Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU30 Is The Biggest Update We've Seen In A While

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU30 Is The Biggest Update We've Seen In A While

Oracle continues maintaining Solaris 11.4 with monthly stable release updates but there still is no public sign of anything past 11.4 for this operating system that was once exciting during the Sun Microsystems days. But with this week's 11.4 SRU30 release, at least there are many package updates...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-Solaris-11.4-SRU30

[lucrus]

https://youtu.be/3at_Ev2kOoI

It's dead Jim.

[szymon_g]

Can it be downloaded and installed on the 'normal' hardware?

[OneTimeShot]

I swear that the best feature of Solaris is whatever the heck they do to the fan speed. Every time I use Solaris, the fan hum is amazing. Even when I ran Open Solaris on my ancient laptop, it sounded like a super computer's cooling system.

Other than that, yeah just stick with Linux...

[FireBurn]

Who still uses this? I shudder when I have to log into a solaris box, then usually frantically google for what the equivalent of top is etc

[drjohnnyfever]

Solaris 11 comes with top out of the box these days. Not that I want to be in the position of defending Oracle but it's actually a pretty usable system.

[drjohnnyfever]

Can it be downloaded and installed on the 'normal' hardware?

Yeah you can go ahead and download it and install on commodity amd64 hardware. I'm not sure what you are legally allowed to do with the free download (commercial use, development etc) but it is the full and complete system. Of course you don't get any of the SRU updates over the base 11.4 install without a support contract. I've intermittently played around with each major release just out of curiosity. That said you'd probably have to be crazy to migrate your infrastructure off of Linux or FreeBSD to Oracle Solaris in 2021 but it is technically interesting and some of the features like IPS for package management are pretty slick. Its ZFS support is excellent as one would expect, assuming you don't need to interoperate with feature-flags OpenZFS pools.

I'm a fan of the Illumos based OmniOS for servers, which is administered fairly similarly to Oracle Solaris due to it's shared OpenSolaris heritage. I run an OmniOS machine as a NAS in parallel with my FreeNAS machine. I would say Oracle Solaris is probably more competitive with Linux on a feature and performance basis than Illumos but of course it isn't open source, Larry wants his money and Oracle's long term commitment to it is sort of vague. One interesting feature of illumos/Oracle Solaris is the in-kernel SMB/CIFS server which in my testing performs extremely well.

All that being said, I like to try out different systems as a hobby. The average person probably has no reason to care at all about any of this stuff.

[useless]

One interesting feature of illumos/Oracle Solaris is the in-kernel SMB/CIFS server which in my testing performs extremely well.

Does Oracle Solaris have proper NFS4.1 support? Last I checked, there were some patches for illumos in a testing branch but no progress so far.

I had a box running OmniOS but I repurposed it since Linux gave me more performance in my workload. It was fun tough, I miss some of the tooling.

[drjohnnyfever]

Does Oracle Solaris have proper NFS4.1 support? Last I checked, there were some patches for illumos in a testing branch but no progress so far.

I had a box running OmniOS but I repurposed it since Linux gave me more performance in my workload. It was fun tough, I miss some of the tooling.

My understanding is that 11.4 supports NFS 4.1 but I've not actually tried it myself yet. Illumos doesn't have it as far as I know, but they do have SMB3.

[k1e0x]

Can it be downloaded and installed on the 'normal' hardware?

No. You need an Oracle License.. but yes the x86_64 version should be fairly compatible with like a run of the mill intel server.

Who still uses this? I shudder when I have to log into a solaris box, then usually frantically google for what the equivalent of top is etc

The GNU Userland is a copy of the older Unix Userland - In a lot of cases they just added a bunch of weird flags and such in Linux. Man is your friend.

I still use Solaris yes, tho it's being retired. (With Linux right? Nope, FreeBSD) and Solaris has some fairly nice features overall. Fault management framework, Zones and Crossbow. ZFS etc. Technically it's a pretty good OS. It's EXTREMELY reliable. I've seen Sun systems in places that were installed when Windows NT was a brand new product. Happy doing their job for the past 30 years.. so where are the NT systems from that era? long since gone.. they blew up, died, had trouble.. and someone got rid of them. Solaris lasts this long because it works. Sun really knew how to build them.

The worst part of it now, is Oracle.. and that is the reason it's going away. Did you know Oracle charges for security patches? Yep.

They clearly didn't buy Sun to get Solaris and their version of it is lagging. As people have mentioned though.. there is no point to use Solaris when Illumos is the same thing, free and better. OmniOS looks very good. it's just somewhat new and needs trust.

Does Oracle Solaris have proper NFS4.1 support? Last I checked, there were some patches for illumos in a testing branch but no progress so far.

I had a box running OmniOS but I repurposed it since Linux gave me more performance in my workload. It was fun tough, I miss some of the tooling.

Dunno, you'd think tho. Solaris invented NFS.. If that new version is in Illumos though.. not sure.