Is Solaris The Same on x86 and SPARC
"Hi Marc, Hope you are well! You may not remember - but we met when you were in Australia during the Friday afternoon Pizza session! I am the Sun account manager for a large bank in Australia. The client has been favorable to Linux - BUT the good news is that there is more "Solaris" talk at the bank going on! On Friday the client made the comment that they thought that Sun releases Solaris SPARC before Solaris x86 (ie a "Sun is not serious about Solaris x86 type comment").
I told him that I did not think this was the case - and would confirm.
What I am looking for is the Sun statement that states that we release equivalent functionality in Solaris x86 at the same time as Solaris SPARC - but I can't find anything definite. "
So for the record,
Dear Sun Australia Sales Rep and Large Australian Bank Customer
cc: The Whole World
Every release of Solaris 10 since it was introduced in January 2005 has shipped SPARC and x86 versions concurrently. We do not have separate versions of Solaris for SPARC and x86. Yes, the binary files are different because the CPU instruction sets are different, but Solaris 10 is Solaris 10. You can download the latest release for free, for either SPARC or x86, from http://www.sun.com/software/solaris. And, just to complete the latest news, Sun also ships a broad line of AMD and Intel powered x86 servers, all of which run Solaris and you can also buy x86 servers with Solaris from other vendors such as IBM. In fact, of the 906 systems currently on the Solaris Hardware Compatibility List, 831 are x86 systems and only 75 are SPARC.
Sincerely, Marc Hamilton, VP Solaris Marketing.
You might want to cc: The Whole World, too. :-)
Posted by Jonathan Schwartz on September 20, 2007 at 10:36 AM PDT #
But some small differences do exist, right? So where can I find the list?
Posted by I on September 20, 2007 at 12:44 PM PDT #
Solaris 10 is the same on every platform, so we don't have a list of differences. Different hardware platforms may take advantage of different features of the OS, i.e. one server may have a SCSI disk and another may have a SAS disk, or one may have an Ethernet interface and another may have an Infiniband interface, but Solaris 10 is always the same.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on September 20, 2007 at 12:56 PM PDT #
I seem to remember that the PCI support in Solaris started life on a non-SPARC platform? If I remember right it was added for the Power version of Solaris, then used in the SPARC version when UltraSPARC systems started appearing with PCI and also reused in the x86 version.
A good example of how the code isn't CPU dependent.
Posted by Phillip Fayers on September 20, 2007 at 01:50 PM PDT #
Linux Zones (BrandZ) are not (yet ?) supported on the SPARC platform, as far as I know. Also the XEN technology won't work on SPARC.
IMHO a list would be useful as I think there are some more differences.
Posted by Matthias on September 20, 2007 at 02:10 PM PDT #
Here are a few differences I can think of off the top of my head:
* The boot process is different (OpenBoot vs Grub).
* The prtdiag command wasn't available for x86 in the earlier versions of Solaris 10.
* The maxphys parameter defaults to 128 KB on SPARC and 56 KB on x86.
* A disk can have more partitions on x86 than on SPARC. (For VTOC labels, at least. Dunno about EFI labels.)
Not earth shattering, but still differences.
Posted by Edward Berner on September 20, 2007 at 03:14 PM PDT #
From Sun's own WS-240-S10 Solaris 10 training docs:
Some of the major differences between these architectures include the following:
* Byte ordering of the processor (endianness)
* 32-bit and 64-bit issues
* Direct memory access (DMA) compared to direct virtual memory access (DVMATM)
* Floating point operation
* Input/output (I/O) architecture
* Device drivers
* The boot process
* Remote installations (JumpStartTM software)
* Hot-plugging and dynamic reconfiguration
Posted by Ed Saipetch on September 20, 2007 at 09:35 PM PDT #
"* The boot process is different (OpenBoot vs Grub)."
This will change when sparc gets GRUB boot, which I understand in in progress. So the boot process being different will more or less become the thing of the past.
"* The prtdiag command wasn't available for x86 in the earlier versions of Solaris 10."
But it is available now, and supports FMA.
As far as I can tell, JumpStart(TM) is the same on both sparc and i86pc (the actual name of the platform).
If JumpStart(TM) is configured to use DHCP, then JumpStarting is identical, even though i86pc uses PXE and sparc the OBP.
BTW, interesting piece of trivia for the Australian bank:
Solaris is now developed on i86pc, and then made to work on sparc, i.e. most new features are cranked out on Acer Ferrari and Apple laptops!
Posted by UX-admin on September 21, 2007 at 12:42 AM PDT #
What Sun should point out more often is that Solaris x86 is and has been built from the same code base as Solaris SPARC since Solaris 2.4 (~1994). That's 13 years on x86!
I know because back in '94 I developed on Solaris 2.4EA Intel on a Gateway PC and then recompiled the final release version so it could run on a SPARC 20 in Production.
I keep reading how Solaris on x86 is a newly supported platform for Sun!
Posted by Bryan Althaus on September 21, 2007 at 10:57 AM PDT #
Actually there are 80 Sun SPARC systems that are listed.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/systems/views/sun_systems_sparc.page1.html
Posted by Honglin Su on September 25, 2007 at 11:38 PM PDT #