92/93) and still
> run it on a Solaris 10 system?
> Or, even if you think that is a little too far fetched, how about
> guaranteed compatibility for Solaris 2.6
> and later to Solaris 10, 8 years of backwards compatibility.  I couldn't
> even upgrade from Fedora
> Core 4 to Fedora Core 5 without having several things break.  

Fedora has always been bad about upgrades--although I understand 5 to 6 was 
relatively pain-free. This is part of the reason I like Debian so 
much--upgrades are almost always smooth and trouble-free. I wouldn't 
extrapolate a specific distro's weakness onto all of them.

> Linux 2.4 
> to 2.6 was a completely
> incompatible change.

No, that's wrong. The system call interface is very stable and has changed 
once or twice in the entire history of Linux, if that. Greg Kroah-Hartman (a 
Linux kernel hacker) has written about using programs compiled for Linux 0.9 
on Linux 2.6. I don't recall if he was talking about binary- or source-level 
compatibility.

The only incompatible userland transition I am aware of is that from the a.out 
to the ELF binary format, and the kernel can still be configured to support 
a.out format binaries.

Linux intentionally does not have a stable kernel API or ABI. Read 
stable-api-nonsense.txt in the kernel source Documentation/ directory for 
more information on why this decision was made.

> There are many, many corporations that require stability and continual
> support.  Solaris 2.6 just
> went out of support in August of this year, and I've got people
> complaining because they can't get
> an official patch for the DST change.  I'm trying to get people off of
> about 500 instances of Solaris
> 2.6 at the Bank.  Until a Linux vendor can match that kind of support,
> Linux will not completely
> replace Solaris.

They're working on it, you've got to remember that the RHEL/Fedora split is 
still only a few years old.

> I find it fascinating that Linux fanatics tend to be so vocal about how
> bad a Windows monoculture is,
> and about how poor interoperability is between real Unix versions, and
> yet they seem so happy to
> embrace a Linux monoculture and ignore the complete non-interoperability
> between the various Linux
> distributions.  I've said for a long time that culturally Linux is at
> exactly the same place as Unix was
> twenty years ago.  As the years go by, I've seen nothing to change that
> opinion (note, I say is has
> pretty much stayed at 20 years, not that Linux hasn't moved forward).

I guess I have no idea what you mean about Linux distributions being 
incompatible. They all use the same kernel, which has the same syscall 
interface, and they all have the same libraries. Packaging systems are 
different, but there's only two or three different ones there, and you can 
convert between them.

To be honest, the only people I see complain about inter-distribution 
compatibility are commercial software and proprietary driver vendors, and 
most Linux users have a thin layer of tolerance for those groups 
anyway--developers even more so.

> -spp
>
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-- 
Andrew Barr

Now playing: The Police - One World (Not Three)