Haim TzadokCEO

Solaris vs. LinuxTechnological Perspective

Disclaimer

This lecture describes my solely personal opinion. The information might not be accurate and might be subject to changes at any time.

It does not project any opinion from any other company or institute which I am affiliated with.

You are encouraged to participate in the lecture and to reflect your own opinion.

How to compare between OS’s ?

In order to compare between Solaris and Linux Operating systems we need to declare several things -

What is the purpose of the operating system ?

Who is using the operating system ?

How the operating system is built ?

Goal

Usability

Quality

Solaris vs. Linux

Purpose

Solaris vs. Linux

Purpose

Solaris Linux

• No availability• No Availability• Server X86/X86_64 (Intel)

• Large ISV install base• Better support for DB

• Heavy duty – SPARC• Large ISV install base• Better support for DB

• Embedded• Tablet/Phones• Server X86/X86_64

• Growing application coverage

• Good support for DB

• Heavy duty (Mainframe, Itanium)• Minimal ISV install base• Poor support for DB

Solaris vs. Linux

Usability

Solaris vs. LinuxSolaris Linux Demand Role

• Excellent stability

• Good stability ConsistencyHigh system throughput

Managers

• Excellent HW/SW Integration.

• Good HW/SW Integration.

Low application response time

End users

• Good API’s• Excellent binary

compatibility

• Excellent API’s• Good binary

compatibility

Fast access to system resources

Programmers

• Excellent Administration Ability

• Good administration Ability

Ability to install and administer the system easily

System Administrators

Solaris vs. LinuxQuality

Hardware IntegrationIntel, SPARC vs. Intel/Mainframe

KernelWell engineered vs. Well developed

File-systemZFS vs. ext4/btrfs

NetworkingNetwork virtualization vs. Regular

networkScheduling

Scheduling classes vs. Optional API’sIO & Storage

Multipathing/COMSTAR vs. Standard device mechanism

VirtualizationZones vs. LXCOVM for Sparc SW hypervisor

InstallationJumpstart/AI vs. Kickstart

PackagingIPS vs. RPM

ServicesSMF vs. SVR4

Hardware Integration – Solaris X86

Integration with Intel CPU’s Sun Microsystem and Intel are collaborating since 2007.

Hardware Integration – Solaris X86 (cont)

FMA – Fault Management Architecture

Hardware Integration – Solaris SPARC

SPARC – The fastest Microprocessor in the worldBest of breed architecture

CPU features:

• Accelerated Cryptography – Cryptography is done by hardware.

• Critical Thread optimization – Ability to utilize a core in 2 ways:• 8 hardware threads - when multithreaded behavior is

needed.or • 1 hardware thread in case single thread intensive

processing is needed.• A Multithreaded Hypervisor – allows to utilize the Virtual

environment in Oracle VM for SPARC better, by splitting the hypervisor operations to several hardware threads.

Hardware Integration – LINUX X86

CentOS HPRedHat

Oracle LinuxOracle Solaris ORACLESuse

DELL

Ubuntu IBM

Where as most Linux distribution require complex matrix of support to other HW vendors, Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris are adjusted to Oracle Hardware better.

Kernel - Solaris

Well Engineered vs. Well Developed

• Binary compatibility• Kernel Debugger in

real time and for postmortem (mdb, crash analysis)

• Security (RBAC aware)

• Well defined APIs

• 18K lines in one day.• Much more feature rich• Scheduling• Security (RBAC aware)• Constant changes in

API’s

File System

ZFS vs. ext4/btrfs

• Matured• Ease of administration• No evacuation of disk

(until BPR is implemented).

• ZFS integrated with DTRACE for better observation, monitoring and analysis.

• Integrated with Image Packaging System

• Ext4 – very old, btrfs - still new not implemented in most of the distributions.

• Use the old UNIX/POSIX command semantics.

• It sometimes takes 1 zfs command to be implemented in 2-4 btrfs commands.

More info:http://www.seedsofgenius.net/solaris/zfs-vs-btrfs-a-reference

NetworkingNetwork virtualization vs. Regular network

• Allows Virtual objects – VNICS, Virtual Switches.

• Well engineered.• Structured driver model

– the hardware driver layer is separated from other layers.

• Structured administration model(dladm, ipadm)

• Move from files to DB configuration.

• Configuration is object driven (e.g: addresses are now objects) and not text driven (using files).

• Flow(QoS) administration• The network

configuration is implemented as a service. With Dependency mechanism.

• Basic Network configuration with no virtualization.

• Driver have one static implementation for all the functionality of the driver.

• Configuration is in old text files.

• Most of the configuration is spread over several files.

Scheduling

Scheduling classes vs. Optional API’s

• Variety of Scheduling classes (dispadmin –l)

• FSS – Fair Share Scheduler.

• Ability to configure Scheduling class if needed.

• Ability to use – Realtime and Fixed priority classes very easy with no need of programming skills.

• Basic Scheduling• Nice for configuring

priorities.

IO & Storage

Multipathing COMSTAR vs. Standard

• Rich Multipathing support MP supports cross protocols.

• Wider support for:• Infiniband• FC• FCoE• Iscsi

• COMSTAR – • Ability to create

software defined storage – with lun provisioning

• Standard IO ability

Virtualization

Local Virtualization (Zones ) or HW virtualization

vs.Local Virtualization (LXC) or SW Hypervisor

• Zone – • Well engineered • Well embraced• Rich resource

management ability

• OVM for SPARC– • Hypervisor on chip• Enterprise class

virtualization• Supports Oracle

stack.

• LXC – not yet embraced.

hypervisors – Variety of Linux based hypervisors.XEN/Vmware/KVM based.

Installation

• Very rich installation ability

• Integrated update mechanism with ZFS

• Boot Environment facility.

• Matured installation method.

Jumpstart/AI vs. Kickstart

Packaging

• Feature rich packaging system

• Integrated with ZFS

• Contains dependency facility.

• Integrated patch mechanism into packaging system.

• Matured packaging system

• Introduced dependency facility

IPS vs. RPM

Services

• Feature rich Services Mechanism

• DB driven with xml configuration semantics.

• Allows dependencies.

• Allows to administer services configuration. And rollback from a configuration if needed.

• Very old services mechanism.

• Text based.• No dependency.• No ability to rollback

services configuration.

SMF vs. SVR4

Thank you !

See you next Oracle Solaris Forum event