Re: Solaris: The Most Advanced OS?
On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 11:11 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> I used Solaris for many years for serious embedded development work,
> as well as an embedded operating system. I've used Linux for just
> about a year. All the GNU tools can be compiled for Solaris, and
> it has a few which Linux doesn't have. Many more vendors build
> versions of their software for Solaris than do so for Linux. I also
> found the Solaris kernel to be much more robust than Linux. I only
> *had* to reboot my Solaris machine (running on a Sparc) one time in
> 5 years. It was rebooted maybe one to two times per year for some
> sort of upgrade or new install, otherwise. I find that I have to
> reboot my Linux machine far more often, maybe every month or two,
> to clear up some strange state (though far less often than
> I have to reboot my Windows machines). I only saw Solaris crash
> two times in over five years.
>
Probably depends on what you are doing. I have servers running 2.4
kernels that only have to be rebooted for kernel upgrades. Otherwise
they are very solid. Not to mention, if you are comparing commodity
hardware to Sun's, then these issues you are having could very well be
hardware related (you didn't mention hardware, so I thought I'd toss
that out).
> That sort of weirdness never happened with Solaris. I've also been
> unable to umount the floppy, when I know there was no process using
> it, using Linux.
>
This is probably fam running in the background. This is a known issue
and many people just don't use fam as a result. gamin with an inotify
kernel is/will be much better.
> Linux seems to be more of a hacker/fiddler's dream, while Solaris
> is more of a let's get the job done, it just runs sort of deal.
Hmm... I use and rely on GNU/Linux in production for my day to day work
without incident, and am quite happy with it.
That said, I will say that I really do NOT like the 2.6 kernel
development model. With so much development happening on a 'stable'
kernel, you can't help but introduce new bugs (there were no less than
12 'stable' patches to the 2.6.11 alone). Leaving it up to the
distributors is a disservice to them and users because backporting
security patches from the latest upstream to Debian's stable kernel is
hard since the 2.6 series is such a moving target. Of course, it is not
like this hasn't been discussed before....
--
James Strandboge
jamie@strandboge.com
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