AMD Shanghai Opteron: Linux vs. OpenSolaris Benchmarks

[Vadi]

But the compiler is part of the OS...

[kraftman]

Please stop spreading FUD about OpenSolaris. You have no idea, why it was slower in these benchmarks, and I doubt that you would say the things you're saying, if you knew that. Its feature set is unique and extremely powerful. There is a price one has to pay for powerful features. Also, giving advices to Sun is ridiculous. Sun has been able to create innovative operating system, and what achievements are you proud of?

Sounds like a primitive fanboyism. I don't think the Linux community benefits from such adepts.

What features do you mean (except zfs, BTRFS is approaching) and what innovations are you talking about? One of things I learned from those benchmarks - debugging enabled is not affecting them too much - Linux beat Solaris like before. I don't consider it was objective benchmark, because of different versions of some apps, compilers etc.

[Dubhthach]

What features do you mean (except zfs, BTRFS is approaching) and what innovations are you talking about?

Features lets see
1. Dtrace
2. Superior NFS performance
3. Integrated kernel CIFS server - good tie in with ZFS
4. Comstar - FibreChannel Target - Turn your opensolaris box into SAN
5. ISCSI Target - integration with ZFS makes life so much easier
6. iSNS server integrated
7. Stable Driver API - doesn't break drivers with every kernel release
8. Zones - think of FreeBSD jails but with more power
9. Crossbow - Sane network virtualisation, very useful for Zones
10. Winchester - proper AD interoperability/integration

If you are building a SAN/storage solution I would put the features available with OpenSolaris as been considerably better then with Linux. ZFS is also in the process of getting built in encryption, the nicest recent feature added to ZFS has to be the ability to use SSD as "fast cache" (L2ARC) especially if you are running a file server and it's fairly easy to do:

zpool add poolname cache SSD1 SSD2 SSD3 ...

[kraftman]

Features lets see
1. Dtrace
2. Superior NFS performance
3. Integrated kernel CIFS server - good tie in with ZFS
4. Comstar - FibreChannel Target - Turn your opensolaris box into SAN
5. ISCSI Target - integration with ZFS makes life so much easier
6. iSNS server integrated
7. Stable Driver API - doesn't break drivers with every kernel release
8. Zones - think of FreeBSD jails but with more power
9. Crossbow - Sane network virtualisation, very useful for Zones
10. Winchester - proper AD interoperability/integration

If you are building a SAN/storage solution I would put the features available with OpenSolaris as been considerably better then with Linux. ZFS is also in the process of getting built in encryption, the nicest recent feature added to ZFS has to be the ability to use SSD as "fast cache" (L2ARC) especially if you are running a file server and it's fairly easy to do:

zpool add poolname cache SSD1 SSD2 SSD3 ...

Thanks. It seems many of this is ZFS related but it just maybe shows how ZFS is great (and what advantages this file system gives to Open Solaris). Btw. I don't see "unstable API" (or ABI) to be problem for Linux. If it changes driver devs usually adapt to it almost immediately (madwifi guys, Nvidia) and OS dirvers devs can adopt to its changes maybe even faster.

[etacarinae]

gcc is by no means a default compiler in OpenSolaris, moreover, there is no such thing as the "default compiler" as it doesn't come preinstalled with any at all. After OpenSolaris is installed you can either install the sun studio or gcc development clusters which respectively contain sun studio and gcc compilers.

What's the point of using the non-default compiler of an OS?

[drag]

Features lets see
1. Dtrace

That's one for Solaris

2. Superior NFS performance

Maybe. It's debatable. Besides Linux has a lot more options for shared storage, out of the box then Solaris.

For example POHMELFS is coming out. DRBD, built-in iSCSI software support, etc.

3. Integrated kernel CIFS server - good tie in with ZFS

Maybe. Samba is very nice and Samba 4 will have native AD support as well as provide Unix optimized modes.

Plus, do you really want to be running a network service out of your kernel?

4. Comstar - FibreChannel Target - Turn your opensolaris box into SAN

I think you'll find that Linux has superior hardware support and is used quite a bit more with large network storage stuff.

5. ISCSI Target - integration with ZFS makes life so much easier

Been using that for years in Linux. Where have you been?

6. iSNS server integrated

Hrm.

7. Stable Driver API - doesn't break drivers with every kernel release

Ya, but Solaris has much much fewer drivers then Linux. Both for older and newer hardware. Plus has much better power management and is able to take better advantage of hardware features in most devices then Solaris can.

It doesn't matter if the API is stable if there is a distinct lack of drivers that it supports.

8. Zones - think of FreeBSD jails but with more power

Virtuozzo has been used for years to create container-style virtulaization for web serving companies. The open source part is OpenVZ.

Plus there is Vserver that also does container-style virtualization.

Not to also mention other virtualization options for Linux... For example Linux now has native built-in ability to be a hypervisor (like Xen or Vmware) in the form of KVM. Every Linux distribution ships with that. There are then a half a dozen virtualization options with various plusses and minuses for Linux.

9. Crossbow - Sane network virtualisation, very useful for Zones

I am running, on my laptop right now, a virtual network with it's own full TCP/IP stack, virtual ethernet switch and virtual ethernet jacks.

This network is NAT'd using native Linux iptables rules and is tied into Network-Manager so that when I connect directly to a network all my virtual machines are instantly networked with it without any user intervention. This means that when I am at work and connect to the corporate environment the VMs are able to access the network transparently. Then when I go at home they can connect through my wireless, all without reconfiguring them or rebooting anything or whatnot.

This is delivered and configured, buy Fedora 10, Network-Manager, Virt-Manager...

yum groupinstall Virtualization

10. Winchester - proper AD interoperability/integration

There exist products like that also. There are plenty of people that use GSSAPI and PAM to integrate Linux into Active Directory schemes.

Plus the up and coming Samba4 will bring the ability for not only sharing out CIFS, but be a compatible Active Directory server which you can then use to replace Windows Server without having to use special software or special configurations on your Windows clients.

If you are building a SAN/storage solution I would put the features available with OpenSolaris as been considerably better then with Linux. ZFS is also in the process of getting built in encryption, the nicest recent feature added to ZFS has to be the ability to use SSD as "fast cache" (L2ARC) especially if you are running a file server and it's fairly easy to do:

Ha. ZFS isn't all that. If your deploying a large SAN people are generally not going to use either ZFS or any Linux stuff. They are more likely to use a proprietary system like NetApps (and there are a few other companies which specialize in SAN stuff), which is currently suing Sun Microsystems for patent violations.



There are two things that Solaris offers over Linux:

1. ZFS
2. Dtrace.

That's _it_. Everything you mentioned is already available for Linux and have been used in Linux prior to them existing in OpenSolaris.

And not only that but they are used in production environment. Unlike the iSCSI support, which only has recently appeared in OpenSolaris.

Otherwise Linux is faster, supports more hardware, supports hardware better, has better application support, better support from commercial ISVs, It runs better on embedded systems, it runs faster on desktops, get better battery life on laptops, and scales to much larger hardware then Solaris can handle.

SGI, for example, has Linux product that feature over a thousand processors per system image.. this is not a cluster, thats a single computer. Then they cluster those computers together to make supercomputers. Recently SGI was able install and deploy a Linux-based supercomputer with 2560 processors, 5.1TB of RAM, and 84TB of storage in under one day.

Meanwhile I was able to build a floppy using the latest version of the Linux kernel from kernel.org and the latest version of Busybox and created a single 1.44MB floppy system for running a old PC-104 formfactor embedded computer that was originally designed to run QNX. No patches were needed, simply downloaded the sources, compiled and built a custom kernel and initrd, copied them to a floppy and made it bootable with syslinux.

--------------------------

I don't hate OpenSolaris (actually I think that it's neat) and I don't think that Linux is all that super-duper, but there is definitely very good reasons why Linux is dominating Solaris in the marketplace.

Go and look at Redhat and their various group add-ons.

Stuff like IPA, Cluster suite, Virtualization, and a few others that are product-ready and realworld validated. Things like iSCSI support, GNBD, OCFSv2, GFSv2, Linux-HA, etc etc. Things that people have been using for a long time in Linux, but OpenSolaris is just starting to get support for.

[etacarinae]

Excuse me? You're saying that when you install OpenSolaris you get gcc pre-installed for you ? Have you actually tried OpenSolaris ? Do you know that all but with certain exception packages in OpenSolaris are built with sun studio (unoptimized 32 bits, optimized 64 bits)

But the compiler is part of the OS...

[etacarinae]

Hmm, let's see:

First of all, why all the hype about btrfs ? BTRFS needs fsck, zfs doesn't, BTRFS is copy-on-write since prone to fragmentation, ZFS doesn't need any defragmentation, BTRFS needs it, from their website:
"Online filesystem defragmentation", "Online filesystem check", in ZFS you forget about that. RAID-Z support in BTRFS ? eh ? Can you cd to snapshots ? can you import/export pools or do you need to use LVM for that ? The story goes on...

As for OpenSolaris:

1. DTrace (yes, I've use it, and it works)
2. ZFS
3. IPS (this coupled with boot environment is awesome, it creates a clone (which is instant) of your system, updates it to a newer version of OpenSolaris, and upon reboot you're in a new environment), if something goes wrong, you just select previous environment...Only the changed files are updated, pkg fix & verify are very fast and easy to use. As you update, your current
environment is unaffected, 2%-3% cpu usage throughout the update, nothing breaks or hangs. Updating a live system is a bad choice of design, unless absolutely required.
4. BrandZ
5. Zones
6. Crossbow and unified mangement of network interface/security/etc..
7. NWAM
8. TrustedExtensions
9. Simultaneous support for 32 & 64 bit apps.

and I'm sure I'm missing more here..

As for what I believe OpenSolaris lacks:
1. Audio stack is way too old, but this hopefully will be fixed with "Boomer"
2. Programs like Skype, Google Earth, (although they run via BrandZ)
3. Some of the packages in repository are very old (e.g. gcc, stardict, evince, etc.)
4. Horrendous performance with FAT32, seriously, it's that bad, 3mb/s ...
5. Read-only ntfs support is fine, but read write via ntfs3g is very buggy and slow (cpu usage 100% on my computer)

So by no means it's perfect, but let's not say it's a waste of time, ok ?

What features do you mean (except zfs, BTRFS is approaching) and what innovations are you talking about? One of things I learned from those benchmarks - debugging enabled is not affecting them too much - Linux beat Solaris like before. I don't consider it was objective benchmark, because of different versions of some apps, compilers etc.

[etacarinae]

...

I don't hate OpenSolaris (actually I think that it's neat) and I don't think that Linux is all that super-duper, but there is definitely very good reasons why Linux is dominating Solaris in the marketplace.

It's not just what features are present, it's also HOW are they implemented, you can have two features-comparable products, but with completely different level of usability, support, speed, stability. It's my personal opinion that things in OpenSolaris are well thought (mainly because they go through a long process of integrating something, which is making it slower compared to linux). As for why is Linux dominating, it's easy, it's way more open to contributions. But this is at the core of OSOL model, that's the price you have to pay for the goodies you get. And since we get them for free, why complain ?

Also it's very sad to see the Linux camp taking every opportunity to trash OpenSolaris, if you tried and don like it, just ignore it.

[drag]

Hmm, let's see:

First of all, why all the hype about btrfs ? BTRFS needs fsck, zfs doesn't, BTRFS is copy-on-write since prone to fragmentation, ZFS doesn't need any defragmentation, BTRFS needs it,

So I take it that you enjoy the feeling of having corruption on your file system that goes undetected until you try to actually access it.

Because, sure checksums are nice (which BTRFS can use also), but they do not automatically prevent any corruption or automatically detect it unless your actually using that file or portion of the file system.

How you find problems is to actually scan and examine the filesystem. If your using checksums, for example, they can only be used to detect the problem if you actually going to read the data and compare it to the checksums. This act of looking at files systematically is called "A File System Check" and this is done using 'FSCK'.

ZFS by lacking a FSCK does not mean that it doesn't not need it's file system checked... it just means that it's missing features compared to Btrfs.

And same thing with fragmentation. All file systems fragment. I don't give a shit what FS your using or your OS. It's going to happen one way or the other under the right circumstances. And I bet that with ZFS when your getting 80-90% total usage of your storage medium it's going to start fragmenting badly.

Again the lack of defrag for ZFS does not mean that ZFS does not fragment. It merely means that it lacks another feature compared to BTRFS.

It's like saying if I build a laptop without a on/off switch this means that I never have to worry about my batteries running out.