what are the [nontrivial] differences between Linux and Solaris?

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Frank A. Uepping wrote:
> puzzlecracker wrote:
> 
> Linux is free, Solaris not ;)
>
> /FAU
NONTRIVIAL

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puzzlecracker wrote:

> what are the [nontrivial] differences between Linux and Solaris?
Linux is free, Solaris not ;)

/FAU

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chk this link
http://www.sans.org/rr/whitepapers/unix/936.php

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On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Frank A. Uepping wrote:

> puzzlecracker wrote:
> 
> Linux is free, Solaris not ;)

You're behind the times.  Solaris is free too.

--
Rich Teer, SCNA, SCSA, author of "Solaris Systems Programming"

President,
Rite Online Inc.

Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638
URL: http://www.rite-group.com/rich

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On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:56:02 +0000, Rich Teer wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Frank A. Uepping wrote:
> 
>
> You're behind the times.  Solaris is free too.

I tried not to respond to this thread, as it seemed like obvious trolling
much like the "Which is better FreeBSD or Linux?" questions.
However, trying to diffuse the trolls: while arguing free/non-free isn't
a good statement there are differences in what you might call "openness":

1. opensolaris.org only contains a non-buildable dtrace code dump. Solaris
itself is _supposed_ to be a couple of months away. So the statement it's
not free will be behind the times in a couple of months.

2. Solaris will be the 6th major[1] "openunix", there are advantages to
not being the last to the table.

3. Solaris kernel code can't go into any of the other 5 major "openunix"
kernels, so it's not like people are going to work on FreeBSD/Linux and
OpenSolaris.

4. From the commercial support POV there is one provider for Solaris
support, whereas there are at least two for Linux. I don't see this
changing.

...obviously the above is going to change to some degree (for instance
when opensolaris.org has a full code dump on it), and a lot of what
happens will depend on decisions are the executive level in Sun (IMO) so
it's not really possible to say with 100% confidence what everything will
look like in 5 or 10 years ... but that was always true .

There are also technical differences, but I don't have space in the
margin to describe them.

[1] Depending on how you count, I counted assuming: Linux,
(Net|Free|Open)BSD, Darwin

--
James Antill -- james@and.org
Need an efficient and powerful string library for C?
http://www.and.org/vstr/

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James Antill <james-netnews@and.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:56:02 +0000, Rich Teer wrote: 
> puzzlecracker wrote: >> >> > what are the [nontrivial]
> differences between Linux and Solaris? >> Linux is free,
> Solaris not ;) >  > You're behind the times.  Solaris is free
> too.
> I tried not to respond to this thread, as it seemed like
> obvious trolling much like the "Which is better FreeBSD or
> Linux?" questions. However, trying to diffuse the trolls:

It is interesting that NO ONE read question carefully.

Original poster have asked about "What are differences", not "What is
better".

In the programming newsgroup it should be first read as "What are
TECHINICAL differences which I should take into account trying to write
program which runs on both Linux and Solaris"

Really, today there are surprisingly few differences between Linux and
Solaris. They both use same executable file format - ELF (which is as
far as I know, originated on Solaris), both are more or less POSIX
compliant.

I've very little trouble porting our big project from Linux x86 to
Solaris x86. Solaris-Sparc was another matter, because it is different
architecture of processor, and you have to be careful with alignment of
variables. Most x86-originated code doesn't care whether address of
variable with sizeof()=x is multiple of x. On Sparc you'll get SIGBUS if
you violate this rule.

As for operating system differences -
speaking of userland tools such as shell, fileutils etc, I cannot
tolerate Solaris unless it has GNU bash, GNU make and other GNU tools
installed (they are mostly included on Software Companion CD, and if
not, you can get ready to use packages from sunfreeware.com)

Speaking of programming - solaris has STREAMS, Linux has only berkeley
socket interface, solaris has better multithreading, but Linux - more lightw
eight fork(), and it is feasable to use multiprocess model on Linux
where multithreading is recommended on Solaris.

There is some differences regarding to distribution of functions between
libraries. On Linux there is no libsocket - all the socket related
functions are in libc, when on Solaris you have sometimes to link with
-lsocket explicitely.

These minor problems can be easily solved by reading manual pages.

There are some differences in system pathes - solaris use /usr/openwin
and /usr/dt where Linux use /usr/X11R6. It is quite easy to master too,
--
..you could spend *all day* customizing the title bar.  Believe me.  I
speak from experience.
-- Matt Welsh

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In article <cv04q4$s82$1@wagner.wagner.home>, Victor Wagner wrote:
> I've very little trouble porting our big project from Linux x86 to
> Solaris x86. Solaris-Sparc was another matter, because it is different
> architecture of processor, and you have to be careful with alignment of
> variables. Most x86-originated code doesn't care whether address of
> variable with sizeof()=x is multiple of x. On Sparc you'll get SIGBUS if
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> you violate this rule.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

From an application's perspective, this behavior is not necessarily to
be expected even on architectures that cannot deal with misaligned
memory access. Linux in particular catches such bus errors and tries to
handle the misaligned load/store on behalf of the application, in a
completely transparent manner (well, unless you count the performance
penality you get for that.)

See linux/arch/sparc/kernel/unaligned.c for the SPARC implementation.

(Another system that does this is Tru64 UNIX. Both systems optionally
print an error message to the console when such a fault occurs.)

--
My real email address is ``nils<at>gnulinux<dot>nl''

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Nils Weller <me@privacy.net> writes:

> In article <cv04q4$s82$1@wagner.wagner.home>, Victor Wagner wrote: 
>                                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> From an application's perspective, this behavior is not necessarily to
> be expected even on architectures that cannot deal with misaligned
> memory access. Linux in particular catches such bus errors and tries to
> handle the misaligned load/store on behalf of the application, in a
> completely transparent manner (well, unless you count the performance
> penality you get for that.)
>
> See linux/arch/sparc/kernel/unaligned.c for the SPARC implementation.
>
> (Another system that does this is Tru64 UNIX. Both systems optionally
> print an error message to the console when such a fault occurs.)

In my opinion, any program that does such accesses is badly broken in
the first place.  There is simply no excuse for not doing it right.

--
Måns Rullgård
mru@inprovide.com

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In article <yw1xfyzw48r9.fsf@ford.inprovide.com>, Måns Rullgård wrote:
> Nils Weller <me@privacy.net> writes:
> 
>
> In my opinion, any program that does such accesses is badly broken in
> the first place.  There is simply no excuse for not doing it right.
>

I agree entirely. But there are so many applications broken in this way
out there that it feels very good to have an operating system that tries
to support your attempts at running them, instead of punishing you for
the goof-ups of someone else. You may never get such an (possibly
otherwise correctly coded) application to work without spending a
considerable amount of time debugging it by yourself, or trying to
convince the maintainer to fix it for you, neither of which ways is
likely to be worth your time, or even guaranteed to succeed.

Perhaps one could say that this feature is great for an ``end user'' of
a program, and bad for the developer (because it may prevent him from
spotting the bug.) But even this negative conclusion on the developer's
side does not seem quite right because the system prints a warning
message telling you about the illegal access, after all!

(I got a lot of misaligned memory access messages when running open
source apps like gcc on Tru64 UNIX, and I just found it cool that these
problems didn't get into my way.)

--
My real email address is ``nils<at>gnulinux<dot>nl''

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