Simon’s Blog

It’s been a good few years since the last time I looked at Solaris x86. In fact, I think the last time was back in the late 1990s, when we were building our first Linux compute farm for use in the Life Sciences. We were a Solaris SPARC shop on the server side, and on the desktop, but it made sense back then (as of course it makes sense today) to use commodity hardware for compute farms. At that time, Linux had a whole lotta bugs - the guys in the movie industry were starting to have success with Linux render farms, albeit at the price of having to fix bugs in NFS to get things working; and SMP support was only just becoming available. So, we reasoned that, rather than Linux, we should try Solaris x86 on our commodity hardware. How did it go? Well, to be blunt, it really sucked - not least because of the driver support, or rather the lack of it. So, we discarded Solaris x86 went ahead and used Linux on our x86 boxes. Actually that sucked too. It just sucked a lot less than Solaris x86 did.

Fast forward to 2006. The developments going on in Solaris, including technologies like DTrace, Zones, and ZFS, are pretty exciting. So, for various reasons, some of which will be the subject of a future blog entry - today became the day to look afresh at Solaris x86/x64, specifically Solaris Express. The test-bed was to be a commodity, self-build box, specified for the occasion: dual-core AMD 2.2GHz processor; 4GB RAM; 2.2TB disk (200MB boot disk, 4×500GB SATA storage); 256MB PCIe graphics; and a CD/DVD drove. All for a total capital expenditure of less than £1,500 ($2,700) - amazing what you can get for your money these days! Putting the hardware together took a couple of hours, and installing the OS just over one hour.

The verdict? Well, times have certainly changed with Solaris x86/x64. Installation was (almost) a dream, and the working system is great and Sun’s Java Desktop System window manager looks beautiful running at 1900×1200 on my 24inch flat panel. All in all, I’m super-impressed. When you add in all the stuff that’s going on in the Open Solaris community - like BlastWave’s nice package management system - Solaris x64 really is a truly impressive piece of work. Great on features, and easy to administer. What more could you want from an OS?

Kudos to everyone in the Open Solaris community (both inside and outside of Sun) for all the great work they’re doing to make Solaris x64 as good as it is! And a special mention to Ben Rockwood - his blog was really invaluable in making the set-up go smoothly.