[OpenIndiana-discuss] I figured this deserved a separate thread

[Rthoreau]

Tom Kranz <tom at siliconbunny.com> writes:

> Allan E. Registos wrote:
>>> No, OpenIndiana both targets Desktops and Server
>>
>>
>> That is what most GNU/Linux distributions have done since the dawn of
> time.
> This is what Solaris (and IRIX, and other UNIXs) have done since,
> well, as long as I've been playing with them, almost 20 odd years now.
>
<snip>
> although with the way IPS and the installer handles things, I don't
> see a pressing need to return to the "Entire Distribution plus OEM
> support" option that Solaris provides.
>
> There's a big chunk of Solaris history that newcomers to OI probably
> aren't aware of - but the Solaris kernel is hugely performant and is
> very much self-tuning to load. There is not much that can be tweaked,
> there's even less that it is advisable to tweak, and features like
> projects and other resource controls enable most common things like
> size of shared memory segments and number of semaphore to be tuned on
> the fly.
>
> We haven't needed to recompile the SunOS kernel to change settings
> since the dark days of SunOS 4 - and the world is much better for it.
>
> Focus on drivers and bundled apps, and let the kernel sort itself out
> for load and hardware - it's pretty good at it (after all, it's been
> doing it since 1992).
>
> Cheers,
> TOM

In the Solaris books, and other posts I have read I have seen a lot of
Sun engineers compare kernels heralding the benefits of sunOS. I just
racked it up to a slight bias, after all they were sun employees, kind of
like hearing Linus talk about the linux kernel. Then when I seen
fishworks and some of the material that it was capable of I was very
impressed.  I guess what sold me was the fact that they could tell from
I/O probes and graphs that a network interface card had malfunctioned.

So I appreciate posts from real people doing real things that tell it as
it is.

Rthoreau