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(slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

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Softpanorama Solaris Bulletin 2005

[Dec 15, 2005] New Sun BluePrints

[Dec 11, 2005] Power could cost more than servers, Google warns CNET News.com Sun's edge in CPU power consumption in T1 "Niagara" might be more important then many think.  Less than 80 watts power consumption, and up to 5 times Xeon performance (AMD's Opteron server processor consumes a maximum of 95 watts, so it is close to T1 in power efficiency).

"If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin," Luiz Andre Barroso, who previously designed processors for Digital Equipment Corp., said in a September paper published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Queue. "The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet."

Barroso's view is likely to go over well at Sun Microsystems, which on Tuesday launched its Sun Fire T2000 server, whose 72-watt UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor performs more work per watt than rivals. Indeed, the "Piranha" processor Barroso helped design at DEC, which never made it to market, is similar in some ways to Niagara, including its use of eight processing cores on the chip.

To address the power problem, Barroso suggests the very approach Sun has taken with Niagara: processors that can simultaneously execute many instruction sequences, called threads. Typical server chips today can execute one, two or sometimes four threads, but Niagara's eight cores can execute 32 threads.

Power has also become an issue in the years-old rivalry between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. AMD's Opteron server processor consumes a maximum of 95 watts, while Intel's Xeon consumes between 110 watts and 165 watts. Other components also draw power, but Barroso observes that in low-end servers, the processor typically accounts for 50 percent to 60 percent of the total consumption.

Fears about energy consumption and heat dissipation first became a common topic among chipmakers around 1999, when Transmeta burst onto the scene. Intel and others immediately latched onto the problem, but coming up with solutions, while providing customers with higher performance, has proved difficult. While the rate at which power consumption increases has declined a bit, the overall rate of energy required still grows. As a result, a "mini-boom" has occurred for companies that specialize in heat sinks and other components that cool.

Sun loudly trumpets Niagara's relatively low power consumption, but it's not the only one to get the religion. At its Intel Developer Forum in August, Intel detailed plans to rework its processor lines to focus on performance per watt.

Over the last three generations of Google's computing infrastructure, performance has nearly doubled, Barroso said. But because performance per watt remained nearly unchanged, that means electricity consumption has also almost doubled.

If server power consumption grows 20 percent per year, the four-year cost of a server's electricity bill will be larger than the $3,000 initial price of a typical low-end server with x86 processors. Google's data center is populated chiefly with such machines. But if power consumption grows at 50 percent per year, "power costs by the end of the decade would dwarf server prices," even without power increasing beyond its current 9 cents per kilowatt-hour cost, Barroso said.

Barroso's suggested solution is to use heavily multithreaded processors that can execute many threads. His term for the approach, "chip multiprocessor technology," or CMP, is close to the "chip multithreading" term Sun employs.

"The computing industry is ready to embrace chip multiprocessing as the mainstream solution for the desktop and server markets," Barroso argues, but acknowledges that there have been significant barriers.

For one thing, CMP requires a significantly different programming approach, in which tasks are subdivided so they can run in parallel and concurrently.

Indeed, in a separate article in the same issue of ACM Queue, Microsoft researchers Herb Sutter and James Larus wrote: "Concurrency is hard. Not only are today's languages and tools inadequate to transform applications into parallel programs, but also it is difficult to find parallelism in mainstream applications, and--worst of all--concurrency requires programmers to think in a way humans find difficult."

But the software situation is improving as programming tools gradually adapt to the technology and multithreading processors start to catch on, Barroso said.

Another hurdle has been that much of the industry has been focused on processors designed for the high-volume personal computer market. PCs, unlike servers, haven't needed multithreading.

But CMP is only a temporary solution, he said.

"CMPs cannot solve the power-efficiency challenge alone, but can simply mitigate it for the next two or three CPU generations," Barroso said. "Fundamental circuit and architectural innovations are still needed to address the longer-term trends."

CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report.

[Dec 7, 2005] NewsForge Opening Solaris opens door to community, derivative distros

Since the OpenSolaris community was launched in June, at least three derivative distributions -- SchilliX, BeleniX, and Nexenta -- have been created and released. Parts of OpenSolaris are also making their way into other operating systems. A port of DTrace is in the works for FreeBSD.

SchilliX, an OpenSolaris-based live CD, was the first OpenSolaris derivative released, only days after Sun's release of the OpenSolaris code. OpenSolaris can be installed from the SchilliX CD to a hard drive or USB memory stick.

[Nov 24, 2005] The history of DOS Within the Oceans of Great Risk were many Sun Worshippers, and they wanted to excel, and make their words perfect, and do their jobs as easy as one-two-three. And what's more, many of them no longer wanted to pay for the Risk. So the Sun Lord went to the Pea Sea, and got himself eighty-sixed.

[Nov 17, 2005] Oracle taps Solaris 10 as 'preferred development platform' Sun Microsystems announced that Oracle selected the Solaris 10 to be its preferred 64-bit development and deployment platform. That's ends Oracle flirting with Linux. According to Oracle, Solaris 10 will be used throughout its development organization. It will also release and ship 64-bit versions of all Oracle products on the Solaris OS prior to or simultaneous with the release of products on other operating systems.

[Nov 17, 2005]  Sun Studio 11 Sun Studio 11 software removes the price barrier and is available for Free!

Sun Studio 11 software is the latest release of record-setting, optimizing compilers and tools for the C, C++ and Fortran developer. This release delivers the highest optimizations and the best performance in the development of scalable 32-bit and 64-bit applications on Sun's newest hardware platforms including the latest multi-core UltraSPARC, x64 and x86 platforms. And Sun Studio 11 software now removes the price barrier and is available for Free!

Sun Studio 11 software compilers allow developers to leverage the latest in parallel programming and maximize throughput on multi-core systems. In addition, even single-threaded applications gain as the compilers can identify opportunities to parallelize execution and automatically, without source-code changes, produce back-end code to take advantage of this.

[Nov 14, 2005] Sun announces new T1 chip - Computerworld
    Key features

The T1's eight cores can each handle four instruction sequences for a total of 32, and Sun's chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, said that it now has a five-year leap on the Power chip from IBM and Intel's Xeon processor.

"It is a linchpin of the turnaround, but it's not the only one," Schwartz said in a telephone interview, pointing to Sun's expanded lineup of servers that use AMD's Opteron processors, its Java Enterprise System collection of network, identity management and other business software, its grid computing offerings and its subscription-based product offerings.

"You may have noticed we haven't had a performance advantage with Sparc in the past few years. Now we have an irrefutable performance advantage," Schwartz said.

Schwartz also said the T1's lower power consumption is about more than conserving natural resources and protecting the environment. Power consumption in data centers has increasingly become a hot topic for those that manage them.

"I don't think doing good for the planet has to be inconsistent with doing good for our shareholders," Schwartz said.

IDC's Turner said the energy-sipping TI chips could resonate well with customers who buy Sun's Sparc-Solaris servers.

"Given that power [consumption] is one of the data center 's hot and heavy buzzwords right now, they'll probably get some attention," Turner said, referring to the T1 chip.

[Nov 9, 2005] Fujitsu UltraSparc compatible CPUs are competitive with Opteron on SPECint2000/SPECfp2000. They managed to get more then 1200 on SPECint_base2000 for 1.8GHz CPU and over 1400 for 2.16 GHz CPU. That's slightly faster then Opteron 252 (SPECint_base2000 1382). In 1T transaction procession IBM still have a lead.

2.16 GHz CPU.

SPECint2000 = 1594
SPECint_base2000 = 1456
SPECfp2000 = 2139
SPECfp_base2000 = 1808

1.8HHz CPU

SPECint2000 = 1344
SPECint_base2000 = 1256
SPECfp2000 = 1803
SPECfp_base2000 = 1510

Sun 20z (Opteron 252)

SPECint2000 = 1521
SPECint_base2000 = 1382
SPECfp2000 = 2036
SPECfp_base2000 = 1852

[Nov 9, 2005] Was OpenSolaris a Mistake Paul Murphy ZDNet.com Two interesting observations from pro-Linux press:

New UltraSparc IV servers are cheaper and faster then Power 5.

... the new USIV+ "traditional" Ultrasparcs are beating Power5 on both price and performance while the company is about to introduce a whole new world of high performance, low cost, CMT/SMP computing.

        ...Right now, Sun offers the fastest, and cheapest, x86 boxes around.

[Nov 4, 2005]  Slashdot/Solaris Now an Option for IBM Blades  IBM and Sun have reached an agreement allowing Solaris 10 to be supported on IBM BladeCenter servers.

[Nov 4, 2005] SchilliX by Jörg Schilling SchilliX-0.2.2 released

About: SchilliX is an OpenSolaris-based live CD and distribution that is intended to help people discover OpenSolaris. When installed on a hard drive, it also allows developers to develop and compile code in a pure OpenSolaris environment.

Changes: SchilliX now boots on amd64 in 32 and 64 bit mode. SchilliX is now built on top of OpenSolaris Build 24. ACPI support was improved. Vold was enhanced so that cdrecord is now able to deal with empty CD-ROMs while the removable volume management is running. A kit (shell scripts and packages) to create a SchilliX .ISO CD image from packages has been published.

[Oct 24, 2005] Review: Sun's Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation by Jem Matzan

Despite its recent announcement of servers based on AMD64 CPUs, Sun Microsystems is still gung-ho about its 64-bit UltraSPARC computers. The newest addition to Sun's workstation array is the portable Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation. At first glance you might think it's a fancy-looking notebook system, but on closer inspection you'll discover that it's got all the power of a Sun Blade workstation in a fraction of the size.

[Oct 22, 2005] Solaris Express 10/2005 Released   Dan Price has given us a long “What’s New” list for this release.Solaris "Nevada", Build 23 (10/2005)

Desktop Technologies

For Developers

System Enhancements

Hardware Support

OpenSolaris Related Activity

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

[Oct 17, 2005] Overview of Sun's new UltraSPARC IV+ 64-bit processor Operating at 1.5 GHz, the UltraSPARC IV+ offers up to five times the performance of UltraSPARC III servers and up to double increased performance over UltraSPARC IV servers in the same footprint, with no increase in power and cooling requirements.

Sun's new UltraSPARC IV+ 64-bit processor is the fifth generation in our UltraSPARC processor family. It comes with significantly enhanced cores, 2 MB on-chip L2 cache, and an off-chip 32 MB L3 cache. The 1.5 GHz processor follows Sun's Throughput Computing vision while continuing the tradition of binary code compatibility—and uses the latest 90 nanometer process technology.

... ... ...

The UltraSPARC IV+ processor uses Chip Multithreaded Technology that supports two simultaneous threads as a result of two independent cores. Operating at 1.5 GHz, the UltraSPARC IV+ offers up to five times the performance of UltraSPARC III servers and up to double increased performance over UltraSPARC IV servers in the same footprint, with no increase in power and cooling requirements.

[Oct 17, 2005] New hopes from Sun's idea factory - page 2 CNET News.com

Sparc servers remain Sun's most important business, and boosting Sparc sales is probably the single easiest way for the company to restore financial health, even though market researcher IDC forecasts the $19.1 billion market for Unix server servers will shrink by $200 million during the next four years, while Linux and Windows sales continue to grow.

"No matter how Galaxy takes off in the marketplace...it's going to be off a comparatively small base," Schwartz said. "We're in the billions of dollars of opportunity in the Solaris-Sparc marketplace." Sparc server sales also tend to tow along other business, such as data storage and customer services, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said.

Here's the Sparc lineup today: UltraSparc IV, released in 2004, and its new IV+ sequel released this month. Both feature a dual-core design, which puts two processing engines on the same slice of silicon.

Next in the Sparc rejuvenation plan comes Niagara, an eight-core processor that can execute 32 simultaneous instruction sequences called threads while consuming only 56 watts of power--less than half of an Intel Xeon, which can handle handle four threads.

There are indications that Sun has already piqued some customer interest. Internet auction giant eBay is among the customers trying the machines, sources familiar with the testing program said. eBay declined to comment.

Not surprisingly, competitors are quick to downplay Niagara. "For Sun's declining installed base, it's going to be a great product," Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said.

Maybe so, but it's a customer base Sun certainly needs to keep happy, and those high-end customers can be leery of x86 machines. "What we need is something that is solid or stable," said Carsten Larsen, general manager of commercial development for Australian utility provider ActewAGL.

And Sun has other plans. Next up is the "Advanced Product Line" partnership to sell servers with Fujitsu's Sparc64 VI "Olympus" processor beginning in late 2006.

Then comes Niagara II, built with a more advanced manufacturing process. Its features include hardware acceleration of at least seven cryptography algorithms, the ability to cooperate with Solaris to classify network traffic and send it to the appropriate processor core, and a built-in 10 gigabit-per-second Ethernet interface, said David Yen, executive vice president of Sun's Sparc group. In addition, it will be possible to make systems with multiple Niagara II chips.

Sun's public chip plan extends as far as "Rock." Where Niagara is geared for network-oriented tasks such as application servers or Web site hosting, the Rock chip family due in 2008 is designed for back-end tasks such as databases, where a single thread must execute as fast as possible.

Rock also will accelerate Java programs, facilitating the "garbage collection" process by which unused memory is freed for use, Yen said. Initial hardware design for both Niagara II and Rock will probably be completed in the first half of 2006, Yen said.

Rock, Niagara and Galaxy aren't a sure bet, of course. But many customers still would double down on Sun.

"Sun has been around for a long time," ActewAGL's Larsen said. "We're confident they're going to be around for some time to come."

[Jul 2, 2005] Learning Solaris 10 » Zones Unofficial FAQ Posted on March 11th, 2005.

This FAQ is NOT coming from an official Sun Source, be careful ! Still, I hope and believe that the answers are correct and will be very happy to correct them if they’re not.

Last updated : may 19 2005

Recent modifs : 1.3

Section 1 : Support

1.1 Do I need special hardware for running Zones ?
1.2 Which applications are supported to run on Zones ?
1.3 What about license costs if I run my application in a Zone on a specific number of CPUs?

Section 2 : Creation - Configuration

2.1 What are these four “add-inherit-pkg-dir” in my zone configuration and may I remove them?
2.2 Which kind of devices may I NOT add using the zonecfg “set devices” command?
2.3 How do I add a special netmask for a zone’s IP address?
2.4 How to hide a subdirectory of a directory that is loopback mounted from the Gloabl zone?
2.5 How do I add a filesystem to my non-global zone?

Section 3 : Administration

3.1. Why is snoop not working in a non-global zone?
3.2. How do I block traffic between non-global zones?
3.3. What is the patches story in non-global zones?

Section 4 : Integration with other Solaris features

4.1 : Zones & IPFilter?
4.2 : Zones & ZFS?
4.3 : Zones & IPQoS?
4.4 : Zones & IPsec?
4.5 : Zones & IPMP?
4.6 : Zones & DTrace?
4.7 : Zones & SunCluster?
4.8 : Zones & Solaris Volume Manager?
4.9 : Zones & Process Rights Management?

Section 6: files, commands & daemons

6.1 The zoneadmd daemon
6.2 The zsched daemon
6.3 The zcons driver
6.4 The zonecfg command
6.5 The zoneadm command
6.6 The zlogin command
6.7 The /etc/zones/my-zone.xml file
6.8 The /etc/zones/index file
6.9 The /etc/zones/SUNWdefault.xml file
6.10 The /etc/zones/SUNWblank.xml file

[Jun 17, 2005] Sun has second thoughts about Linux on Solaris CNET News.com Sun is emphasizing Xen.

The feature, code-named Janus and not yet released, lets Linux applications run on its Solaris operating system. Sun instead is emphasizing a related open-source alternative called Xen.

Sun had touted Janus as a useful tool to help customers drop Linux in favor of Solaris, Sun's version of Unix. Sun offers the software to interested customers, but now expects customers that run Linux applications to be more interested in on an ordinary version of Linux.

"The interest in doing Linux applications on Solaris has been for migration. But when you talk about running certified data center applications, you're going to run that on the full stack of software that's been certified," said Tom Goguen, director of Solaris marketing for Sun.

Running Linux and Solaris side-by-side on the same computer will be possible with an open-source project called Xen, "hypervisor" software that lets multiple operating systems run simultaneously on one computer. It's used chiefly with Linux today, but "We've gotten actively involved in the Xen project," Goguen said.

Though Sun expects Xen to be more widely used, the company plans to offer and support Janus, Goguen said. John Fowler, a Sun executive vice president, said he's helped out Xen developers: "I just sent them a pile of hardware, gratis." And Solaris programmer Tim Marsland, in his blog on Friday, invited others to help Sun build Xen support into OpenSolaris.

IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices also are Xen enthusiasts. Microsoft, which is critical of the General Public License (GPL) that covers open-source Xen, has its own hypervisor work under way.

Java flaws open door to hackers CNET News.com Sun Microsystems has fixed a pair of security bugs in Java that could be exploited by attackers to take over computers running Windows, Linux and Solaris.

The flaws are "highly critical," security monitoring company Secunia said in an advisory posted Tuesday. Flaws that get that ranking--one notch below Secunia's most severe "extremely critical" rating--are typically remotely exploitable and can lead to full system compromise.

Both flaws affect the Java Runtime Environment, or JRE. This is the Java software many computer users have on their system to run Java applications. The bugs could allow a Java application to read and write files or execute applications on a victim's computer, Sun said in two separate security advisories released Monday.

One is a general flaw in the JRE, while the other is specific to Java Web Start, a technology to load Java applications over a network such as the Internet.

The flaws could be exploited through a malicious Web site, according to alerts from the French Security Incident Response Team, which rates both issues "critical."

[Jun 3, 2005] Sun promotion: Bundle a 1.6 GHz AMD Athlon PC* in a Sun Blade 1500 or 2500 workstation for $1.

Run Solaris and Microsoft or Linux environments on a single desktop. With this promotion, you can add a SunPCi IIIpro Coprocessor card to your Sun Blade 1500 or Sun Blade 2500 workstation order for $1. Promotion valid February 1, 2005 through June 30th, 2005.

All Published SPEC CINT2000 Results. It looks like Opteron 250 based system are on average 2 times faster then fastest UltraSparc CPU (1.6 GHz) on integer calculations.   1.6 GHz CPU get a respectable 743 (approximately twice less then top Opteron CPU). The best Opteron system has 1569. BTW  Ultra 10 333MHz, which along with Ultra-5 was the most popular Sun workstation in late 90th, has CINT2000 rating of just 133.

Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1600 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 293 313 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1600 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 292 311 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1750 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 370 395 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1750 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 377 396 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1750 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 369 393 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1900 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 438 467 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 1900 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 439 466 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1000 Model 900 Cu 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 470 533 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 100 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 165 174 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 150 (550 MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 202 217 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 150 (650 MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 230 246 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1500 (1.062GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 513 589 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 1500 (1.5GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 697 796 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 2000 (1.015GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 516 576 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 2000 (1.2GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 642 722 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 2500 (1.28GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 604 696 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 2500 (1.6GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 739 845 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Blade Model 2050 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 537 610 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Enterprise 3500/4500 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 198 212 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Enterprise 450 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 225 234 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire 280R (1.015GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 511 574 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire 280R (1200 MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 637 712 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire 280R 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 470 529 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire 280R 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 365 391 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire 280R 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 375 394 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire 280R 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 366 390 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V1280 (1200MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 608 676 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V1280 (900MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 479 535 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V20z 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1382 1521 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V20z 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1569 1746 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V210 (1002MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 485 555 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V210 (1336MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 621 706 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V240 (1.28GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 613 704 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V240 (1002MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 482 553 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V240 (1503MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 698 794 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V250 (1.28GHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 612 702 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V40z 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1379 1515 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V40z 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1558 1741 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V440 (1600MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 743 845 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V480 (1050MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 556 619 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V480 (1200MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 632 702 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V480 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 469 531 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V65x (3.06 GHz Xeon) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip (Hyper-Threading Technology disabled) 1024 1066 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V880 (1050MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 560 626 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V880 (1200MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 625 700 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V880 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 347 390 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V880 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 449 507 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Java Workstation W1100z 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1434 1582 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Java Workstation W2100z 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1437 1584 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Netra 20 (900MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 475 533 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Sun Netra 20 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 377 417 Text HTML PDF PS Config
Sun Microsystems Ultra 10 333MHz 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 133 -- Text HTML PDF PS Config

Automating Centralized File Integrity Checks in the Solaris 10 Operating System

by Glenn Brunette

This Sun BluePrints Cookbook describes how to centralize and automate the collection of file integrity information using the following Solaris features:

* Secure Shell
* Role-based Access Control (RBAC)
* Process Privileges
* Basic Auditing and Reporting Tool (BART)

Each of these features can be quickly and easily integrated to centralize and automate the process of collecting file fingerprints across a network of Solaris 10 systems.

Note: This article is available in PDF Format only.

[Mar 25, 2005] http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/selfheal.html

Traditionally, when a hardware or software fault occurred on a Solaris system, a message would usually be logged to the appropriate device specified in /etc/syslog.conf, and the rest of the diagnosis and repair was left to the administrator. Predictive Self-Healing technology is introduced in the Solaris 10 OS, which is available for preview through the Software Express for Solaris program.

Predictive Self-Healing is a newly designed cohesive architecture and methodology for automatically diagnosing,reporting, and handling software and hardware fault conditions.

This new technology lessens the time required to debug a hardware or software problem and provides the administrator and Sun Technical Support with detailed data about each fault. The architecture consists of an event management protocol, the fault manager, and the software fault-handling software, the Solaris Service Manager.

[Mar 17, 2005] An interesting option in telnetd for Solaris 10

It looks like it now provides a simple "not in DNS, no access" defense via option -U:

-U Refuses connections that cannot be mapped to a name through the getnameinfo(3SOCKET) function.

The Jem Report - Solaris 10 a collection of great, new, unique features

Prior to the launch event I got some suggestions from Solaris sysadmins who had specific problems with previous versions of Solaris and had switched to other operating systems where they could. I took the issues mentioned in this SysAdmin to SysAdmin column and the comment attached to it, plus some other notes, and compiled the following list of issues, which several Solaris engineers addressed point by point:
  • Solaris is too complex. This was described by the Solaris hackers as being an engineering problem that has been solved by introducing better technology -- namely, DTrace to replace other less specific command-line tools, X.org to replace the aging Xsun server, a more streamlined installation procedure, and better documentation. "Documentation is never an afterthought for us," Cantrill told me.
  • If a user belongs to more than 15 groups, the system dies. Cantrill told me that this has long been a tunable parameter in Solaris. "Such that it exists at all, the limitation is due to a protocol restriction in NFS. By default, Solaris is configured to cooperate with other vendors' NFS implementations -- which means setting the number of supplementary groups to 15."
  • NIS netgroups have a size limitation; this forces messy netgroups. This is due to an underlying DBM database issue; the database has a size limit of 1,024 bytes. The best solution is to use LDAP instead.
  • If one machine is in two netgroups and both groups have mount privileges, the NFS server crashes. The Solaris engineers tested this and didn't find the problem; furthermore they had no record of this ever being a bug or problem with any previous editions of Solaris.
  • GNOME is poorly implemented. GNOME support has been greatly improved in Solaris 10. The version that ships with the initial release is 2.6.1, and it now uses the Java Desktop System theme by default.
  • The version of Netscape included with Solaris is old. Sun has abandoned Netscape in favor of Mozilla.
  • Solaris has a poor LDAP implementation. A great deal of work has gone into improving LDAP in Solaris 10. The new implementation is of a much higher quality and has expanded features over previous Solaris implementations.
  • If you set up the system to authenticate to NIS, then start LDAP, the system crashes. This bug has been fixed in Solaris 10.
  • Solaris is slow. Solaris 10 includes an optimized TCP/IP stack, which now scales much better on multi-CPU systems. Additionally, Solaris 10 has specific performance enhancements for UltraSPARC IIIi and IV systems that can increase performance by as much as 20%.

[Mar 14, 2005] Slashdot Solaris 10 Installation and Desktop Walkthrough This time the discussion is almost 100% junk: it looks like no experienced Solaris admin visit Slashdot anymore ;-).  Some more or less interesting posts: 

Solaris VS Linux (Score:-1, Troll)
by Lunix Torvalds (866066) on Sunday March 13, @10:26PM (#11929754)
I like Solaris. I find that it's more professional and robust than Linux. But what do I know, I only wrote Linux.
 
solaris 10 is great (+ real world dtrace example) (Score:1, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, @04:20AM (#11930849)
i've got it installed on a computer here, and it's not only solid but flexible. and dtrace makes it easy to shoot down any possible problem you're facing. for example (this is a dumb example, but useful) i was trying to samba share my dvd drive and watch a movie over it, and the player was just skipping on the first frame. so i'm sitting here wondering if it's an i/o problem, a network problem, a protocol problem, or what. i decided to test out dtrace and wrote a script to profile the reads from the dvd drive, and i find that it's only reading 59 bytes at a time. then it dawned on me that it was a commercial dvd that was css-locked or whatever and therefore the reads were failing.

had i thought to check the return codes on the reads i was profiling, i would have seen the problem immediately.

so then i do pkg-get -i vls (http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html) and i'm on a roll. pkg-get is an automatic package downloader and dependency checker similar to apt or yum.

(of course, i haven't actually gotten videolan server *working* but i know what the problem and resolution is, thanks to solaris's profiling ability)

if you're running any high-demand system, you can see the obvious advantage of being able to exactly pinpoint any performance problem you're having.

anyways, i installed it when it came out (feb 1) and my uptime is 32 days. the only rebooting i've done so far is when i was trying to figure out the new svcs thing (which makes perfect sense and is way better than sysv-style init scripts once you get the hang of it)

in my book, solaris 10 gets 2 thumbs up.
Sun to kill Linux? (Score:2, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 13, @09:41PM (#11929561)
I hope so
Re:Sun paid SCO money (Score:2)
by Tpenta (197089) on Monday March 14, @12:55AM (#11930342)
So what are are suggesting is that Sun should have acted illegally and not ensured that their licensing was correct? Come on, I am sure you can come up with something better than that old argument (which has been refuted so many times as conspiacy theory that I'm not going to mention it here again).

What I was asking for was references of Sun Folks saying that they are specifically aiming to kill Linux. The closest comment that I have come across was the reverse, and that was Linus saying that he'd like to see Sun die. The actual quote was

"A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die,"

Ref: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingn ews.jhtml?articleId=59300278 [crn.com]

I am assuming that this is the same Anonymous Coward who wrote the initial post that I responded to. I would look forward to seeing those words (about Sun not open sourcing Solaris) get taken back, but I won't be terribly surprised if you don't.


Anatomy of a Read and Write Call - 21k By Pat Shuff Linux Journal 2002-09-20 23:00

We look at three different tactics for optimizing read and write performance under Linux.

A few years ago I was tasked with making the Spec96 benchmark suite produce the fastest numbers possible using the Solaris Intel operating system and Compaq Proliant servers. We were given all the resources that Sun Microsystems and Compaq Computer Corporation could muster to help take both companies to the next level in Unix computing on the Intel architecture. Sun had just announced its flagship operating system on the Intel platform and Compaq was in a heated race with Dell for the best departmental servers. Unixware and SCO were the primary challengers since Windows NT 3.5 was not very stable at the time and no one had ever heard of an upstart graduate student from overseas who thought that he could build a kernel that rivaled those of multi-billion dollar corporations.

Now many years later, Linux has gained considerable market share and is the De facto Unix for all the major hardware manufacturers on the Intel architecture. In this article, I will attempt to take the lessons learned from this tuning exercise and show how they can be applied to the Linux operating system.

As it turned out, the gcc benchmark was the one that everyone seemed to be improving on the most. As we analyzed what the benchmark was doing, we found out that basically it opened a file, read its contents, created a new file, wrote new contents, then closed both files. It did this over and over and over. File operations proved to be the bottleneck in performance. We tried faster processors with insignificant improvement. We tried processors with huge (at the time) level 1 and level 2 cache and still found no significant improvement. We tried using a gigabyte of memory and found little or no improvement. By using the vmstat command, we found that the processor was relatively idle, little memory was being used, but we were getting a significant amount of reads and writes to the root disk. Using the same hardware and same test programs, Unixware was 25% faster than Solaris Intel. Initially, we decided that Solaris was just really slow. Unfortunately, I was working for Sun at the time and this was not the answer that we could take to my management. We had to figure out why it was slow and make recommendations on how to improve the performance. The target was 25% faster than Unixware, not slower.

The first thing that we did was to look at the configurations. It turns out that the two systems were identical hardware,. We just booted a different disk to boot the other operating system. The Unixware system was configured with /tmp as a tmpfs whereas the Solaris system had /tmp on the root file system. We changed the Solaris configuration to use tmpfs but it did not significantly improve performance. Later, we found that this was due to a bug in the tmpfs implementation on Solaris Intel. By braking down the file operation, we decided to focus on three areas; the libc interface, the node/dentry layer, and the device drivers managing the disk. In this article, we will look at the three different layers and talk about how to improve performance and how they specifically apply to Linux.

LISA 2001 Paper LISA 2001 Paper about RUF

This paper describes a utility named ruf that reads files from an unmounted file system. The files are accessed by reading disk structures directly so the program is peculiar to the specific file system employed. The current implementation supports the *BSD FFS, SunOS/Solaris UFS, HP-UX HFS, and Linux ext2fs file systems. All these file systems derive from the original FFS, but have peculiar differences in their specific implementations.

The utility can read files from a damaged file system. Since the utility attempts to read only those structures it requires, damaged areas of the disk can be avoided. Files can be accessed by their inode number alone, bypassing damage to structures above it in the directory hierarchy.

The functions of the utility is available in a library named libruf. The utility and library is available under the BSD license.

Introduction

There are many important reasons for being able to access unmounted file systems, the prime example being a damaged disk. This paper describes a utility that can be used to read a disk file without mounting the file system. The utility behaves similar to the regular cat utility, and was originally named dog, but was renamed to ruf for reading unmounted filesystems to avoid a name