Wednesday December 29, 2004 64-bit AMD64 Environments, Solaris a joke???
A friend of mine recently got a Tyan S2875 motherboard and built a system. He's a Porsche mechanic by day, and hacker by night, (arguably one of the best damn Porsche mechanics in Silicon Valley;-) and wanted something that was easy to install and use. He's been waiting for Solaris 10 to FCS so he can install it on his new system, and in the meantime he's installed Debian AMD64 on it. This doesn't make sense to me, after seeing the state of Linux AMD64, but who am I to say...?
Partially, I guess I'm to blame for him using Debian, being how I touted Debian's package management system, namely APT, several years ago to wean him off of OS/2. APT is certainly a feature that many distros have pattered network updates around on various systems, some of which are used in a similar fashion on Solaris.
So, the first problem is that his DVD/CDRW drive doesn't work, and he was using a stock kernel. This works fine on Solaris, but for Linux using the stock distro kernel is not good as it loads in all types of drivers trying to get the system boot, and nobody really knows what was compiled into the kernel anyway, there could even be back doors. I'm always very strong on building your own kernel, if you must use Linux. He was told on a Debian mailing list that he would need to build his own kernel and add ide-scsi support into the kernel.
So I offered to help him build a kernel, since he didn't feel up to it, and I insisted if he wanted to use Linux he should build his own kernel. He created an account for me and I shelled into his system so I could configure and build him a kernel. Surprise, surprise...when I find out that he's not running a pure 64-bit environment since all the apps were not available on it at the time, such a KDE. So he's running a 64-bit kernel on top of sarge, the soon to be released Debian stable system which has been soon to be released for quite a while...
Well, wouldn't you know it, you can't build a 64-bit kernel on this environment unless you use a cross compiler, and you need to jump some hoops to get that working. This confuses me as Solaris can produce both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system, and you can even build a kernel on a 32-bit system. This is not to mention that 32-bit apps just seem to work on Solaris AMD64 or that you don't even need to build a kernel for Solaris...but that's for another discussion.
This really did make me realize how spoiled I've become using Solaris on AMD64. I really walked away scrathing my head wondering how far along the 64-bit system is on Linux. While it seems to work fine for most people, it's somewhat held together with bubble gum. Sure, one might argue that Linux AMD64 has been around a lot longer, and that there's already more apps for it than Solaris on AMD64, but I think people should watch the application space as Solaris on AMD64 goes FCS (First Customer Ship) with Solaris 10. Most of Sun's partners that I have worked with have very positive words to say about Solaris on AMD64, and are very happy porting their software to it. It's no surprise to me, because the systems works very well. You do not have to play kernel roulette to replace specific versions, the same kernel works and will boot in either 32-bit or 64-bit. You don't need to mess around with cross compilers to get a build, you just tell the compiler if you want 32-bit or 64-bit.
So, let me ponder for a couple minutes about the comments Linus Torvalds made in this article, where he said "Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. (It has) very little support for any kind of strange hardware."...ok, done, I've pondered long enough...
I don't get it, maybe he hasn't been looking closely at the current status of Linux running on AMD64, or maybe it's just not relevant to him? I don't know, but I wasn't laughing very hard trying to get his Linux AMD64 system going, and it won't be long to get Solaris Express loaded on there to let my friend see what a joke Solaris on AMD64 really is...[chortle!]
( Dec 29 2004, 10:03:16 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [10]