Comment by toast0
8 hours ago
I've never spent much time with Sun equipment, but the hardware and OS had features I haven't seen on commodity hardware with Linux. IIRC, Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory. And I think they had hot swap memory on some systems.
ZFS was pretty unrivaled for long term storage for a long time. Solaris zones were containers before they were cool. Dtrace is pretty neat. Etc.
Maybe they could have survived with their OpenSolaris push driving low end adoption and high end customers buying their hardware. Pretty sure they would have had to migrate to x86, but they were dabling in that.
Maybe make some low end commodity x86 servers. Sell enterprise a fully engineered big ass database server and a bunch of commodity web servers. Doesn't have to be exceptionally priced, just good enough to let customers have single vendor server purchasing instead of getting the big stuff from sun and the little stuff from dell or hp.
More systems consulting? Sun had great engineers, but you don't see too many war stories about them fixing stuff for customers (maybe they keep quiet though).
> IIRC, Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory. And I think they had hot swap memory on some systems.
Both of these are supported on Linux now. The kill-on-ECC is handled by hwpoison: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.1/vm/hwpoison.html and the hot-swappable RAM has been present for quite a bit longer.
I saw references to Linux support for hotswappable ram a long time ago, but I've yet to run into a commodity server that supports it. And honestly, I've yet to run a system that needed it nor did I have systems where are hard stop from an unrecoverable ECC error was a problem.
I'm not terribly surprised that Linux grew support for poisoning pages eventually (and I appreciate the link!), but I believe Solaris had memory retirement in Solaris 10 (2005), and Linux got page poisoning in 2009. If you were running workloads where it would be important, then Solaris was better for you at that time, unlike the claim from the poster above that
> once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
I think only a curmudgeon would claim Linux wasn't stable in 2005. Although certainly the userland could use less churn. :P
Linux is not a monolith :)
There was (and still is) a bunch of niche Linux kernels. I remember reading about a team that used Xen to do triple-redundancy with voting for Linux. They virtualized _all_ the non-deterministic IO paths (including rdtsc) and observed the outgoing network packets, ensuring that they are completely identical. I think this was around the mid-2000-s timeframe.
But yeah, it was all super-niche. The consensus now is that you should design your systems to be fault-tolerant and self-recovering, rather than depending on perfect hardware functionality. And for everything else IBM still exists.
zfs + solaris zones were amazing