[Nottingham] Re: Solaris

[Jon Masters]

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James Gibbon wrote:

| You know, I was a SunOS/Solaris 2.x SA for 11 years - and I've only just
| found that out ;)

Solaris is quite terrible at not telling you stuff. That's what is the
single most annoying thing about Sun stuff in general - I actually have
a soft spot for them but they need to stop pussing footing around and
FOSSify Solaris if they are ever going to.

It used to be the case that they claimed there were intellectual
property reasons they could not and that code had to be rewritten but I
would love to know why I cannot get hold of the Solaris source for
educational interest - they ignored requests I sent from cs.nott.ac.uk
when I was studying in Nottingham. I would really like to like Solaris
more from a practical viewpoint as I do from a technical viewpoint.

Face it, Sun had the Linux scheduler design (almost but not quite) and
they invented stuff like the slab allocator and so on. They have dynamic
kernel probes in Solaris 10 and 9 if you install various patches.
Solaris has funky stuff but it's useless if it's not open.

Try figuring out how their systems actually work on the inside too - I
spent a while learning about things like OpenBoot and OpenFirmware for
various work but if you want to know what is going on then you are best
served buying external books and looking at the Linux source code.

Cheers,

Jon.
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