Oracle Keeps Linux and Solaris Going

When Oracle (News - Alert) acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, it found itself supporting two operating systems: Linux and Solaris. Oracle was a big supporter of Linux, but didn't throw out the legacy of Sun's Unix system.

“Before we acquired Sun, literally everything was Linux except for maybe five big systems where x86 hardware wasn't capable and we had SPARC hardware for running big ERP systems,” Vim Cokearts, senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, told Server Watch.

Cokearts said the company was moving forward on both Linux and Solaris. "We're not Linux only now, and we're also not Solaris only," he said.

Even though the code bases are different, with Linux being an open source project that attracts thousands of programmers around the world, while Solaris is a proprietary system with roots in the original Unix developed at Bell Labs (News - Alert), the developers are willing to harmonize on Oracle's database and middleware projects.

"Anything that affects user interfaces and how the customer sees features, we do discuss a lot," Coekaerts said.

One example of collaboration is the network virtualization models both systems use. Having models that are too different between them would cause problems. The developers of the different systems do talk to one another, but don't share code back and forth owing to the different licensing models the projects employ.

There are some important features of both systems that each could benefit from.

One piece of software that the Linux developers have created that Oracle is looking to port to Solaris is Ksplice. This allows administrators and programmers to make changes to the Linux kernel without rebooting.

On the Solaris side, the ZFS file system, designed to handle large volumes, has garnered some attention and been ported to FreeBSD, but has not migrated to Linux, largely due to licensing issues and the way filesystems work in Linux. A former Oracle engineer has created Btrfs for Linux to add advanced filesystem capability to the system.

Oracle is working on porting Dtrace, a tool that allows administrators to see exactly what the system is doing, over from Solaris to Linux.

Cokearts sees a future for both Linux and Solaris. “The Solaris team is hiring more people, and I'm hiring more people,” Coekaerts said. “We're making both better and we're not favoring one over the other.”

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