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Operating Systems Software Sun Microsystems Linux

Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down 320

Posted by Hemos from the battle-to-the-finish dept.
JigSaw writes "Tony Bourke put together a long article, benchmarking File System, System, Compilation, OpenSSL and Web Performance for both Linux and Solaris on x86 hardware. While SPARC's Solaris is said to be more optimized than its x86 counterpart on the other hand so is Linux 2.6 compared to 2.4. Solaris-x86 performed well in the tests, but Linux 2.4 seems to win most of the tests and the overall impressions."
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Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down More

Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down

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  • Sorry? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Sir Haxalot ( 693401 )
    While SPARC's Solaris is said to be more optimized than its x86 counterpart on the other hand so is Linux 2.6 compared to 2.4
    Maybe for computers with multiple processors, for regular computers Linux 2.6 is comparitively slower.
  • I see nothing in the article about a steel cage. You call that a smack-down?
    • Put up a review stating that Suns OS sucks, and cap it off with this statement:

      "In fact, it's possible installing Solaris x86 on my dual-processor box, even if I disabled one of the processors, violates the evaluation license that Sun offers Solaris x86. Oops."

      Smart move, dumbass...

  • Sun on x86 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @10:48AM (#7260814)
    Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?

    The fact that they simply "give away" the OS for cheap (i actually got my copy for free from Sun) kinda makes me think they've only released the x86 version to make it "available" to more poeple.

    The more people that are familiar with Solaris, in theory, the more Admins/IT staff will end up recommending SUN hardware/software at their workplace. It's a marketing strategy. Not a pervasive strategy, but a strategy nonetheless.

    If you take my meaning, mr. Frodo.

    • Re:Sun on x86 (Score:5, Informative)

      by n3rd ( 111397 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @11:23AM (#7261107)
      Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?

      On and off, evidently back on again. I've heard that back in the mid 90's a decent amount of customers used Solaris x86 on Compaq's. After a while they dropped support and over the next few years. Anyone confirm or deny (I know the second part is true)?

      Here [sun.com] is a recent press release about Solaris x86. Disregard the marketing garbage, there's a lot of it.

      They name a decent amount of customers, a biomedical place is one of them. Perhaps a transition from SPARC to x86 for sheer speed would be cheaping going from Solaris to Solaris instead of Solaris to Linux, that is assuming Solaris on x86 meets their needs.

      Also, according to this article [com.com] they have Solaris x86 for Opteron. Perhaps this would help convince big graphics apps such as Photoshop make a port to Opteron since Linux and the BSD's are already there.

      They also have a POWER4+'esqe chip coming out [com.com] in the first half of the new year. Two UltraSPARC III cores with 8 megs of cache and each running at 1.2 GHz each.

      Sun has good things going for them but they need to expand into new areas and take another look at the current situation.
    • Sun sold a lot of x86 licenses to companies which wanted to keep the same OS all around their enterprise, but also wanted workstations cheaper than they would be with SPARC processors in them. Around the time of the 486, the x86 processor started to really deliver on price:performance; when the pentium came out, its future as a leader in that category was assured. Today you cannot get as much performance out of any processor for as little money as with x86-compatible processors, and the other architectures
    • I think they are rather serious about it. But, as you say, not necessarily as a profit generator right now.

      First, IT staff who try Solaris on x86 will NOT be any more likely to recommend Sun gear if Solaris x86 is intolerably slow or buggy or whatever. It doesn't need to be the fastest, but it can't be too far behind Linux and I guess Windows.

      Also, x86 becomes insurance. It's tough and expensive to design competitive chips - and getting tougher all the time. If somewhere down the line Sun considers g

  • Why Red Hat ? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MoonFog ( 586818 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @10:48AM (#7260821)
    Guess that question will be asked, and to those to lazy to RTFA, here's his reply :
    I chose RedHat 9 for the simple fact that it is a very popular distribution, and is ubiquitous in terms of corporate and personal deployment. Of course it is not the end-all be-all of Linux distributions, but it's both popular and effective, which makes it appropriate as an evaluation platBesides, most of what I evaluate has more to do with Linux itself, and not the distribution. The only significant affect RedHat has on this evaluation is the specific version of the kernel (2.4.20-20.9) and the use of RPMs (which some other Linux distributions use as well).form.
  • ...from the distant past, there's this [slashdot.org] Slashdot thread from way back in 1999.

    There's a "Summary of Points" post a ways down that page that nicely encapsulates most of the discussion.

  • Why does this get put under developers? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bombadillo ( 706765 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @10:49AM (#7260832)
    In my experience the majority of Developers don't have an in depth knowledge of OS and Hardware performance. The System Administrators almost always have a much better understanding of OS performance. The majority of developers I have worked with are Java developers. Perhaps it is different for other languages. However, shouldn't this be under a Systems Admin category?
    • The System Administrators almost always have a much better understanding of OS performance.
      In my experience sysadmins tend to know much about a certain OS, and will proclaim it to be the best no matter what the benchmarking results are. They may have knowledge about the OS, but rarely have any depth knowledge of the actual hardware performance.
      • In my experience sysadmins tend to know much about a certain OS, and will proclaim it to be the best no matter what the benchmarking results are. They may have knowledge about the OS, but rarely have any depth knowledge of the actual hardware performance.

        And, unless you're suggesting developers are more likely to possess this knowledge than sysadmins -- something which makes no logical sense -- you've really not answered the question.

        - A.P.
        • He's right at least in the scientific community. Most of us prof/gprof our code immensely and take advantage of everything the hardware can give us at the very least on the compiler level.

          This is why you'll have developers extoll the virtues of single multiply adds that IBM's power architecture has if they are doing numerically intensive code (now incorporated into the G5) or perhaps the memory management of the Sun boxes if they are running code that necessitates having > 4 gb ram.

          Things like "cache

    • In my experience the majority of Developers don't have an in depth knowledge of OS and Hardware performance.

      That's true for probably 90% of developers out there, but the truly *great* programmers realize these concepts play a tremendous role in software development and try to understand them as much as possible. Any developer writing anything close to real-time software *has* to know how things are working at a very low level.

  • Surprisingly good article (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) * on Monday October 20, 2003 @10:58AM (#7260909)
    This is a surprisingly good article for OSNews. Usually their reviews are limited to utterly trivial things like what the reviewer thought of the default colour scheme, or how easy it was to change the desktop wallpaper. But this one actually has some useful quantitative data in, and refers to things that workstation users actually care about, such as compile times. Whoever this chap is he should take over doing all the reviews from the girl (can't remember her name offhand) who usually does them, because she is pretty much clueless.

  • um... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GoNINzo ( 32266 )
    Who bothers to use Solaris on x86? Oh yeah, idiots who don't understand the 'right tool for the job' philosophy.

    Go with OpenBSD or Linux on x86. If you want to run Solaris correctly, get some ultrasparcs already. You always lose something when you skimp on your infrastructure to save a few bucks.

    • Re:um... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by n3rd ( 111397 )
      Who bothers to use Solaris on x86? Oh yeah, idiots who don't understand the 'right tool for the job' philosophy.

      But what if Solaris x86 is the right tool for the job?

      It may not be often but it is at times.

    • Re:um... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by LurkerXXX ( 667952 )
      Maybe you just understand what the job is.

      Solaris for x86 has always been for training or utility. Cheap or free x86 versions mean people who want to eventually admin Solaris on Sparc equipment can easily get ahold of it to try without having the capital to purchase a Sparc just for learning purposes.

      The other common job for it has been as a utility/admin machine. When you have 20 Solaris Sparc servers to admin, it's just easier and more consistant to also run Solaris on the admin's workstation. Why

      • Have you maintained an x86/sparc environment? It's a pain in the ass. You have to do many things differently anyway, so why bother. Besides, the Blade 100's are only a thousand bucks so they are not that much to the 24k-48k you pay for the low end 280R's and such.

        And if it's a utility machine, you can look at the netra x-1's, which are quite nice.

        I've just seen too many people put up farms of x86 machines, brag about how they are running solaris, and spend all day trying to fight the fires with it. Th

    • I've played around with Solaris on x86. It's neat but if you think software for Linux is hard to come by, software for Solaris x86 is virtually non-existent. I'd be really really hard pressed to find a situation where I'd pick it over Linux for anything really. Come to think of it, it doesn't even make a good training tool for Solaris noobs since the hardware / BIOS is so different from the Sparc version of Solaris. Did I mention that it's neat?

    • Why would you pick it?

      • Threads. Solaris has the best support for threads on x86.
      • UNIX98. If you need an OS with this type of certification on x86, Solaris is the only game in town.
      • NFS. While I have no quantitative data, I would bet you $100 that Solaris x86 NFS stomps Linux.

      There are probably lots of other reasons. Solaris is by no means perfect [slashdot.org], but it does have its strengths.

    • I disagree: Solaris x86 is an excellent NFS server. Rock solid, reliable, locks work as they f**** should and it's fast! Plus, it has one of the best storage management software bundled for free: Solstice DiskSuite, now re-labeled Sun Volume Manager. It has already cought up with Veritas on almost all features, plus it's easier to configure for maximum performance and rendundancy than Veritas (it is missing clustered diskgroups, but that shall come soon).

  • Solaris: Time machine to the 1980s (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GGardner ( 97375 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @11:08AM (#7260998)
    Running Solaris on X86 is like going back in time to the 1980s with all the ancient Unix utilities -- it's got the ancient vi, not VIM, which is annoying when you need things like multiple undo or multiple windows. The awk/nawk are ancient, and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked). Ditto for most of the Unix shell programs.

    The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distribution.

    • "The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distribution."

      They come with the Solaris distribution as well. Not Sun's fault if you don't install them.

      A.
    • it's got the ancient vi

      Solaris works for consistency and having a plane jane vi might be a good thing even if vim is better.

      The awk/nawk are ancient

      I don't use awk often, what's up with them?

      and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked). Ditto for most of the Unix shell programs.

      Yeah it ships with perl since Solaris 8, same with bash, tcsh and zsh.

      The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distributi
    • That pretty much sums up the world of commercial Unix. The commercial Unix companies had a lead of years (or even decades) on Windows and Linux. What did they do with that lead? Very little. Yes, they added hardware support and improved their kernels but, what about the utilities? What about the tools that Unix users need for everyday work?
    • it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked)

      When was this, 1993?!? Get your facts straight before posting (like that stops anyone on Slashdot, anyway).
    • ... and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked).

      Then you must have last checked around 1999 or so. Perl has been standard since Solaris 8. Several new system utilities require it.

    • Most slashdotters won't understand or agree with this, but the large bulk of Sun's customers appreciate the fact that command-line options do not mutate over time, that the default behavior of the -foo switch is now reversed, etc, etc. The GNU coreutils maintainer has been busily ripping out all kinds of traditional functionality in the name of POSIX standardization, which would normally be a good thing if he hadn't gone way too far. (I don't give a fuck if "uniq" and "head -1" aren't full POSIX, they're

    • Running Solaris on X86 is like going back in time to the 1980s with all the ancient Unix utilities -- [SNIP] it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked).

      So, it's been a long time since you checked then, eh?

    • I was able to replace most of the stuff, such as a "ls" command with color. However, certain utils, such as "ps", I couldn't find replacements for.

      In any case, that one Sun box kicked the bucket, so I'm not to worried about it anymore, but I was busy trying to transform Solaris into GNU/Solaris.

  • bah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @11:10AM (#7261007) Homepage
    Who the heck runs Solaris on a crappy dual-processor machine? Solaris doesn't really even begin to show benefits until it gets at least 8 processors. It just keeps going up, and up, and up.

    Solaris/Intel is just a toy that grabs a few extra customers that Sun would have lost otherwise. Boy, you should see it when linux noobs get their hands on it. They get really angry when you tell them "your hardware must be listed on the Hardware Compatibility List". I've seen venomous diatribes directed at "sucky" Sun and its "sucky" OS for not having video drivers for whatever the most expensive game-playing graphics board is these days. And if they actually get the system to install and they see CDE...oh man.

    I don't hang on #solaris any more, but damn we would get the same reactions over, and over, and over about Solaris/Intel.

    • Re:bah (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )
      Who the heck runs Solaris on a crappy dual-processor machine?

      Ahh the rant of a non-knowing person...

      Thousands, if not tens of thousands use Solaris on dual and ...GASP! Single processor systems!

      In fact the company here has 12 sun workstations running solaris as data collection servers that are going to be replaced here in 180 days. (giving me a few Sun UltraSparc toys to play with as I see fit later)

      Solaris is used mostly for single and dual processor systems. there are significantly less 8 processo

    • Re:bah (Score:2)

      by n3rd ( 111397 )
      I've seen venomous diatribes directed at "sucky" Sun and its "sucky" OS for not having video drivers for whatever the most expensive game-playing graphics board is these days. And if they actually get the system to install and they see CDE...oh man.

      So true. Solaris is built for work, not for play.
    • Solaris/Intel is just a toy that grabs a few extra customers that Sun would have lost otherwise. Boy, you should see it when linux noobs get their hands on it. They get really angry when you tell them "your hardware must be listed on the Hardware Compatibility List".

      So basically, what you're saying is: Sun is trying to grab a few extra customers, but doesn't support them very well (no drivers for boxes you can actually buy in stores today, very late security patches, crappy toolset, the list goes on), so

    • funny in the pilot Linux/Oracle project I just did for a *very large* midwestern city that a 4 way Intel Xeon box outperformed a 14-way SunFire 6800 by a factor of 3, even with the much smaller 2G SGA & contortions an Intel chip has to go through to get to >4GB memory chunks

      *something* is killing Sun, and they can't survive on just their 8-way or more system sales. Wait until the finer grain SMP in Linux & FreeBSD get perfected.....
    • Who the heck runs Solaris on a crappy dual-processor machine? Solaris doesn't really even begin to show benefits until it gets at least 8 processors. It just keeps going up, and up, and up.

      According to the article, Solaris for x86 runs on a maximum of 4 processors.

  • Appears in this article again.

    I think what he meant was that "we don't have a Linux strategy" means "we don't do Linux only products or development" and "Linux doesn't play a role on the server" means "Don't write/develop to the OS" - ie could say the same thing about Solaris if you contort it that much. Possibly being overly generous, but it's about the only logical thing I can think of. (unless you assume the guy's gone nuts.)

    Last month Jonathan Schwartz did a fairly in depth response on his thoughts o
  • "Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price"

    Wow. What a ringing endorsement. Tell me why anyone would buy Linux from people like that when you can deal with IBM.

    Salesman rule #1 - Never Ever talk bad about
  • This guy states that Linux is the clear winner in the enterprise software space, but he states this based on a comparison that uses Red Hat 9? If you want to run enterprise software on Linux, such as Oracle or BEA, you can't run Red Hat 9! You have to run Red Hat AS. Oh you can get Oracle to run on RH9, but you will not get any support from Oracle if you do it. The fact that the author left this little fact out indicates that either he doesn't know this or that he left it out intentionally. So either he is

  • Red-headed Solaris (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SARSpatient ( 679467 )
    Neither Sun nor Sun resellers really push Solaris x86. This includes during their presentations to customers interested in high performance x86 clusters solutions. Yes, the alternative is always there, showing the Solaris logo along with a RedHat one under available operating systems. Even with clients where Solaris x86 might make sense, Sun salespeople skirt around the issue of O/S and never press their own version. Aside from Sun support (which IMO is really good), would there be any benefit to switching

  • Hi got to be kidding (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @11:36AM (#7261220)
    Processor (2) Intel Pentium IIIs at 600 MHz, 256 KB cache
    Motherboard Intel L440GX+
    RAM 512 MB PC133 ECC
    DISK (1) 9 GB Maxtor SCSI

    I bet Solaris is designed to run on more serious hardware. I bet DOS apps will run even faster than Linux on this box, even without taking advantage of dual processor.
    • I bet Solaris is designed to run on more serious hardware.

      I'd consider a dual Pentium III with a SCSI disk a dandy candidate for Solaris if there's no funds for getting a v210 or v60x.

      Also, don't forget that Solaris/SPARC and Solaris/x86 are nearly the same code base (differing on drivers and assembler stuff, of course), meaning that Solaris/x86 fits very well into a Solaris/SPARC infrastructure.

  • The future of the software market is clearly different to the market that existed before GNU&Co.

    Customers make an investment in deploying software which ranges from equipment to training and maintenance infrastructure. These are the significant and notably "long term" investments.

    This would imply that the wise customer would look not at the sticker price but also at the cost of the future investment when making a software purchase.

    Unfortunately, given the behaviour of tech corporations over the las

  • Stepping outside of the Solaris --vs-- Linux article, I just didn't come away very satisified. It looks like the author only performed a few shoestring tests while I was expecting an exhausting barrage of tests. IMHO I wouldn't take anything to heart from reading this article. Maybe if the author goes back and expands the number of tests it would be an interestig article. Just look at all the comments from our fellow posters. There are so many people pointing out various issues that the tester neglected. I

  • drivers (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AchmedHabib ( 696882 )
    at least he was lucky there where drivers. Try installing it on real server hardware, then even FreeBSD has more drivers for stuff like RAID controllers etc. Look at the Hardware Compatibility List [sun.com].
    If you are planning on installing Solaris in your enterprise enviroment you have to buy hardware that will work with Solaris x86 rather than the hardware you normally use. But then again, in a enterprise enviroment, I guess one would choose the Sparc platform or buy the Sun Intel hardware.
    • Some shitface managed to sell a few intel (real intel, not just processor) rack servers to company where i work for and the machine came with scsi raid that was based on ami megatrends chipset. Ok, nice machines indeed at that time but the technical staff (that i wasnt part of at that time) insisted that we *must* use Solaris/x86 on the machines.

      Well, all was good until the boxes where taken to *heavy* production: Raid drivers caused fs corruption and total deadlocks every 3-4 days. Feeling very superior
  • After using apt, pkgadd will make you want to gnaw your arms off, even though it does have back-out capabilities. Sun should take that page from Debian and port apt over and start using it. They could add the missing capabilities from pkgadd easily enough.

  • Security (Score:2, Informative)

    by allenw ( 33234 )

    I guess he doesn't know that Sun generally releases a T-Patch [sun.com] relatively quickly so that admins can get immediately relief while testing out the real patch.

  • Solaris advantages. (Score:4, Informative)

    by miguel ( 7116 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @12:25PM (#7261630) Homepage
    Solaris does have a few areas where they have done a fantastic job.

    For example, when it comes to debugging threaded applications, and having a reliable debugger, they beat us every single time. This is a mix of debugger support, kernel support, libraries support and god knows what else.

    Their thread implementation is also very robust. I have no clue about their performance, but I know that you can depend on their implementations being robust. On Linux plenty of thread-related issues are still flaky (big progress being made there), but today, I really wish I had Solaris to debug a few problems.

    And there are tons of other little things they get right. My suggestion is that we should focus on what is wrong in our platform, and focus on what is good in their platform, to find out what needs to be solved.

    Miguel.

    • As a developer I find the Solaris documentation at docs.sun.com is usually significantly better than the stuff that comes with Linux, and the manual pages are vastly better, including information about when and why you would use a function, alternatives, examples, and pointers to other documents.

      To me documentation is a big part of any platform. I think that is one thing .NET has going for it too.

      Larry

  • It would be interesting to see a comparison with the paid for versions of Red Hat, as opposed to the 'support yourself' versions - the supportability of Solaris is important for many customers. That doesn't necessarily just mean bug fixes - having someone to call is important, particularly where it's hard to get decent sysadmins. Red Hat 9 is great, but Solaris offers predictability, support and so on and so forth.
  • The solaris 9 installer stinks,
    the patch system is horrible,
    the package system is far behind dpkg or rpm

    Seriously, this author has a serious hard-on for solaris and it shows. Solaris is stuck in the year 1997.

    This isn't a troll, this is just the way it is.
  • Hey this just came out at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html [theregister.co.uk]
    "The new TCP/IP stack - code-named Fire Engine - has 10 gigabit and 100 gigabit Ethernet networks in mind." Available for testing download now

    Sun is quoted:

    "we did work to efficiently handle many NICs, so combinations of NICs and CPUs scale. The upshot of all this stuff is that customers will notice quite measurable differences in latency and bandwidth improvements in networking on existing machines. It shows up in internal

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