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We have announced a new version of Virtualbox. 2.1 contains some new features and bugfixes. You will find the following add-ons in it:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements
• Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support
• New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

You will find the changelog at here. The binaries are available at the usual location.

Interesting conclusion of Charlie Schluting in his article "Will OpenSolaris 2008.11 Attract Linux Users?":

If OpenSolaris spent the next 1-2 years focusing primarily on adopting standardized open source software rather than implementing shiny new features, the project would stand a much better chance of attracting long-time Linux users.

Don´t think so. The new features are the stuff that attacts Linux users ... you have to do both. Making it easy for Linux users to choose their favourite OS on technical merits than on usage habits. But there has to be a technological lead. Otherwise there wouldn´t be any reason to think about changing. Often good-enough is good-enough. You need such features like dtrace or zfs or crossbow to create a demand.

OpenSolaris doesn’t need the exclusive community that Solaris enjoyed all these years, it needs the huge Linux community. I think it will happen; the question is, “how quickly?”

ACK. I think Solaris will get more influence from the Linux side. We need the bigger linux community. The problem is: You can´t get a linux-like standard on one side without violating some standards and alienating Solaris users. Solaris don´t need the community at the price of its soul. We have to balance this.

PS: Anonymous is correct ... i´ve read this article in an incorrect way as i was distracted, so it led me to a wrong comment. I´ve reread the article again and edited the article.

This is a trend i´ve recognizing for a while now: Companies stopped to migrate to Linux for the migrations sake. I think it´s a combination of Solaris 10 (as i wrote several time: the tenth version rescued the Solaris franchise), the consequence of several burned fingers with Linux and some people that doesn´t take this "Linux is cheaper" meme for granted and use their own pencil and calculator.

The Computerworld writes about this tendency in Replacing high-end Unix with enterprise Linux? Not so fast:

As Qualcomm's director of IT, Matthew Clark was part of the team that reviewed the Linux option. The company's ratio of administrators to users is currently 500-to-1 (although he plans to lower that to about 450-to-1). "With Linux, it would have been 150- or 175-to-1. We would have had to hire three additional administrators for every administrator we have right now working on Unix," Clark says.

Another Solaris user states in the same article:

"We won't be as aggressive in replatforming to Linux as we initially thought," he says. But, he adds, "we feel that both platforms will have a place in our infrastructure."

A really interesting read.

Okay,okay ... i know the headline is a little bit provoking. But when you think about some comments from Linux proponents you could think so. In the last few weeks i´ve heard one sentence quite often: "Why you you still develop Solaris? You should contribute to Linux!" from people administering Linux systems. And you could read at other places, that Solaris is irrelevant, that there is nothing worth of mentioning it or even for an integration to Linux. Just think about the Zemlin quotations! Or several other comments of proponents of Linux.

Neil A. Wilson wrote an interesting article why he choosen Solaris as is favourite operating environment: "Why i like Solaris". It´s an article about some features of Solaris, but there is one paragraphy that summarizes an important reason of my choice for Solaris many years ago as well:

Linux feels like it was written. Solaris feels like it was designed.. While I think that Sun’s development processes can sometimes be a little heavyweight, and I think that Sun is trying to retain too much control over OpenSolaris, there is a lot to be said for having processes in place to guide development.

This is the basic difference. Linux is based on the concept "Okay, you can develop a feature and we will see if we integrate it into the mainline code." Opensolaris works differently in this area. The concept of PSARC may look as an heavyweight process for an opensource operating system, but it´s the reason for "Solaris feels like it was designed." as the documented review of the design and the analysis of the impact to the whole architecture is the beginning of all code in Solaris.

Let´s assume, you want know more about the new BMW X6. Would you ask a Mercedes sales guy standing in front of a M-class SUV? Obviously you wouldn´t to it.

Out of this reason,i have some problems with articles like this one: Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?. Just one and a half pages uninformed, biased marketing material from the Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. What a nonsense. When you want to talk about the future of something, you don´t ask the competitor. It´s better to ask an unpartisan observer.

BTW: I really believe the Linux Foundation (as the commercial part of the Linux Community) is afraid of Solaris. When you look at Linux Foundations member you will find dozens of companies. The Platinum Member (aka the ones investing most into the foundation) are the ones economically interested in prospering Linux. Such fear would explain some paradox comments like "ZFS and DTrace is irrelevant" just to talk about "Sun should put ZFS and DTrace under the GPL" a few lines later.

<rant>At the end one comment to "And the Linux community is working on rival technology, Zemlin adds.". Yes ... there are rival technolgies. Kind of. There is no filesystem in the Linux market that´s even near of ZFS. We started to develop it in 2001. Why does the Linux Community think, they can do it faster. Multipathing ... yes, there is something like Multipathing ... but it´s nowhere near of MPXIO in Solaris, it´s a major pain in the a.. to configure it. SystemTap ... obvious example of the NIH syndrome in Linux, just yet another kernel developer tool. The NFSv4 implementation is really substandard. And the behaviour under high load (really high load on Enterprise systems, not what the average linux admin perceives as "high load") is at least strange in Linux land. The list is endless. Many features of Solaris are available in Linux ... somehow ... in a kind. And there is only one feature in Linux, that´s not in Solaris ... drivers for almost every strange brand of soundcards ...</rant>

Dear Inforworld: Just write "Advertisment" above the article next time you give the Linux Foundation two pages for pure marketing.

Sometimes i have the strong impression that Linux is the landfill for old filesystems. Linux is now the proud home of AdvFS. as HP contributed the old Tru64 Unix file system to Linux. But: Does Linux really need yet another filesystem? Beside all the other ones ?

A really interesting article written by Jason Perlow at ZDNet: Unixfication II. It´s an insightful article about the different ways to define scalability in the Linux and Unix community and about the effects an GPLv3 Solaris may have.

So these implementations have been tested, but they are not exactly what you would call mainstream systems. And if I’m not correct, you don’t currently see the level of geometric performance increases on Linux above 16 cores like you do with UNIX. The maturity in the Linux kernel for this level of enterprise performance and stability on this type of hardware just isn’t there yet.

The problem for Linux is, that systems with more than 16 cores are available soon (think about an Sun Fire 4600 with Quadcores) and will be quite common when AMD delivers a 12 core version of their processors.

Think about other multicore procs. The announcement of UltraSPARC T2 sound on the hardware side relatively small. Dual Socket or Quad socket isn´t such a big numerical jump. For Solaris this developement means: Jumping from 64 to 128 respectively 256 strands to schedule. And we won´t stop there.

The chance for Linux: Systems with more than 8 cores were out of reach for many developers, and systems with more than 32 cores even for many software developers. Now such machines are relatively cheap and within reach of a community backed by companies, and this may fuel the community effort to optimize Linux for larger SMP systems.

Ubuntu was certified by Canonical on some new hardware from Sun. Now you can buy support for Ubuntu from Canonical for the Sun Fire T5220 and 5240 ( both UltraSPARC T2) and the Sun Ultra 24 (Xeon).

Informationweek did an email interview with Linus Torvalds about the future of Linux: Torvalds On Where Linux Is Headed In 2008. This interview leaved me somewhat dissatisfied ... i would like some information where the development of Linux will lead the operating environment in the next 12 or 24 month. Asked in this direction, the answer was somewhat limited to hardware support:

So a lot of the effort ends up being hardware-related. Both in terms of peripheral drivers and simply in platform changes. The bulk of the kernel really is about hardware support, and that alone keeps us busy. The situation in graphics and wireless networking devices -- both of which have been somewhat weak spots -- is changing, and I suspect that will be a large part of what continues to happen during 2008 too.

I hoped to see something like a ZFS competitor, albeit his thoughts about SSD could hint to something similar like read- and writezilla. More or less, the essence of this interview is: More of the same.

I wrote several times in this blog, that the innovations of Linux aren't technical ones. Linux is a social phenomenon, not a technical one. Now, Paul Murphy wrote a similar opinion in his blog at zdnet: Is Linux innovative?. From my view, Linux on x86 is the triumph of good-enough. It's good enough to be a webserver, it's good enough to be a mailserver, it's good enough for being a datacenter server. It's not really good at it, but it's capable to run 80% of all unixoid tasks sufficiently when you ignore some problems (like RAS being an afterthought in x86 or the inherent problems of storing data on rotating rust)

The marketing problem: Linux get a good market share in areas with the general suspicion of "beeing innovative" like HPC. Fanboys and media digest this image without further thinking and tout it into the world. The problem: The reality isn't so simple. In HPC Linux is little more than a glorified bootloader and device driver for small nodes (the ability to scale on such cluster has nothing to do with the Linux kernel, it's the merit of the application programming frameworks and fast network (like IB) )

PS: This paragraph made my day ....

Similarly people will argue that Linux scales better than anything else. They’ll point, for example, at SGI’s Linux super computers - but those aren’t SMP machines, they’re multi-processor grids in boxes; and, by that logic the world CPU scaling crown would have to go to Microsoft: for botnet, a wanabe grid entirely enabled by Microsoft Windows.

Whenever you speak about Solaris with some Linux fans, they will tell you "I would like to use ZFS, dtrace is so cool ... but well ... i can´t do it ... it´s not in linux. And it´s your fault, because of your OSS license". Okay ... that were multiple persons merged to one citation. But it´s a good summary of all the stuff i hear all the day.

I found two blog entries, that speak out what i think: When you want Solaris feature, just use Solaris, and don´t wait for some shoehorned concept in your favorite religion-laden operating environment. When you think rational about the problem, you should not tied to your operating systems, you should look at your tasks and your applications. And when Solaris fits better than Linux into the equation , just use it ...

But it´s the same with the everlasting dispute about Windows/Unix, vi/emacs: People have a bias regarding their choices. And this bias seldoms comes from rational thinking.

It is just me, or is this statement full of arrogance:

"They've fragmented the non-Windows operating system world and they continue to do so," he said. But he acknowledged he did not see much chance of Sun moving away from Solaris.

Mr. Morton, Solaris and SunOS were around long before Mr. Torvalds buyed it´s first 386. So, when you really want to talk about fragmentation, please look in the nearest mirror. But this discussion is nonsensical: There is no fragmentation in a world, where the next binary is just one makefile away. It doesn´t fragment the non-windows world, it eats away the Linux adressable market. And this is a huge difference.

So, why do they isssue such bold statements. In my opinion, Opensolaris is the most dangerous competitor for Linux in the open source based economy. At least from my point of view, i see many die-hard-linux shop that consider Solaris or Opensolaris. The luminaries of Linux are quite aware of this fact. Futhermore, there are some technical like ZFS or dtrace developments, where Linux can´t participate, because of the license they use (it´s a GPL problem, not a problem of the CDDL, as the BSDs or MacOS X can use Opensolaris technology).

When you look at Opensolaris and Linux, they seem to be mirror universes. Similar, but with important differences: Both are open-source, but as Linux thrives to broaden it´s common of code, Solaris licence was designed to include legacy components and to enable IP-based business with open source. Where Linux has no roadmap, Solaris and Opensolaris have one (can be advantageous as well as disadvantageous) . Linux development and integration in the mainline kernel is driven by the kernel maintainers, whereas Solaris has an full-fledged process to ensure such things like compatibility. Solaris is different enough to attract developers and nobody can really predict the outcome on a five year basis. Both opinopns are perfectly valid. And the communities will decide. By the way: Solaris has a big advantage, Sun is commited to it´s operating system. Linux has such "commited" backers like IBM, which pray Linux and sell AIX ... sorry, could not resist ...

And as a sidenote to the ever-reoccuring "Linux has more drivers" disccusion: In a market, where the newest graphic boards outdates faster than you can pass it over the counter, the advantage of having more hardware drivers can be a very temporary one.

Interesting annotation about the fuss surrounding the CFS in Linux:

I find it interesting and slightly sad, given how low level a topic this really is, how much is being written about the new CFS scheduler being introduced into Linux. The sad part is how much flamage is flying around as a result of this from people not in the slightest bit involved in the desgin and development - this sadly is the ugly side of many open source groups.

You should read the blog entry of to read the perception of one of the DTrace developers regarding the relationship of DTrace and Systemtap. But i really think the whole issue opens up the view to a different problem inside of Linux: The "not invented here (NIH)" problem. Linux isn´t immune to that problem.