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Why solaris?

C

Carlis

Senior member
I dont mean to be rude, I just have a frank question about solaris. I have been using it at my university for two years now and I still dont understand why it is so appreciated.
Apart from sun sparcs we have pc´s running xp and red hat as well as mac's and there seem to be more trubble with the sparcs regardign stability. It is also a more difficult os. Apart from that, the sparcs arent very fast but still cost like the most expensive mac.
And yet they seem to be rather popular among scientists, developers etc. So what did I miss?
 
Some times I ask myself the same, FreeBSD and Solaris is not Lightweight Unix, but have some things really interesting besides.
Any chip of any manufacture when is not well balanced between the tecnology and velocity of operation is really problematic, and sparc coolers are not so good, so we have problems like we have in X86 platforms or then in MACs too.
It seems tha major problems of any processor chip is :
1° - Cool to a them near 42 ~ 53 celsius degrees and maintain the chips at this temp, but more cool does not have any problems at all.
2° - the balance between operation frequencies, communications with chipsets, voltage regulators ( A Tri or Quad phase cleaning stages are better than two stages of energy cleaning for the processor ).

In the case of everything is all right with the machine, your software can go as well too.

Solaris is intended to be the most robust and stable O.S. ever built, but in the real world sometimes have problems because not any hardware is standardized to make it more simpler. Bugs where found at this case. Remember that we have a bigger world in the PC market. An example of what I´m taljking about is the BIOS codes, some revisions of BIOS codes can implement or disable features as well. And Unix sytems sometimes have big problesm with it.
In My try, the major problem I´ve found on the Solaris environment is a lack of drivers, common Nvidia cards drivers are not provided, you have to rely on drivers made by the community for a sample. other sample is SATA/SCSI versus PATA. in Linux everything is detected properly, and Solaris have to be tweaked to know what is DMA in certain IDE controllers. SATA and SCSI are hardware controlled to determine the frequencies so you do not have to tweak anything. It´s simple. Transparent.
AGP cards recognized as pci devices, problems to determine certain chipsets, and a wide range of problems that can be possibly solved by the community in the near future, until it´s solved, I will avoid to use Solaris with certain apps.

But in the other side, JFS is going to be the best Journaling system, only lack few features.
Solaris containers is very usefull.
Snapshots are great.
Security is superb.

If We Join the forces between Linux compatibility and use JFS, Containers, and the Security provided by Solaris or FreeBSD we are in the heaven of the OSES.
 
I've not had any stability issues running Solaris on Sparc, but I think that tainting Soloris with things like other video cards, etc may cause problems.
 
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