Thomas Maier-Komor wrote:
Jörg Stephan schrieb:
Hi there,
at the weekend i installed OpenSolaris 2009.06 on an AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ with
1GB DDR Ram. I wanted to try virtualization with VirtualBox. But i there where
some things i really dont like, maybe you can help me to understand why it is
and when it will work
1. Why uses OpenSolaris 95% of Ram directly after install (By the way same
machine other OS takes 30%)
Memory is cheap - just get another gigabyte. Running Opensolaris without
Java Desktop works fine for me with only ~800MB in a VirtualBox. Even
with 512MB the system comes up.
Very few modern UNIX/Linuxes have much "free" RAM - anything not being
used for an application is allocated to disk cacheing. Take a look at
the output of 'top' - it will show you very little free memory. Caches
of course, are just that - when you need the RAM, the amount allocated
to disk cache is just reduced.
Solaris is also a 64-bit OS, which by it's very nature consumes more RAM
than a 32-bit system.
That said, most GUI interfaces consume a non-trivial amount of RAM. On
my Ubuntu system, a typical GNOME-based setup consumes 400MB+ RAM for
all the GUI-related applications running - that's just the background
systems stuff (nautilus, gnome-panel, sawfish, etc.)
As a relative comparison, on similar hardware, here's what I see on my
VM instances (right after boot, no apps running, excluding disk cache):
Window 2000 SP4: 180MB
Windows XP SP3: 210MB
Ubuntu 6.04 LTS (32-bit) & Gnome 2.4: 300MB
SLES 8 64-bit & KDE 3: 330MB
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (32-bit) & Gnome 2.22: 400MB
Windows 2003 Enterprise x64: 400MB
Windows Vista Ultimate x64: 600MB
Solaris 10 Update 8 64-bit: 550MB
OpenSolaris 2009.06: 600MB
2. What about LVM and ext2,3,4 Support? I t would look better if i could use
my old linux storage discs by just plugging them in.
Why doesn't Linux support ZFS?
Honestly, besides the fact that the code for implementing those Linux
features are GPL'd, and thus cannot be ported directly to Solaris, is
that most of LVM's features are available in Solaris Volume Manager (nee
DiskSuite), and that ZFS is radically superior to LVM. The Ext2,3,4
filesystems are horribly obsolete; in addition, the ability to read a
wide variety of filesystems is really only useful for an OS which is
intended to be multi-booted with others frequently. OpenSolaris really
isn't this type of OS - it can be, but that's not it's real target.
There's no real need to support much more than the FAT-derived
filesystem, and then only for data interchange (i.e. USB flash/floppy disks)
3. Why does the boot of the System takes so long? I could drink a coffee. I
mean the mashine isnt that slow.
The first boot takes very long because the services database needs to be
initialized. All subsequent boots should be pretty fast.
Agreed - after the very first boot, you should see boot times comparable
to Linux - roughly 90-120 seconds on typical systems. It sometimes feels
slower, since you don't get the visual feedback Linux gives you, nor do
you get that nice little "cylon" bar that Windows shows. Also,
particularly as compared to Windows, don't think that Windows is done
booting when you get the login prompt - it's not. It still has 1-2
minutes of background loading to do. Solaris and Linux generally
present you with the login prompt as one of the last things in the boot
cycle.
4. Why doenst <Alt>+<F1> switch to an console? Or better question... Where is
the console?
I think you have to enable additional virtual consoles manually. Only
the physical console is active per default.
As pointed out elsewhere, virtual consoles were not available in
2009.06. They are now in the development branch, and will be part of
the default 2010.03 release.
After all. I really like Solaris. But this 4 Points make it a bit bad. Point 2
is the biggest problem. First i could solve by buying ram which isnt expencive,
but my storage data would be necessary. Copying 400GB Data just takes too long,
even when i must insert it into a different machine to make scp or so.
Thank for listening
Jörg
Frankly, disk is even cheaper than RAM, so if what you need to data
interchange between a Solaris and Linux system, use FAT/vFAT. Solaris
generally refers to this as the 'pcfs' filesystem.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
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