Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Solaris 10 Revenue Release - Here we go, get ready!

Well, all the signs are positive that tomorrow, Solaris 10 will Revenue Release. This means that it will be available for download and it will be possible to run it commercially, with support. Expect media to be available in about a month.

One of the really important things to note is that the Solaris 10 RTU (Right To Use) is now $0.

You read that correctly. $0 for the most featureful release of Solaris since (and possibly including) Solaris 2.4.

Why am I looking forward to folks running Solaris 10? The main reason is the observability granted by Dtrace. A large portion of the customer calls that I end up with are performance calls. I will now be able to narrow down on issues an awful lot faster than I have been able to previously, without the need for special drivers, debug kernels and (worst of all) the downtime required to install those things.

And while I'm on the area of performance. I've been involved in getting a number of performance and scalability issues addressed in Solaris 8 and 9 recently. These issues and more have already been addressed in 10; and some of the issues that we have addressed in 10 do not lend themselves to backporting.

Fire-Engine: The IP stack has been drasticly(sp?) streamlined for this release, especially in the area of set-up and knock-down of sockets. It runs an awful lot quicker.

Some of the benchmarks that I am seeing internally (that I'd love to talk about, but cannot until they have been certified by the appropriate external bodies - <sarcasm>besides, I work for Sun, who is going to trust me to be objective?</sarcasm>) are showing amazing improvements on records that we already hold.

The install is a lot cleaner than it has ever been and the support for non-Sun hardware is looking pretty damn good (and will only get better).

You will note that ZFS (not Zones as I orignally type [I really should be more awake when I write some of this]) and Janus are not yet in the release. There are still a few bits and pieces to iron out. As an enterprise class operating environment, we are not prepared to release anything until we are happy with it. Expect to see these in early updates.

I expect the number of downloads tomorrow to be staggering!

Technorati Tag: Solaris

Posted at 06:45PM Jan 31, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Patent Grants

I make a point of reading Jonathan's blog whenever he does a new entry. Not simply because I am an employee, but I find he almost always has something interesting to say.

In his latest he dwells a little more on the theme of commoditisation including some interesting references.

However, the part I found particularly interesting is the ps on the end of the item. It appears that all of those who have been commenting on the patent grants (both ours and IBM's) at slashdot and osnews missed this.

I'll quote it verbatim

You've got to love IBM's ability to play the community. Going through some of the patents they "donated" to the open source community a few weeks back, it looks as if they all, curiously, seem to be due for payment - and thus potential expiration - this year. Were they destined for the bit bucket (turns out IBM is among the largest patent expirers in the world, along with its largest issuer).

And some of the patents have nothing to do with open source software - my favorite in the heap is this one. Not sure that's going to be quite the comfort the community's looking for. Here are a few others - for those working in gel embodiments; and for the open source doctors in the crowd.

We know we need to help the community understand how to take advantage of our grant - but at least all 1600 of the patents we've granted to the world were for operating systems and software (USPTO 700, for the wonks in the crowd).

Food for thought.

Posted at 05:52PM Jan 31, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[3]