Solaris 10 Advantages

Before checking Solaris 10 advantages will dig some basic information about Solaris.

Solaris is a computer operating system, the proprietary Unix variant developed by Sun
Microsystems. Early versions, based on BSD UNIX, were called SunOS. The shift to a System V
code base in SunOS 5 was marked by changing the name to Solaris 2. Earlier versions were
retroactively named Solaris 1.x. After version 2.6, Sun dropped the "2." from the name. Solaris
consists of the SunOS UNIX base operating system plus a graphical user environment. Solaris is
written in a platform-independent manner and is available for SPARC and x86 processors (including
x86_64). Starting from version 10, the Solaris license changed and the product was distributed free
of charge for any system or purpose, but after the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle in
2009, the product is once again proprietary with a restrictive license.

Version history
Solaris logo introduced with Solaris 10 and used until Oracle's acquisition of SunNotable features of
Solaris currently include DTrace, Doors, Service Management Facility, Solaris Containers, Solaris
Multiplexed I/O, Solaris Volume Manager, ZFS, and Solaris Trusted Extensions.

Updates to Solaris versions are periodically released, such as Solaris 10 10/09.

In ascending order, the following versions of Solaris have been released:

Solaris SunOS Release date End of

Major new features
version version SPARC x86 support

SunOS 4 rebranded as Solaris 1 for marketing

September
1.x 4.1.x 1991–1994 - purposes. See SunOS article for more
2003
information.

Preliminary release (primarily available to

January
2.0 5.0 June 1992 - developers only), support for only the sun4c
1999
architecture. First appearance of NIS+.

Support for sun4 and sun4m architectures added;

December May
2.1 5.1 April 1999 first Solaris x86 releases. First Solaris 2 release to
1992 1993
support SMP.

SPARC-only release. First to support sun4d

2.2 5.2 May 1993 - May 1999 architecture. First to support multithreading
libraries (UI threads API in libthread)

2.3 5.3 November - June 2002 SPARC-only release. OpenWindows 3.3 switches
1993 from NeWS to Display PostScript and drops
SunView support. Support added for autofs and

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 CacheFS filesystems.

September First unified SPARC/x86 release. Includes

2.4 5.4 November 1994
2003 OSF/Motif runtime support.

First to support UltraSPARC and include CDE,

December NFSv3 and NFS/TCP. Dropped sun4 (VMEbus)
2.5 5.5 November 1995
2003 support. POSIX.1c-1995 pthreads added. Doors
added but undocumented.

Only release to support PowerPC platform; Ultra

Enterprise support added; user and group IDs
September
2.5.1 5.5.1 May 1996 (uid_t, gid_t) expanded to 32 bits, also included
2005
processor sets and early resource management
technologies.

Includes Kerberos 5, PAM, TrueType fonts,

2.6 5.6 July 1997 July 2006 WebNFS, large file support, enhanced procfs.
SPARCserver 600MP series support dropped.

The first 64-bit UltraSPARC release. Added

August native support for file system meta-data logging
7 5.7 November 1998
2008 (UFS logging). Dropped MCA support on x86
platform. Last update was Solaris 7 11/99.

Includes Multipath I/O, Solaris Volume Manager,

IPMP, first support for IPv6 and IPsec (manual
March
8 5.8 February 2000 keying only), mdb modular debugger. Introduced
2012
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC); sun4c
support removed. Last update is Solaris 8 2/04.

iPlanet Directory Server, Resource Manager,

extended file attributes, IKE IPsec keying, and
May 28, January October
9 5.9 Linux compatibility added; OpenWindows
2002 10, 2003 2014
dropped, sun4d support removed. Most current
update is Solaris 9 9/05.

10 5.10 January 31, 2005 - Includes x86-64 (AMD64/Intel 64) support,

DTrace (Dynamic Tracing), Solaris Containers,
Service Management Facility (SMF) which
replaces init.d scripts, NFSv4. Least privilege
security model. Support for sun4m and
UltraSPARC I processors removed. Support for
EISA-based PCs removed. Adds Java Desktop
System (based on GNOME) as default desktop.

 Solaris 10 1/06 (known internally as

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 "U1") added the GRUB bootloader for
x86 systems, iSCSI Initiator support and
fcinfo command-line tool.
 Solaris 10 6/06 ("U2") added the ZFS
filesystem.

 Solaris 10 11/06 ("U3") added Solaris

Trusted Extensions and Logical Domains.

 Solaris 10 8/07 ("U4") added Samba

Active Directory support, IP Instances
(part of the OpenSolaris Network
Virtualization and Resource Control
project), iSCSI Target support and Solaris
Containers for Linux Applications (based
on branded zones), enhanced version of
the Resource Capping Daemon (rcapd).

 Solaris 10 5/08 ("U5") added CPU

capping for Solaris Containers,
performance improvements, SpeedStep
support for Intel processors and
PowerNow! support for AMD processors

 Solaris 10 10/08 ("U6") added boot from

ZFS and can use ZFS as its root file
system. Solaris 10 10/08 also includes
virtualization enhancements including the
ability for a Solaris Container to
automatically update its environment
when moved from one system to another,
Logical Domains support for dynamically
reconfigurable disk and network I/O, and
paravirtualization support when Solaris
10 is used as a guest OS in Xen-based

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 environments such as Sun xVM Server.

 Solaris 10 5/09 ("U7") added performance

and power management support for Intel
Nehalem processors, container cloning
using ZFS cloned file systems, and
performance enhancements for ZFS on
solid-state drives.

 Solaris 10 10/09 ("U8") added user and

group level ZFS quotas, ZFS cache
devices and nss_ldap shadowAccount
Support, improvements to patching
performance.

 Solaris 10 9/10 ("U9") added physical to

zone migration, ZFS triple parity RAID-Z
and Oracle Solaris Auto Registration.

Optimizing performance and efficiency requires coordinating underlying technologies, system

configuration and utilization, tools, applications, and system tuning. A newly enhanced TCP/IP stack
in Oracle Solaris 10 lowers overhead by requiring fewer instructions to process packets. Oracle
Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) makes it possible to troubleshoot systemic problems in real time
or diagnose performance bottlenecks on the fly. In addition, system performance optimization with
Oracle Solaris 10 running on x64- and x86- based systems allows head-to-head comparisons with
Linux and BSD.

Solaris 10 having many new and advanced features, here will see elaborated view about
Performance Enhancements.

Solaris 10 Performance Enhancements

Meeting increased throughput demands with the same—or even less—resources has become a
critical issue in today’s business computing environment. Oracle Solaris 10 helps resolve this issue
by providing breakthrough small-system performance gains—outperforming the competition on
customer applications as well as industry-standard benchmarks. Oracle Solaris 10

 Delivers near-linear performance gains of 92 percent for database applications and 88 percent
for Java platform applications

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  Speeds up Web workload processing by 47 percent on SPARC platforms with four processors
over Oracle Solaris 9, and more than 80 percent over Oracle Solaris 8

 Increases Web workloads on x86 architecture systems, delivering up to 43 percent

improvement over Oracle Solaris 9 with two processors

 Increases Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Data Encryption Standard (DES) performance by 77
percent. Performance for 3DES increases by 130 percent over Oracle Solaris 9

 Improves performance up to 38 percent for Oracle Solaris 10 over Linux on dual-processor

Sun Fire systems from Oracle

 Outperforms commercial distributions of Linux on x64 systems.

 Sets performance and price/performance world records on multiple platforms

Superior Networking Performance

Oracle Solaris 10 has always included an enhanced TCP/IP stack. By optimizing the code and
making it easier to develop drivers supporting new hardware technologies, customers have seen
speed increases of as much as 50 percent when moving network-based applications to Oracle Solaris
10. An enhanced software stack not only reduces CPU overhead when processing network packets, it
also improves scalability. More network connections can be supported, and throughput can scale
linearly with the number of CPUs and interface cards. This enables the latest 10-gigabit cards to
deliver throughput converging on wire speed. The latest Oracle Solaris 10 innovations ensure
optimized handling of interrupts for the UltraSPARC T1 processor and in-kernel acceleration of SSL
traffic.

Application Performance Tools

With DTrace, system administrators, integrators, and developers can use dynamic instrumentation
and tracing capabilities to see what the system is doing, for both the kernel and user processes. It can
be used on production systems without modifying applications. DTrace is a unique and powerful tool
that gives a true, system-level view of application and kernel activities—even those running in a
Java Virtual Machine. This baseline data gathering reduces the time for diagnosing problems from
days and weeks to minutes and hours, enabling faster data-driven fixes.

Improved Kernel Performance

Latency reduction in the Oracle Solaris 10 kernel is the result of workload analysis and micro-
benchmarking. Through this effort, many system and library calls were sped up by as much as a
factor of 15, mostly by fine-tuning kernel algorithms and locating bottlenecks with DTrace. A large
number of system calls were improved by 25 percent. In addition, the LibMicro4 benchmark was
created to help developers identify performance gaps. It is portable, scalable, extensible, and easy to
use. As an aid to the developer community, Oracle offers it as open source.

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Multithreading Advancements
By simplifying underlying thread implementation, existing applications can achieve dramatic
performance and stability improvements without requiring recompilation. In Oracle Solaris 10,
Threaded Local Storage (TLS) was added, simplifying and improving thread memory utilization.
The combination of a new threads model and the latest Java Virtual Machine technology
significantly improves SPECjbb2000.

Memory Placement Optimization (MPO)

Oracle Solaris 10 uses memory placement optimization (MPO) to improve memory placement
across a server’s physical memory, resulting in increased performance. MPO support is extended to
UltraSPARC IIIi and AMD Opteron-based systems, in addition to Oracle’s Sun Fire 6800 through
Sun Fire E25K server lines. Utilizing MPO, Oracle Solaris 10 can ensure that memory is as close as
possible to processors that access it, while still maintaining workload balance within the system. As
a result, TPC-H runtime is reduced considerably, TPC-C performance increases, and many high-
performance computing (HPC) applications run in half the time.

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