Weblog entry #61 for ajt
See all weblog entries made by ajt.
I have this hunch that once Sun can licence their Solaris Kernel in a compatible way there will evolve a Debian GNU/Solaris distribution. I also think that Sun may have enough of a clue to merge their OpenSolaris into Debian GNU/Solaris as a nice way to let someone else to the heavy work of packaging it all up, and the Sun can just act as the upstream providers of the kernel and a few bits and bobs and at the same time act as a downstream packager of official Sun Solaris not unlike ubuntu today.
- Sun have give Debian kit recently.
- No body owns Debian, so Sun can't have the rug ripped from under neath them.
- Debian's deb/apt system is second to none, it's free so Sun may as well use it.
- Debian has a very good reputation and vast package selection.
- Debian runs on x86, AMD64 and Sparc already, all the platforms Sun would want.
- Debian already supports multiple kernels: BSD; Hurd and Linux.
- Ubuntu et al. all seem to be doing well by building on top of Debian.
- Solaris is a good Unix, but it's going no where fast.
Obviously some people will have to swallow their ego and it's not going to happen overnight but I think it's less absurb than it appears at first glance. I bounced the idea round at my LUG meet on Saturday and I think people realised it is more plausible that you first think. If it happens you saw it here first.
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It would be interesting to see, although I guess half the attraction of the Sun kernel would be for people running Sun hardware.
This was tried once before .. although I guess with an open kernel the legal problems would become simpler.
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However look at it from Sun's perspective, they get a complete disto and package system built and tested for "free", from which they can build a supported commerical disto just like Ubuntu do now.
Once the legal/moral problems are fixed a lot of things are possible.
How many people realy care that their Debian distro is running on a Linux kernel? I'm sure some people me included would consider running Debian on a Solaris kernel instead. I don't normally interact with the kernel so as long as bash, SSH, KDE et al are there what do I care which kernel I'm running? Solaris may be faster and ZFS looks cool!
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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When it comes to filesystems I'm very much a conservative! Unless there is a real need for super-performance I'd rather take a speed hit and stick with something which is well-understood and which has the recovery tools when required.
Still if their kernel was opened up and supported my hardware I'd be tempted to try it, even if I didn't stick with it. Although I wonder now what the differences would be DTrace and Zones are being copied right now - so the obvious differences are beyond me. (Things like massive uptimes I'm sure are partly kernel-related, but mostly hardware differences between the big Sun boxes I used to have and the generic x86 boxes I look after nowadays.)
The one thing I missed from Sun/Sparc machines was a shell which worked and GNU Grep (with a -r flag). So a Sun kernel and Debian user-environment would be a nice role-reversal if nothing else!
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Granted clever Sun tools like DTrace, Zones and ZFS are gradually being migrated but it takes time and they may work better where they were designed.
I can see some people being tempted, there is a persistent rumour that Google is considering Solaris on x86 as an alternative to Linux on x86. Google are unusual and hardly typical by any metric, but they are also very clever people and they generally know what they are doing.
I think the big win would be to drag Solaris kicking and screaming into a brave GNU world. Upgrading the Solaris userland and decent package mangment would benefit a lot of Solaris users.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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