Sun's Solaris Makes Open Source Debut
As expected, Sun Microsystems has taken the lid off of OpenSolaris. Sun is celebrating by blogging the event with special launch day content. Once it is fully released, Solaris will have contributed over 5 million lines of code and 1,600 associated patents to the open source community.
Marking the occasion in his blog, Stephen Harpster, Director of Open Source Software at Sun Microsystems, wrote, "There were people that believed we would never do it. There were people that attacked our license. There were people who thought we were out to take over Linux. There were all wrong."
"People will look at what we've done today and still complain. This isn't the end. It's the beginning. More source code will be coming. Our processes for submitting code and bug reports will get easier. We'll get build and test farms up and running. The point is, we'll do this together. As a community," Harpster said.
"There's an opportunity to make Solaris better, to get it into places where it's never been before, and into the hands of people who have never seen it. It's that opportunity that's generating the excitement. So come join us."
The OpenSolaris project started as a pilot in January when Sun shared its DTrace performance utility.
Components that were released today include containers, predictive self-healing technologies, "hardened" Solaris security features derived from Trusted Solaris, IP networking stack, and the Zetabyte File System. The source is licensed to developers under the Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) is a performance utility that seeks out and diagnoses bottlenecks that are caused due to improperly designed applications and flaws in system design. Sun designed DTrace to be stable enough for production environments when conditions are normal. Developers are key to the utility's success: A special scripting language must be used by developers to write complex diagnostic procedures in order to utilize the 30,000 hooks Sun has embedded into the OS.
To trim down licensing costs, Sun has delivered a technology called N1 Grid containers. While "Grid containers" may sound a lot like grid computing, it is a very different proposition. Designed as an alternative to virtualization, grid containers operate independently as separate machines but in reality only run on a single machine.
Sun's self-healing framework probes active hardware and software environments, and will attempt to intervene before a system malfunctions. One of these interventions, for example, would be copying data from failing memory to another area of memory before a crash. Solaris is designed to determine the right sequence to restart services and will report back to administrators when it runs into any trouble.
To harden OpenSolaris against intruders, Sun has borrowed its process rights management technology from Trusted Solaris. Trusted Solaris, a military grade distribution of Solaris, only grants processes the minimal rights needed to complete a task and nothing more. This eliminates unnecessary "superusers" and makes it more difficult for hackers to cause harm even if they infiltrate a system.
Sun has launched a Web site at OpenSolaris.org that contains downloadable code, documentation and general community resources.