Xblog

Yes, the CDDL license isn’t ideal, but for most cases, it fits the category of “good enough”, and Sun appears to be considering relicensing under GPL. Yes, the hardware support isn’t as extensive as Linux, but so long as it works with my hardware, I could care less.

On the plus side, Solaris’ BrandZ virtualization beats it’s Linux equivalents for my needs (if you need a different kernels, then Xen would be a better choice, and if you want to debug Linux kernels UML would be a better choice). Solaris scales more smoothly than Linux, ZFS looks like it might be nicer than LVM/[ext3], etc.

Most importantly though, Solaris has DTrace. DTrace is one of those developers tools that just makes you drool the first time you have it explained to you. Heck, you can even use it now to figure out why all that AJAX/DHTML crud on a web page is so slow. You just know that one day DTrace is going to give you a great war story.

I was thinking of all this as I read Theo’s recent blog entries.

So what’s the catch? Well, I haven’t tried using Solaris 10 yet. In fact the last Solaris I dealt with much was probably Solaris 7. So I wonder how much of this is “grass is greener” and will seem much worse once I get to know it. So, I’m going to spin up a vmware image with Solaris on it and try it on for size a bit. For realistic work I will have to set it up on a box at some point, but this is the most painless way to get up and running with it. I’ll let you know what it’s like.