Solaris Operating System

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Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. It is certified against the Single Unix Specification as a version of Unix. Although Solaris is still proprietary software, the core OS has been made into an open source project, OpenSolaris.

History

In the early 1990s Sun replaced the BSD-derived SunOS 4 with a version of UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4), jointly developed with AT&T. The underlying release name was SunOS 5.0, but a new marketing name was introduced at the same time: Solaris 2. While SunOS 4.1.x micro releases were retroactively named Solaris 1 by Sun, the name Solaris is almost exclusively used to refer to SVR4-derived SunOS 5.0 and later.^[2]

Solaris is considered to be the SunOS operating system plus a graphical user environment, ONC+, and other components. The SunOS minor version is included in the Solaris release name; for example, Solaris 2.4 incorporated SunOS 5.4. After Solaris 2.6, Sun dropped the "2." from the name, so Solaris 7 incorporates SunOS 5.7, and the latest release SunOS 5.10 forms the core of Solaris 10.

Supported architectures

Solaris uses a common code base for the architectures it supports: SPARC and x86 (including x86-64). It was also ported to the PowerPC architecture (PowerPC Reference Platform) for version 2.5.1, but the port was cancelled almost as soon as it was released. Support for Itanium was at one time planned but never brought to market.^[3] Sun also plan to implement support for the ABI of the Linux platform in a future update to Solaris 10, allowing Solaris to run native Linux binaries on x86 systems. This feature is called "Solaris Containers for Linux Applications" or SCLA.^[4]

Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to SMP, supporting a large number of CPUs.^[5] It has historically been tightly integrated with Sun's SPARC hardware, with which it is designed and marketed as a combined package, and has included support for 64-bit SPARC applications since Solaris 7. This has often led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium over commodity PC hardware. However, it has also supported x86 systems since Solaris 2.1 and the latest version of Solaris, Solaris 10, has been designed with AMD64 in mind, allowing Sun to capitalize on the availability of commodity 64-bit CPUs based on the AMD64 architecture. Sun has heavily marketed Solaris with its AMD64-based workstations and servers, which range from dual-core to 16-core models as of December 2006.

Desktop environments

The first Solaris desktop environment was OpenWindows, previously bundled with SunOS 4.1.x releases. It was superseded by CDE in Solaris 2.5 onwards. Sun's Java Desktop System, which is based on GNOME, is included with Solaris 10.

License

Solaris's source code (with a few exceptions) has been released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) via the OpenSolaris project.^[6] The CDDL is an OSI-approved license.^[7] However, it is considered by the Free Software Foundation to be incompatible with the GPL.^[8]

OpenSolaris was seeded on June 14, 2005 from the then-current Solaris development code base; both binary and source versions are currently downloadable and licensed without cost. Source for upcoming features such as Xen support is now added to the OpenSolaris project as a matter of course, and Sun has said that future releases of Solaris proper will henceforth be derived from OpenSolaris.

Versions

Notable features of Solaris currently include DTrace, Doors, Service Management Facility, Solaris Containers, Solaris Multiplexed I/O, Solaris Volume Manager, ZFS, and Solaris Trusted Extensions.

In descending order, the following versions of Solaris have been released as of December 2006:

Solaris 7 is no longer shipping but will be supported until August 2008; Solaris 8 will stop shipping in February 2007 but will be supported until April 2012.^[16] Earlier versions are unsupported.

A more comprehensive summary of some Solaris versions is also available.^[17] Solaris releases are also described in the Solaris 2 FAQ.^[18]

Development release

The underlying Solaris codebase has been under continuous development since work began in the late 1980s on what was eventually released as Solaris 2.0. Each version such as Solaris 10 is based on a snapshot of this development "train", taken near the time of its release, which is then maintained as a derived project. Updates to that project are built and delivered several times a year until the next official release comes out.

The Solaris version under development by Sun is codenamed Nevada, and is derived from what is now the OpenSolaris codebase.

In 2003, an addition to the Solaris development process was initiated. Under the program name Solaris Express, a snapshot of the development train is now made available for download each month, allowing anyone to try out new features and test the quality and stability of the OS as it progresses to the release of the next official Solaris version.^[19]

Since Solaris Express predates the release of the Solaris codebase as an open source project, it began as a binary-only program, but there is now a version called the Solaris Express: Community Release intended specifically for OpenSolaris developers.^[20] It is updated weekly, and is for evaluation and personal purposes only.

References

See also

• Trusted Solaris
• Comparison of operating systems

External links

• Solaris Operating System Official home page
• Open Directory: Operating Systems: Unix: Solaris
• SunHELP - Solaris news, resources, and discussion
• Solaris Central - Solaris news and discussion
• BigAdmin - System administration portal
• Solaris Developer Portal - For application developers on Solaris
• Software
  • Blastwave.org - Solaris free software packages
  • Sunfreeware.com - Solaris freeware