Oracle Solaris


Oracle Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system offered by Oracle for SPARC and x86-64 based workstations and servers. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems as Solaris, it superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993 and became known for its scalability, especially on SPARC systems, and for originating many innovative features such as DTrace, ZFS and Time Slider. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.
Solaris was registered as compliant with the Single UNIX Specification until April 29, 2019. Historically, Solaris was developed as proprietary software. In June 2005, Sun Microsystems released most of the codebase under the CDDL license, and founded the OpenSolaris open-source project. Sun aimed to build a developer and user community with OpenSolaris; after the Oracle acquisition in 2010, the OpenSolaris distribution was discontinued and later Oracle discontinued providing public updates to the source code of the Solaris kernel, effectively turning Solaris version 11 back into a closed-source proprietary operating system. Following that, OpenSolaris was forked as Illumos and is alive through several Illumos distributions. In September 2017, Oracle laid off most of the Solaris teams.

History

In 1987, AT&T Corporation and Sun announced that they were collaborating on a project to merge the most popular Unix variants on the market at that time: Berkeley Software Distribution, UNIX System V, and Xenix. This became Unix System V Release 4. About 40 AT&T and Sun programmers would work together in the San Francisco Bay area, the two companies said, with the goal of SunOS compliance with SVR4 in 1988 and addition of BSD 4.2 features in 1989.
On September 4, 1991, Sun announced that it would replace SunOS 4, with one based on SVR4. This was identified internally as SunOS 5, but a new marketing name was introduced at the same time: Solaris 2. The justification for this new overbrand was that it encompassed not only SunOS, but also the OpenWindows graphical user interface and Open Network Computing functionality.
Although SunOS 4.1.x micro releases were retroactively named Solaris 1 by Sun, the Solaris name is used almost exclusively to refer only to the releases based on SVR4-derived SunOS 5.0 and later.For releases based on SunOS 5, the SunOS minor version is included in the Solaris release number. For example, Solaris 2.4 incorporates SunOS 5.4. After Solaris 2.6, the 2. was dropped from the release name, so Solaris 7 incorporates SunOS 5.7, and the latest release SunOS 5.11 forms the core of Solaris 11.4.Although SunSoft stated in its initial Solaris 2 press release their intent to eventually support both SPARC and x86 systems, the first two Solaris 2 releases, 2.0 and 2.1, were SPARC-only. An x86 version of Solaris 2.1 was released in June 1993, about 6 months after the SPARC version, as a desktop and uniprocessor workgroup server operating system. It included the Wabi emulator to support Windows applications. At the time, Sun also offered the Interactive Unix system that it had acquired from Interactive Systems Corporation. In 1994, Sun released Solaris 2.4, supporting both SPARC and x86 systems from a unified source code base.
In 2011, the Solaris 11 kernel source code leaked.
On September 2, 2017, Simon Phipps, a former Sun Microsystems employee not hired by Oracle in the acquisition, reported on Twitter that Oracle had laid off the Solaris core development staff, which many interpreted as sign that Oracle no longer intended to support future development of the platform. While Oracle did have a large layoff of Solaris development engineering staff, development continued and Solaris 11.4 was released in 2018.

Supported architectures

Solaris uses a common code base for the platforms it supports: 64-bit SPARC and x86-64.
Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to symmetric multiprocessing, supporting a large number of CPUs. It has historically been tightly integrated with Sun's SPARC hardware, with which it is marketed as a combined package. This has led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium compared to commodity PC hardware. However, it has supported x86 systems since Solaris 2.1 and 64-bit x86 applications since Solaris 10, allowing Sun to capitalize on the availability of commodity 64-bit CPUs based on the x86-64 architecture. Sun heavily marketed Solaris for use with both its own x86-64-based Sun Java Workstation and the x86-64 models of the Sun Ultra series workstations, and servers based on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, as well as x86 systems manufactured by companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM., the following vendors support Solaris for their x86 server systems:
  • Dell – will "test, certify, and optimize Solaris and OpenSolaris on its rack and blade servers and offer them as one of several choices in the overall Dell software menu"
  • Intel
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise – distributes and provides software technical support for Solaris on BL, DL, and SL platforms
  • Fujitsu Siemens

    Other platforms

Solaris 2.5.1 included support for the PowerPC platform, but the port was canceled before the Solaris 2.6 release. In January 2006, a community of developers at Blastwave began work on a PowerPC port which they named Polaris. In October 2006, an OpenSolaris community project based on the Blastwave efforts and Sun Labs' Project Pulsar, which re-integrated the relevant parts from Solaris 2.5.1 into OpenSolaris, announced its first official source code release.
A port of Solaris to the Intel Itanium architecture was announced in 1997 but never brought to market.
On November 28, 2007, IBM, Sun, and Sine Nomine Associates demonstrated a preview of OpenSolaris for System z running on an IBM System z mainframe under z/VM, called Sirius. On October 17, 2008, a prototype release of Sirius was made available and on November 19 the same year, IBM authorized the use of Sirius on System z Integrated Facility for Linux processors.
Solaris also supports the Linux platform application binary interface, allowing Solaris to run native Linux binaries on x86 systems. This feature is called Solaris Containers for Linux Applications, based on the branded zones functionality introduced in Solaris 10 8/07.

Installation and usage options

Solaris can be installed from various pre-packaged software groups, ranging from a minimalistic Reduced Network Support to a complete Entire Plus OEM. Installation of Solaris is not necessary for an individual to use the system. The DVD ISO image can be used to load Solaris, running in-memory, rather than initiating the installation.
Additional software, like Apache, MySQL, etc. can be installed as well in a packaged form from sunfreeware and OpenCSW. Solaris can be installed from physical media or a network for use on a desktop or server, or be run in a live mode without installation on a desktop or server.

Updates

There are several types of updates within each major release, including the Software Packages, and the Oracle Solaris Image.
Additional minor updates called Support Repository Updates and Critical Patch Update Packages require a support credential and are not freely available to the public.

Desktop environments

Early releases of Solaris used OpenWindows as the standard desktop environment. In Solaris 2.0 to 2.2, OpenWindows supported both NeWS and X applications, and provided backward compatibility for SunView applications from Sun's older desktop environment. NeWS allowed applications to be built in an object-oriented way using PostScript, a common printing language released in 1982. The X Window System originated from MIT's Project Athena in 1984 and allowed for the display of an application to be disconnected from the machine where the application was running, separated by a network connection. Sun's original bundled SunView application suite was ported to X.
Sun later dropped support for legacy SunView applications and NeWS with OpenWindows 3.3, which shipped with Solaris 2.3, and switched to X11R5 with Display Postscript support. The graphical look and feel remained based upon OPEN LOOK. OpenWindows 3.6.2 was the last release under Solaris 8. The OPEN LOOK Window Manager and other OPEN LOOK-specific applications were dropped in Solaris 9, but support libraries were still bundled, providing long term binary backwards compatibility with existing applications. The OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager can still be downloaded for Solaris from sunfreeware and works on releases as recent as Solaris 10.
Image:CDE running on Solaris 10.png|thumb|250px|The Common Desktop Environment was open sourced in August 2012. This is a screenshot of CDE running on Solaris 10.
Sun and other Unix vendors formed an industry alliance to standardize Unix desktop environments. As a member of the Common Open Software Environment initiative, Sun helped co-develop the Common Desktop Environment. This was an initiative to create a standard Unix desktop environment. Each vendor contributed different components: Hewlett-Packard contributed the window manager, IBM provided the file manager, and Sun provided the e-mail and calendar facilities as well as drag-and-drop support. This new desktop environment was based upon the Motif look and feel and the old OPEN LOOK desktop environment was considered legacy. CDE unified Unix desktops across multiple open system vendors. CDE was available as an unbundled add-on for Solaris 2.4 and 2.5, and was included in Solaris 2.6 through 10.
Image:Java Desktop running on Solaris 10.png|thumb|250px|Screenshot of the Java Desktop System running on Solaris 10
In 2001, Sun issued a preview release of the open-source desktop environment GNOME 1.4, based on the GTK+ toolkit, for Solaris 8. Solaris 9 8/03 introduced GNOME 2.0 as an alternative to CDE. Solaris 10 includes Sun's Java Desktop System, which is based on GNOME and comes with a large set of applications, including StarOffice, Sun's office suite. Sun describes JDS as a "major component" of Solaris 10. The Java Desktop System is not included in Solaris 11 which instead ships with a stock version of GNOME. Likewise, CDE applications are no longer included in Solaris 11, but many libraries remain for binary backwards compatibility.
The open source desktop environments KDE and Xfce, along with numerous other window managers, also compile and run on recent versions of Solaris.
Sun was investing in a new desktop environment called Project Looking Glass since 2003. The project has been inactive since late 2006.