Thursday September 30, 2004 AMD64, not only about the coolness factor!
Hey, go ahead and have a look at my desktop. Yeah, click on the thumbnail. It looks just like any other desktop on Solaris these days. I'm running KDE, KMail, Firefox 1.0 Preview, GIMP 2.0.2, and I'm VPN'd into the SWAN using IPsec. This is after all my home machine. Oh, but there is one other minor difference about this desktop, please have a gander at the Konsole terminal which is displaying the output of isainfo -v. Yeah, it's running the AMD64 Solaris kernel.
At first thought this doesn't seem like a breakthrough in technology, there are other 64-bit kernels that already exist in today's world, in fact we have one for Solaris that runs on 64-bit SPARC processors, so at Sun Microsystems this is certainly not any big breakthrough.
However, this is a slight breakthrough in the x86 commodity hardware space, because while I have a 64-bit kernel for Solaris on AMD64 Opteron, I can still run all of my 32-bit applications that exist in today's 32-bit Solaris on x86.
While there's a certain amount of coolness factor in running 64-bit apps on a 64-bit kernel, it's much more cool in today's world to be able to run your existing 32-bit applications without change, IMO. It just seems that one of the big lessons we've learned over the past 20 years in the microcomputer world is that backward compatibility is key to moving technology forward. Looking at the cases where technology didn't take backward compatibility into account, the chipsets had a hard time in the market, and in most cases have "died on the vine" so to speak.
It seems to me that by being able to accomplish this, we open a new door for customers and in many ways can "Win Friends and Influence People". I know that I have started to learn a great deal by reading Dale Carnegie's book, as stated below in my blog...but I think Sun has as well. Sun's committment to Solaris on the x86 architecture has never been stronger, and I'm looking forward to seeing us make a lot of new friends. Solaris 10 is definitely going to have a big influence on many people, if you don't believe me, just go ahead and try it. Have a look at the Solaris Express Webpage where you can download a version of Solaris 10 that will run on either SPARC or x86 architectures. Before you know it you'll be able to have those same features running on a true 64-bit kernel with the ability to run all of your existing 32-bit applications as well.
Sure, it's not only about the coolness factor. But this is so cool to me, I thought winter was here already!;-)
( Sep 30 2004, 11:08:30 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [6]
Tuesday September 28, 2004 Solaris x86 users, commend yourself
Recentely, my manager required me to read Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends & Influence People to improve on some of my people skills, and rightfully so. I often have a habit of being quick to critisize people for some of their weaknesses. And this certainly holds true for their use of operating systems. Especially should they not be using a superior operating system on their laptop or server, as me and many of my colleagues do.
As I started to read this book, it came to my attention that peole that do go to the trouble of using Solaris should be commended, rather than those who don't being ridiculed.
One of my colleagues (and friend), Jim Grisanzio, was recentely having me help him load Solaris which now includes the Java Desktop System on his laptop, and as he pointed out some of the weaknesses in comparison to the alternative operating systems. I immediately became defensive. As I think back on it now, Jim should be commended for going to the trouble of installing and using our product, as there are still a few shortcoming when using such a robust and power system on commodity based laptops in today's world.
It sometimes seem unimaginable to me that anyone would think that using Solaris on their laptop would have any room to complain, after all, it's come so far in the past year and many features are available to make our lives easier and allow more people to use Solaris in their environments. But we still can learn from our competition and we need to listen to the users more to make their lives not only as easy, but easier than the competition where possible.
I have helped countless people install Solaris on their laptops and servers inside Sun within the past year and a half that I literally can't count them. And I think this really shows that people are able to use Solaris in an enterprise environment and that it is certainly getting easier to use every day. These are people that previously were not using Solaris on their hardware in many cases, so compliments are in order to all of them. Sure, Solaris is not perfect, but neither are we as humans either. And as we continue to listen to the customers more and make the changes that they have been asking for over the past, the better it will be in the long run. It's really gratifying that Solaris has come so far over the past year and a half, and it's gonna get that much better over the next year and a half. If we continue to make it better, we won't need to ridicule our competition any longer, and the product will continue to speak for itself. The users will see the benifit of using and developing on such a great system, and our userbase will continue to grow. Unlike our competition who often ridicules our product for it's shortcomings, the time is here for us to turn that ridicule around and heed their advice on the shortcomings they see, and better our own product as we've been doing for past year and a half so intensely.
Reading some of the comments about Sun on some of the public online news sources can certainly make one want to take the high ground. However, our product has the features in it already, with more amazing features being added, that Solaris can stand on it's own ground without us having to defend it. Thankfully we do have such a great product that it can do that, and we should let the product speak for itself.
( Sep 28 2004, 03:18:44 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [5]
Sunday September 19, 2004 IBM's plans for 64 bit migration!
While reading news on the net, I happened to stumble across this article by Ashlee Vance, which reports on IBM's 64-Bit Computing Global Technical Outlook in this presentation, available for your downloading pleasure.
What I find most interesting is not the blatent mocking of the Itanium processor which Ashlee wrote about, but the plans which IBM's Linux Solutions group has for 64-bit migration.
Please click on the thumbnail above so that you can see the specific page which caught my interest, and let me explain a little bit about the differences between IBM's and Sun's plans for 64-bit migration.
You'll notice on the bottom of that slide in the presentation it points out that there is finally a compelling reason to migrate from 64-bit UNIX to 64-bit Linux, and that there is finally a compelling reason to migrate from memory-constrained 32-bit commodity platforms to "64-bit platforms". The second part is key here as the rest of the slides go on to slobber all over the reader about the Power Architechture and how the Power 5 Processor which is due to come out sometime in the future will offer "Best absolute performance in the market place", to quote the IBM slides.
Now, let's be realistic here, does the current market seem that it's ready to migrate from commodity 32-bit platforms to IBM's 64-bit Power 5 platforms which will most likely not save them $$$s? I don't think so, and I don't think customers are looking to migrate from 64-bit UNIX to a 64-bit Linux, especially when the systems aren't commodity, but that might just be me.
OTOH, Sun's strategy is based around offering "64-bit commodity hardware" to compliment our currently existing 64-bit hardware solutions of SMP systems which currently provide support for numbers of processors that exceed all of the x86 based commodity solutions to date. And certainly I don't see this changing into the forseeable future for the next couple years.
Maybe I'm completely off base here, but Sun's Solaris Operating System is well on it's way to having a 64-bit port for the AMD Opteron CPU, and currently these processors do offer the "best absolute performance in the market place", based on cost of CPU cycles. They also do it today so you won't have to wait for fabrication in the future.
Now, maybe there are customers that are looking to spend more $$$s than needed, or that don't mind the added maintenance of running the 64-bit port of Linux on IBM's non-commodity 64-bit hardware, rather than cutting costs and migrating to Sun's 64-bit commodity solutions. I guess we'll just need to wait and see how this all pans out as Sun rolls out it's enterprise quality UNIX on 64-bit commodity hardware in the near future, and see how cost effective those IBM Power 5 systems are that will compete with Sun's current and future AMD Opteron based systems.
Oh, and did I mention that Sun is in the process of opening up the Solaris Operating System so that our customers will not have to worry about using a proprietary system? I didn't think I did, but that's for another story...;-)
( Sep 19 2004, 10:19:57 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Open Source Summit in Santa Clara
Ok, some of you have read about the Open Source Summit that Sun held recentely in Santa Clara, CA. I've read some interesting comments from people on the web that have somehow been kind enough to post what they have heard in the form of hear-say, and the comments didn't seem very truthful when I compare them against my personal view as an attendee.
For this event, Sun brought in more than a dozen open source figures, some leaders and some members of successful projects in the open source community. There were aprox. 250 attendees who first got to listen to 5 minute lightning talks, and afterwards you could select which breakout sessions you wanted to attend based on your interest in their initial lightning talk. Both the lightning talks as well as the breakout sessions were interesting to most all who attended (based on feedback of the attendees).
We started out with a talk from John Loiacono. I think the guests were convinced that John is very serious about open sourcing Solaris. We also had a special guest appearance from John Gage during the middle of the conference with some interesting comments. The open source team under Claire Giordano which includes Karyn Ritter, Andy Tucker, Jim Grisanzio, Derek Cicero, and Bonnie Corwin, were all in attendance.
Doc Searls gave in interesting talk titled "Beyond the Matrix" which had some interesting analogies. As did Brian Behlendorf who compared the Burning Man Project to open source software.
Other guests included Fred Sanchez (Darwin Project), Joerg Schilling (cdrecord, dvd pro, star, mkisofs, etc...), Mike Shaver (Mozilla), Zak Greant (MySQL), Duncan Davidson (Tomcat), Dan Steinberg (java.net), Bart Smaalders (Solaris Performance), Andy Tucker (Open Solaris Lead), Tim Bray (Bonnie among others), and many others that escape my short memory which comes with getting old...(sigh)...
All in all, Danese Cooper and Simon Phipps did an excellent job at setting up and running the OS Summit.
I have some pictures that I've taken at the OS Summit, please feel free to have a gander for yourself.
( Sep 19 2004, 12:35:41 AM PDT ) Permalink
Friday September 10, 2004 Printer Configuration, the sore thumb looses it's soreness
Many of you know that for the average person to setup a printer on Solaris has been historically a challenge. In fact, this is not only for Solaris but most all flavors of UNIX and it's clone cousins.
Solaris 10 shows some promise in this area, as the print team has made a great attemp to turn this task into a present day solution.
(Click on above to display large images)
Yes, Solaris now includes more than 4000 printer support files that make it easy to configure an attached printer on a port of your Solaris system, or a network accessible printer.
This is really something that was sorely needed, hence my reference to it being a sore thumb.
In addition, the new USB frameworks being added make adding a USB printer easy as well, and the Solaris Print Manager is smart enough to gather information to populate the dialog for many USB printers.
Many thanks go to the print team for making both of our thumbs, ours and your's, feel better!
( Sep 10 2004, 01:55:48 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [6]
Monday September 06, 2004 Solaris Systems Programming
I was in a colleague's office last week who ordered Rich Teer's new book, Solaris Systems Programming, and I just have to give this book a plug.
This is without a doubt one of the best books to be written on Solaris in a long, long time. In fact, as others have noted, the style is done in that of the late, world renown W. Richard Stevens, whose books I have cherished for years.
Knowing Rich personally, and knowing how dedicated he was to providing such a quality book, all I can say is, WOW! Rich spent more than 3 years in getting this text together, and it will surely be one of the "Bibles" for Solaris programmers for quite some time to come.
If you're considering purchasing the book (which I highly reccomend), please stop by the Solaris Systems Programming web page and click on the link provided so Rich can get credit from Amazon for your purchase.
Let's do our part to help out the efforts of our community, most all of whom have families to support!
Congrats go to Rich Teer, job well done.
( Sep 06 2004, 02:51:23 PM PDT ) Permalink
Sun Java Calendar Preview
A couple days ago I posted about the Sunbird project at mozilla.org. I received a comment from Alexis asking what the relationship is between Sunbird and Glow.
Well, today I got Solaris 10 x86 build 66 installed on one of my home servers, as you can read about here if you haven't already, and it included the "Sun Java Calendar Preview" which I believe is Glow (I could be wrong).
I can honestly say that I'm looking forward to tossing dtcm, the calendar application in CDE, in favor of this beautiful pure java application. This is a very nice looking app in the preview state. We use calendaring at Sun regularly.
Before any of you jump to any conclusions, me and my colleague John Weeks, will still be building Sunbird and providing the Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC builds on mozilla.org, so fear not, we enjoy helping the community with builds.
However, if you hear about someone in Solaris Engineering over in Menlo Park doing the "Snoopy Dance" and hollarin' out the Fred Flinstone "Yabba-dabba-doo" call, that would be me as I switch over to using the Sun Java Calendar program.LOL!
( Sep 06 2004, 01:26:11 AM PDT ) Permalink
Sunday September 05, 2004 Solaris 10 with JDS looking fine
I just install the most recent build of Solaris 10 x86 build 66 on a Dual Opteron Tyan S2885 system. I cannot believe the improvement in the system from where it was just a build or two ago.
The new Service Management Frameworks have improved by magnitudes from where it was a build or two ago. These new frameworks will simplify the administration of UNIX services, and are one of the key features being added to Solaris 10.
In addition, the Java Desktop System for Solaris was added in build 66, and it is looking very nice indeed. The X server team has been doing a lot of bug fixing on fonts and such, so it is starting to look like a very nice system. Customers are going to like having this on Solaris (x86 and SPARC for that matter;-), and this will make it much easier to setup and use a Solaris system for most everyone.
I was very pleased to see the Mozilla Desktop team had integrated Mozilla 1.7 into this build. This is the latest stable release of Mozilla, and it was very nice to see the hard work of the Mozilla team starting to really show in the actual product. Gone are the days where you have an outdated browser, this is the most recent stable release of Mozilla. I would like to congratulate the Mozilla Desktop team on a fine job with this prompt integration.
Another surprise was working audio on a standard install. After I loaded the Companion CD and installed KDE, was I ever surprised as my speakers came to life as I started up KDE. This was a very refreshing response! Most AC '97 devices should work, and I know that the team working on the audio drivers have come up with a solution for Sony Vaio laptops. There has been problems with Sony Vaio laptops where the audio device shares the same interrupt with several other devices. Somehow the device doesn't receive servicable interrupts, and all of the known audio drivers available in the community and commercially have not been able to work on the Vaios.
The next time someone tells you how out of date Solaris is, please do me a favor and laugh in their face...Solaris Enineering is bringing Solaris into modern times with features and applications that our customers have been asking for. Stay tuned for more in the way of laptop support with Power Management, better ACPI, wireles drivers and much, much more.
( Sep 05 2004, 11:12:34 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [7]
Webmin going into Solaris!
It has been approved for Webmin to go into Solaris 10. Webmin is a nice web based tool which let's you configure and administrate a system, over the web. I was shown a demo of this and it's very nice, and it will be a very nice addition to Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC.
Sun is really changing the way they do things, and things are clipping along at the speed of light! Congrats to those that worked through the process of getting this software included in Solaris. Look for it on the Companion CD for Solaris 10
( Sep 05 2004, 11:27:48 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]
Saturday September 04, 2004 Sunbird Project implements calendaring!
Calendaring has been an issue with many companies in the past, but now there's a new project at Mozilla that was started up to implement it. Yes, the Sunbird project looks to be a very promising solution to the very problem, and it compliments the Firefox and Thunderbird products. This is essentially the Mozilla calendar program seperated as both Firefox and Thunderbird were in a similar fashion.
We are hoping to have Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC builds up on mozilla.org within the next couple days. Please bear with us while we get these packages built.
( Sep 04 2004, 10:03:50 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Thursday September 02, 2004 Solaris (Intel Platform Edition) Third Party Packaging Tools
Just when you thought it was gone, it's back!
Sun has brought back the Driver Update Diskette, so that anyone interested can build their own ITU diskettes to be used at install time, can now do so.
For more information please see the Device Update Diskette Web Page.
This could help vendors and users alike who wish to produce device drivers to be used at install time and more so to expand the hardware that Solaris x86 will install to.
A BIG round of applause go to the IHV/ISV team in Solaris x86 Engineering for pulling this through and getting it back into not only the hands of vendors, but everyone's hands who wishes to do so.
Hopefully many will benifit from this!
( Sep 02 2004, 05:04:10 PM PDT ) Permalink
Hoping to supply some real meat!
The intention is to supply folks with some real meat, rather than a bunch of fluffy potatoes. There's a lot of fluff distributed in the traditional channels, but the blogs at sun.com show more promise and set an example of the changes inside Sun
Intel EM64T
Jonathan Schwartz mentioned recentely in his blog about the Intel EM64T (Nacono) chipset and that Solaris x86 was running on it. To be more specific, this is the 64 bit Opteron port, which is great news and it shows that Intel's 64 bit extentions are so close to the AMD Opteron chipset that Sun's 64 bit AMD Opteron port of Solaris x86 was able to run on the Nacona chipset with virtually no modifications. I have heard that the engineers only had to modify only a single section of code which had to do with ACPI. Given the state of ACPI, this is not surprising, but really makes a statement about how close both architectures really are. I won't go into the great features which the AMD Opteron architecture presents over Intel's Nacona (such as the Hypertransport system), but suffice to say there is more to performance than just having the compatible extentions.
In addition, I have certified one of the EM64T systems with the Solaris x86 Hardware Certification Test Suite (HCTS) running S9 04/04 and this will show up on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) very soon if it's not there already. This shows that Sun continues to move forward in offering our customers the broadest hardware compatibiltiy, including any customers that may choose to purchase 32 bit hardware or who are looking to move into the 64 bit space, including Intel's EM64T chipset. Kudos to the Solaris Engineering team, you guys are one heck of a team!
Look for the Solaris x86 HCL to continue growing with more systems being added each week.
Mozilla 1.7.2, Firefox 0.9.3, and Thunderbird 0.7.3
Many of you use the packages which me and John Weeks build and post to mozilla.org. There was a delay with our SPARC builds as we ran into a glich and needed to do additional testing. Those builds of the latest packages are now up on mozilla.org to compliment their Solaris x86 32 bit counterparts. Please let us know if you have any problems as we plan to be every bit responsive to any problems in the community with these builds as can be received from any other source which builds them to date.
Sony X505
For those not familiar with the new Sony X505 laptop, you've got to check this out! This is such a small footprint for an x86 based laptop and it runs Solaris x86 today. I have seen this laptop running S10 and it is one nice laptop for those looking for the upmost in portability.
Catch 'ya all soon, gotta run to resolve some issues.
( Sep 02 2004, 01:19:52 PM PDT ) Permalink