OpenSolaris to be Delivered Next Week
According to reports, Sun is expected to make OpenSolaris broadly available next week, making good on a promise to open source its flagship operating system. The project began in late January when Sun shared its DTrace optimizing utility. Once released Sun will have contributed more than 1,600 patents associated with Solaris to the open source community.
The rest of Solaris will be offered up by Sun throughout the second quarter. This includes containers, predictive self-healing technologies, "hardened" Solaris security features derived from Trusted Solaris, IP networking stack, and the Zetabyte File System. The source will be licensed to developers under the Community Development and Distribution License.
News of the launch was first reported by CNET in a blog posting.
DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) is a performance utility that analyzes and diagnoses bottlenecks caused by poorly designed applications and bad system design. Sun designed DTrace to be stable enough for production environments when conditions are normal. A special scripting language can be used to write complex diagnostic procedures utilizing some of the 30,000 hooks Sun has embedded into the OS.
To provide cost savings, Sun has delivered a technology called N1 Grid containers. Although "Grid containers" sound a lot like grid computing, they are not one and the same.
Designed as an alternative to virtualization, grid containers, much like mainframes, operate as if they are separate machines but in reality run on a single machine. N1 Grid containers consolidate many resources into a single copy of Solaris, making its ability to self-diagnose potential problems an important aspect of the release.
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 order to restart services in and will report back to administrators if it encounters a problem.
To harden the release against intruders, Sun has borrowed what it calls process rights management, from Trusted Solaris. Process rights management gives individual processes the minimal rights needed for a task and nothing more; eliminating unnecessary "superusers". Trusted Solaris is a military grade distribution of Solaris.
A Sun spokesperson would not confirm the report, telling BetaNews, "At this point, Sun has not announced specific plans for the OpenSolaris program, but we will be sure to communicate with you when we do."