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]
Posted by Henrik Lynggaard on December 30, 2004 at 05:28 AM PST #
Posted by Derek Morr on December 30, 2004 at 07:17 AM PST #
There're distros with support for opteron (redhat and suse, price for the latest suse version is very low ie: not everything is redhat)
BTW, debian has the weirdest opteron support of all linux distros. It don't follows the same rules than other distros (redhat, suse, fedora, mandrake) when it comes to 32/64 libraries. You need to use chroots and other weird tricks which DON'T happen in other distros...
Debian also has the problem of having a bloated kernel by default because debian don't use hardware detectors and it needs to load everything if they want it to work.
In short, debian really sucks for amd64, linux don't. Try a stable, supported distro.
Solaris is better? Well, I haven't tried it, but IIRC solaris 10 started to boot experimantally in 64-bit mode like...6 months ago? It might be less...linux has been running it since there wasn't real hardware and only emulators were available. I will leave the interpretations for others but for me it's quite clear who has better opteron support
(BTW, the way to get CD/RW support in 2.6 is just by enabling ide support not ide-scsi, with ide-scsi you won't get UDMA and other performance improvements. It looks like you were bitten by the cdrecord/2.6.[789] permissions bug)
Posted by - on December 30, 2004 at 08:08 AM PST #
Posted by Adam Sweet on December 30, 2004 at 11:15 AM PST #
Henrick, I agree that it does matter which distribution you pick, no question. I was just surprised at what it would take to even get a 64-bit kernel build from a 32-bit system.
Derek, The Solaris Engineers did a very nice implementation. Being able to run and build either 32-bit or 64-bit on the same system has spoiled me!
Mr. '-', (I guess you don't have enough pride to use your name) I am not going to base my opionions based on how long the system has been running. You can find out for yourself by going and getting Solaris Express, the download is free, and if you have 64-bit hardware it will be able to boot in 64-bit mode. If you think the Linux community has a leg up on us with their 64-bit support, think again, Sun has been the dominator in the 64-bit space for quite some time now, so this is not something that's been developed over the last 6 months.
Adam, I didn't mean to point out Debian's kernel as having possible back doors, I feel that way about all Linux distribution and would never use any stock kernel as it not only presents the problem of a back door, but it typically loads every kernel module in hopes that all the devices will be detected. I have a 32-bit Debian system running, and I prefer Debian as the Linux distribution of choice, APT is terrific! However, SMP and certainly 64-bit are not areas where I have typically considered Linux to be a leader in the industry. It was not my intention to spread FUD, it was more of shock after reading what Linus Torvalds had to say about Solaris when he hasn't used it in quite some time. I do use Linux, and I use Solaris on SPARC and AMD64, it quite frankly, it rocks!
Sure, I wouldn't have put Solaris on x86 into the Kerbango Internet Radio (which I wrote all the communications for in a previous time), but I wouldn't run Embedded Linux on my enterprise quality servers either, err..., I wouldn't run Linux on them either unless they were only functioning as web or mail servers. I use the right tool for the job, and Linux is a fine tool in many cases. Just as Solaris is. And Solaris on x86/AMD64 is no joke, it's very real.[wink]
Posted by Alan DuBoff on December 30, 2004 at 07:19 PM PST #
For real-world AMD64 Linux one should use SuSE, Gentoo, Mandrake or Fedora.
The claim about backdoors in any distribution's kernel is ridiculous. I could as well speculate that all US based vendors like Sun, Microsoft, IBM are including backdoors in their software for the NSA or any other agency...
Posted by Markus Ackermann on December 30, 2004 at 11:33 PM PST #
Markus,
Aside from backdoors, do you use a stock distribution kernel on a Linux system?
And who would you hold responsible if you got a bad kernel that *DID* have a backdoor in it, from Debian, for instance? It's not like Sun, Microsoft, or IBM as you list above, there is no responsible party with Debian, and there is no corporation to take the liability. Call it ridiculous if you like.
I welcome you to try Solaris Express, available with 64-bit support today. See for yourself if Solaris is a joke or not, don't believe any uninformed people in the press.
Posted by Alan DuBoff on December 31, 2004 at 12:00 AM PST #
I'm not saying Solaris has bad opteron support - heck, solaris 10 is there, and before microsoft released their windows version. But implying that linux is worse just because you tried a bad distro (yes, gcc _can_ output 32 and 64 bit binaries without any strange cross compiler, just don't use debian) is not a good conclusion IMO.
AFAIK solaris 10 started to boot in opteron like 6 months ago (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/15/sun_solarislives_opteron/)and regardless of the good 64-bit goodness of solaris porting a operative system to a new architecture is not done magically. Your "long time 64-bit leader" Sun started selling opteron workstations with Solaris 9 and no 64-bit support only 32 bit. In fact Sun gave you to choose between 32-bit Solaris 9 and 64/32-bit Redhat linux. I don't know what people means by "good support" but I don't think I'm changing my opinion
Posted by Diego on December 31, 2004 at 06:23 AM PST #
Diego, thanks for using a name, I don't mind if you don't use your email, that's fine, I just prefer to responding to someone other than '-'. Sun has been developing and shipping 64-bit before the Opteron, and the Opteron port works almost identical to the SPARC port in every way. You get both a 32-bit kernel and a 64-bit kernel in Solaris. You can select between either at boot time, and you can compile for either environment, and run code from either if you're booted on the 64-bit kernel. The first Opteron systems were shipping before the 64-bit kernel, and Solaris on x86 was going through major overhaul, so while it was unfortunate that Solaris on x86 didn't ship on those systems, it was not something that could have been easily avoided. Sun has ported their operating system to the Itanium previously as well, as they have to PowerPC. I think Sun has some experience with porting Solaris, and Sun certainly has experience with 64-bit on SPARC and x86 architectures (i.e., Itanium is also 64-bit based).
I'm not asking you to change your opinion, only that you base it on something a bit more logical, other than how long the system has been shipping. As I suggested, download it for free yourself and go ahead and install it. You can dual boot it with your Linux distribution. Check out http://multiboot.solaris-x86.org/ for more info on doing that.
Posted by Alan DuBoff on December 31, 2004 at 12:45 PM PST #
Debian amd64 was in development before those other distros and those other distros use the same source as debian.
I did't have to cross compile my 2.6.11 kernel.
Posted by bucky on March 19, 2005 at 07:11 PM PST #