Solaris on x86 is abandoned, unless you count OpenIndiana. Solaris 11 is now only sparc IIRC and even though Oracle ended support for Solaris and fired a bunch of people working on it, it should still be supported until something insane like 2034. With solaris 10 having support until 2023. I don’t know how Oracle is planning to support it like that though. Same for Oracle ZFS, most development moved to OpenZFS.
2 Likes
Back in the day X86 solaris had performance (certainly bang for buck) on certain workloads going for it whilst maintaining the same OS across your fleet.
We had a Pentium Pro running Solaris + SQUID cache back in the day for an ISP (after we had disastrous results with Windows NT4 + cache on it, lol. the main ISP server was a little Sun Netra so we used Solaris on the Pentium Pro too. This was back in the mid-late 90s).
Some time after that we added more and more Linux boxes for various things, and the Pentium Pro did end up running Linux too eventually.
edit:
Just on the solaris staying up thing…
My mentor had a copy of the main sound track from the Future Crew demo “Panic” on the Sparc (YouTube the demo, its a classic from the 90s). He’d play it through /dev/audio on boot. Appropriate tune for a reboot post kernel panic, lol.
2 Likes
Possibly a life-long journey as you move from cron to the next to the next…
Cheers!
Never liked the userland that Solaris ships with (yes I know some folks basically ported Debian package building over to Solaris), but I’m the one to complain about RHEL being archaic and unergonomic and how the choices they made are causing friction with people who don’t use it daily and are reducing the pool of people taking up jobs in sysadmin roles … Solaris was quite a shock first time I’ve used it - felt super stripped down.
2 Likes