Chris's Wiki :: blog/solaris/ASolarisFuture

One possible future for Solaris

March 30, 2010

In light of recent developments, here is one pessimistic view of a future for Oracle's Solaris. I wrote before that I didn't think that Oracle had suddenly decided to get into the operating system business; instead, they might see Solaris as infrastructure for their actual products. Well, take that to its logical end point and what you get is Solaris as Oracle's captive operating system.

As their captive OS, Solaris exists to run Oracle products and not for much else. It gets improvements only when they help Oracle's products (because otherwise they're not cost justifiable; operating systems don't make much money). In particular, it only gets new driver support for hardware that Oracle is interested in Solaris running on, which is probably only hardware that Oracle makes and a few other high end things.

(My native optimism says that Oracle won't entirely give up on Solaris on x86 hardware. But then, I thought that it might be six months before Oracle made Solaris non-free and it took them a lot less than that.)

This is a terribly pessimistic view because it basically predicts the death of Solaris through irrelevance, due to people not being able to run Solaris or OpenSolaris on common inexpensive hardware because it doesn't have the necessary driver support. (This is already somewhat of an issue for Linux, of all operating systems, and it's only going to get worse for a less popular one. Yes, even on server hardware; Ethernet and (E)SATA drivers don't grow on trees, among other things, and Solaris already has problems on Sun's own hardware.)

(As Pete Zaitcev notes, the much more important question for the open source world is what Oracle does about Sun's important open source projects. I care about Solaris's future for entirely selfish reasons, namely that we run it as part of our production environment and there is no equivalent replacement for our ZFS setup.)

Comments on this page:

From 198.102.62.250 at 2010-03-30 12:25:01:

I hadn't considered them dropping Solaris x86. That would be a real bummer as we've been investing a lot in "whitebox" (read: Silicon Mechanics) based Solaris 10 x86 ZFS boxes.

Surely Oracle isn't this stupid...

I've been trying to get information on whether or not Sun does any special virtualization pricing (as RH does) as we also have a growing number of Solaris 10 x86 systems running on ESX... so far not much luck.

Ray Van Dolson

By cks at 2010-03-30 15:13:44:

My pessimism certainly expects the Solaris hardware compatibility list to shrink to basically the hardware that Oracle sells, unless they turn out to make a lot more money from white-box Solaris support licenses than I expect.

(I suspect that driver support is the largest ongoing development expense for an operating system these days, plus it generally involves prying hardware documentation out of vendors that may not even have it (since they write their own drivers for Windows).)

The question of what virtualization they'll support is an interesting one that I hadn't thought of before. Hopefully they will continue to support at least testing Solaris under VMWare and similar platforms.

(One would think that this would be a no-brainer, but then a recent OpenSolaris build was broken so that it wouldn't run on VMWare.)

From 83.145.210.250 at 2010-04-04 14:24:37:

I agree that driver support is increasingly an obstacle for smaller open source projects.

It may become clear that the Linux model ("support everything on earth and even some from outer space") will not fly for smaller projects. But I am not sure if that is a good approach even for Linux in the long run, as you also implicitly indicated.

But people are still enthusiastic about operating systems; the BSDs are still going strong in their own way and there are even newcomers like, e.g., Haiku. Perhaps the solution will be restricting the support to a strictly defined and limited set of hardware (cf. Apple). You'd support Dell servers and ThinkPads, and that's it, no questions asked. Do one thing and do it good, and all that.

I'd personally say this is also very much a tragedy of the computer industry. Compared to many other sectors, standardization is still very limited and even actively downplayed. Enormous amounts of resources and money are being wasted every single day due this, open source or not.

By cks at 2010-04-04 14:45:59:

One problem with such a hardware support list is that Dell servers and ThinkPads can keep changing their hardware on you. The reason that Apple has it easy is not just that it operates with a limited set of hardware, it is that it gets to select the hardware as well as write the drivers.

(Also, as a large commercial entity Apple is in a position to say 'we won't use your hardware unless you give us enough documentation to write a driver'.)

Written on 30 March 2010.

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