SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems said it will take
an “aggressive” approach to opening up the source code of its core operating
system. It just isn’t saying when.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based network computer maker fended off questions from reporters and analysts Tuesday during a briefing centered on the major
developments for Solaris 10. The enterprise platform is scheduled for a
September 2004 launch date to coincide with the shipment of Sun’s next
generation Java Enterprise System.
Earlier this month, top executives confirmed Sun’s long-rumored intentions to release parts of Solaris to
the open source community similar to the way that Linux, Apache and other
open source projects are available. Ann Wettersten, Sun vice president of
systems software marketing, said the movement is not only supported within
the company but Sun customers are “very positive in opening up Solaris.”
“The concerns and open source questions we hear from customers is along
the same questions any company would get in opening up anything to the GPL
[GNU General Public License],”Wettersten said. “We have to make sure we are
doing the right thing for the community and the right thing for the
customers.”
Sun Senior staff engineer Bryan Cantrill mirrored Wettersten’s comments
saying, “technically, it is not a problem to do this.”
“We’re moving on an aggressive schedule, he said. “We’re engineers and
we’ve written the cleanest code and we can’t wait to share it with the
world.”
What’s The Holdup?
“On a practical level, Sun would have to figure out how they will open
source it, under what organization and what licensing model,” Shawn Willett,
principal analyst with Current Analysis, recently told
internetnews.com.
“That would make a big difference if it is accepted
as a true open source product. If Sun retains too much control, that would
turn off some open source advocates and possible converts to Solaris. Sun
would face a bigger challenge in figuring out how to price this, and price
its other products so they can make a sustainable profit. It could be that
support contracts will make this a minor issue, but it is also true that
third parties could bundle an open source Solaris with cheap hardware and
basically eat into Sun’s business. Again, it depends on Sun’s definition of
open source [and open distribution].”
Sun has many options including a modified GNU General Public License
process. But even if Sun is capable in resolving the issue of licenses,
Stacey Quandt, principal analyst of Quandt Analytics, points out there are
still issues against success, such as customers choosing to stay the
course with Solaris rather than migrate to Linux.
“First, this comes three years too late due to the significant adoption
of Linux,” Quandt told internetnews.com.
“Linux on Intel is a volume
market, while the contributions [to] the Linux 2.6 kernel make Linux a 64-bit
alternative to Unix. Many customers in financial services migrated away from
Sun because of the cost of underutilized Solaris/SPARC systems.
“Even more
important is the inability of Sun to adequately address the issue of freedom
of lock-in from a single vendor. Most Linux customers appreciate the ability
to choose from multiple Linux distributions and take back control from
lock-in to a single IT vendor. A further issue is how will Sun work with
customers to integrate patches and changes back to the Solaris kernel. If
customers make changes to the Solaris kernel will they end up having to
support these changes? If so, will Solaris customers truly care if it is
available as an open source operating system?”
Wettersten’s reply: “Openness fuels innovation.”
The Big Five
Solaris 10 went into beta in March 2004. Different features have been
trickling out on a monthly schedule through Sun’s Software Express program.
More than 600 changes are expected in Solaris 10, including a handful of
additions that have their roots in trying to improve Solaris 8.
Before its launch event in Shanghai earlier this month, Sun said 80,000 people are active Solaris Express users. In March, Sun registered
some 60,000 members. That number is expected to rise sharply along with interest in open sourcing Solaris.
The big five additions include a partitioning technology (N1 Grid
Containers); a diagnostic tool for system administrators (DTrace),
Predictive Self Healing, Crypto Infrastructure and Dynamic File System.
DTrace comprises three parts: a set of at least 25,000 dynamic
probes in the software; a framework that activates and deactivates those
probes and gathers information from them; and a simple C-like scripting
language (called “D”) that is used to control and automate the collection
and enable the display of the system data.
“We’ve been spending a huge amount of time pouring the infrastructure for
Solaris 10. It was about at the end of Solaris 8 that we poured out that
foundation for Solaris 10,” Cantrill said.
Sun has even tested DTrace on its own networks. In October of 2002, the
company was working on installing some GNOME
Solaris 10 also includes some partitioning technology called N1 Grid containers. The advancement was needed, according to Sun engineer Andy
Tucker, because most data center operators report that their systems only
use 10 percent of their total capacity, leaving huge amounts of the
resources idle.
“There are a number of companies that supply Web hosting and
maintaining,” Tucker said. “What we’ve done is take that functionality and
make it so that operators can observe what is going on in the network.”
Previously known as Solaris Zones and “Project Kevlar,” the
server could be allocated to support some 20 zones on average but boasted
that there is no virtual limit because each zone has its own IP address, Tucker said.
“One of the ideas for this came in from the Jails project from FreeBSD,” Tucker said.
Sun is also releasing its long-awaited ZFS (short for Zettabyte File
System), which gets its roots from the classic POSIX-compliant Unix
file-system. Sun’s engineers also developed the technology to self-tune file
systems and added in features that make it simpler to administer in the
first place.
“Companies are also putting the checksum systems in EMC products and
other storage boxes,” said Jeff Bonwick, Sun’s Dynamic File System (ZFS) manager.
Tucker also confirmed that other features will make their way into
Solaris 10 enterprise operating system including “Clustrex,” which is a
single-node restart as standard, “FMA/Greenline” self-healing and fault
management, InfiniBand support, “Atomic Operations” (a set of tools or
programming libraries), BART (Basic Audit and reporting Tool) which is like
a “lite” version of Tripwire, more advanced NUMA optimizations, and more
security/authentication features.