NYCPHP Meetup

[leam]

Adam Fields wrote:
> leam wrote:
> 
>> Nyah, both Linux and *BSD are superior products. First, Linux has a 
>> much better developer base and the entry point for contributions is 
>> much lower. You only need low-end x86 hardware and you're off. Plus, 
>> Linux 
> 
> 
> There >is< an x86 version of Solaris. It doesn't have quite the same 
> level of hardware support as Linux, but for some things, it's vastly 
> superior. It has a number of proponents that swear by it.

Some people swear by screw-top wine bottles too. Wouldn't take that as a 
recommendation though.  :)

Vastly superior in what? Solaris does use a fairly modular kernel so you 
don't have to recompile to get new drivers. Of course that means you get 
all the hooks, you can't really compile out anything.

I tried x86 Solaris a couple years ago, didn't care for it. Though newer 
Sparc hardware is becoing PCI based more and more. Hmm, actually it may 
be fully there already. So it's moving to where everyone else is.

> 
>> makes a better desktop experience; more user apps are written for it.
> 
> 
> For now, but this falls down in two ways - anything that's compiled can 
> be cross-compiled, and there's no reason you can't add linux binary 
> compatibility to Solaris, as some of the BSDs have done.

Not everyone is as good about portable code, and you still have native 
issues to deal with. Most things in Solaris have had the possibility of 
64 bits for a while, not sure how they translate to a 32 bit hardware 
platform.


>> NetBSD (my favorite of the lot) is a much cleaner code base and more 
>> platforms, thus more places to use it.
>>
>> Solaris really doesn't seem to offer any value in the low-medium end 
>> server market or the desktop. It may be nice for a few high end uses 
>> but I think it more likely that people will read the code and spend 
>> time porting the concepts to Linux and *BSD than converting to Solaris.
> 
> 
> I think it'll be some combination of the two, but I suspect that it'll 
> be easier to port the user apps to Solaris than to incorporate the 
> advantages Solaris has into the Linux kernel.

I still havent' seen any Soalris based apps that don't run on Linux or 
*BSD. And for note, both of them run faster on sparc hardware than Solaris!

> I'm not familiar with the specifics, but I'd assume that some of the 
> enhancements that Sun came up with for multi-processor support will also 
> apply to distributed cluster implementations, and that Sun hasn't gone 
> that way because up until very recently, they've had a vested interest 
> in getting people to buy large SMP servers.

Sun cluster is a dog, avoid it. Same with Alternate pathing. Sun's 
position is that they want to sell 4-20 CPU boxes and have them run in 
parallel. You can use Oracle's multi-node stuff cluster or Vertias 
cluster, but Sun's is "warm standby" only.

They're also happy if you buy a load-balanced solution.  :)


> Well... MySQL on Solaris is currently less fun.

For me most anything on Solaris, except SCSI and logical volumes, is 
less fun. With x86 hardware and a tuned Linux/*BSD you can customize the 
OS to the server mission. There's a balance between server farms and 
single points of failure

I won't say Linux is vastly superior to Solaris, but in a large number 
of respects it's better, to me.

ciao!

leam