Reply to post: "...I'm not sure if this is a major deal"

Solaris 12 disappears from Oracle's roadmap

HCV

"...I'm not sure if this is a major deal"

I'm not entirely sure how one would define where an OS ends and applications start

This is actually a pretty important concept. If you don’t have a crystal-clear boundary between the OS and applications, you don’t really have an OS, and application compatibility across releases is a vague fantasy rather than reality. This was the rap against Linux since practically forever: that the OS interface guide was called "the kernel source code."

“and whether a lack of development in the OS is a major deal.”

Spoiler: it is. OSes keep evolving, either with outright new developments (think DTrace in the Solaris world), or co-opting and integrating features that had previously been bolted on outside the OS (virtualized compute, virtualized networking, virtualized storage come to mind). Security continues to be ripe for development.

An example of how lack of development can bite you: When Oracle bought Ksplice in 2011, it was a unique technology, allowing Linux sysadmins to apply kernel fixes without rebooting. Oracle has been talking about how they've been working to get similar functionality into Solaris ever since then, with Solaris 12 as the target release, which would be cool, but at this point it would now be catchup rather than a leadership feature.

So yeah, if this move means functionality like this is seriously delayed or even dropped from Solaris, it will be a major deal. Ditto for their work on integrating Docker. Solaris Containers/Zones is already great, but but adding Docker integration would have been extraordinarily useful.

"Solaris doesn't have systemd. Oracle would have to do quite a lot of porting then to accommodate such a package."

The Solaris equivalent to systemd is SMF, which came in with Solaris 10 in 2005. It was considered to be heretical by Unix traditionalists, but it was a major leap forward in service management and reliability. It’s another great example of “development in the OS being a major deal”.

There’s a lot more to OS development than just keeping existing userland programs running, or even accommodating new hardware. It’s the underlying plumbing, carefully hidden away from the applications (or presented as new services with stable interfaces), where innovation can really pay off. Killing off Solaris 12, which has been in development for over five years, and trying to shoehorn that work back into Solaris 11, is going to make it even harder for Solaris to stay current with OS trends than it had been.

What I’ll be looking for is signs of any of the advanced work that was going into Solaris 12 (and there’s more than what we’ve been talking about here) suddenly making its way exclusively into Oracle Linux.

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