Solaris
Group F
Kevin Franklin
Jay Lee
Greg Nesslerodt
Travis Thomas
Chris Woodley
Overview
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Environment
State of the Art
Commercial Success
Technical success
Pro’s
Con’s
Environment
• UNIX
• SPARC (32- and 64-bit)
• Intel Architecture (32-bit)
State of the Art
• Advanced the state of the art by:
– Manageability
– Commercial Presence
– Also Java-based applications
Commercial Success
• Called “the #1 UNIX operating
environment”
• Good reviews
– InfoWorld
– D.H. Brown
Commercial Success (cont’d)
• Satisfied customers:
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ATG
BEA Systems, Inc.
Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Computer Associates International,
Inc.
Data Connection Ltd.
Gemstone Systems, Inc.
Hewlett-Packard, Inc.
Industri-Matematik
Informix
J.Crew
Lexmark International
Lotus Development Corporation
Magma Design Automation
Mentor Graphics Corp.
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Metrowerks
Novell
Oracle
Platform Computing
RealNetworks, Inc.
Resonate
RSi Solutions Ltd.
SAS Institute
SBE.com
Sybase
ThinAirApps
TimesTen
VERITAS
Commercial Success (cont’d)
• The UNIX versus NT Organization lists 103 prominent
companies web servers and their OSes
• Many use Solaris including: AOL, Apple, AT&T, Bank of
America, CBS, CNN, The Coca-cola company, FBI,
Geico, Lockheed-Martin, McDonalds, MCI, MIT,
Netscape, NSA, Oracle, Sony, Sprint, TimeWarner,Verisign
Commercial Success – InfoWorld
Review
Sun Microsystems Solaris
• Current release: Solaris 8
• Platform: Sun Sparc and Intel PC workstations and servers
• Standard: Unix 98
• Application score: 10 out of 10
• “…Sun's ownership of Java and its involvement in iPlanet,
make Sun the safest choice in enterprise Unix systems.”
Commercial Success – InfoWorld
Review (cont’d)
Name
Platform
Standard
SGI Irix 6.5
SGI MIPS servers and Unix 95
workstations
2 out of 10
Hewlett-Packard HPUX 11i
HP 9000 servers
Unix 95
9 out of 10
IBM AIX 5L
IBM RS/6000 and
Unix 98
selected other systems
running IBM Power
and PowerPC series
processors; Intel IA64 edition planned
9 out of 10
SCO UnixWare 7.1
Intel PC workstations
and servers
0 out of 10
Unix 95
Score
Commercial Success – D.H. Brown
• D.H. Brown Associates, 2001 UNIX Function
Review
– Rated Solaris the best overall against UnixWare 7.1.1,
AIX 4.3.3, Tru64 UNIX 5.1, and HP-UX 11i
– Rated Solaris first in RAS (Reliability,
Availability/Scalability, and Serviceability) and
Directory and Security Services
– Gives Solaris a strong standing in Internet and WebApplication Services
Technical success – Availability
• allows installation of updates while
applications continue to run
• when installation is complete, a simple
reboot enables the new version to take
control
– This reduces the amount of downtime
• Backward compatible
Technical success – Scalability
• Designed for multiprocessing and 64-bit
computing
• the Solaris platform supports:
– One million simultaneous processes on a single
system
– Up to 128 CPUs on a single system
– More than four billion network connections
– 32- and 64-bit applications
– Two-, four-, and eight-node clusters
– IPv4 and IPv6 network addresses
– Up to 512 CPUs in a clustered environment
Technical success – Manageability
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Solaris Web Start Wizards[tm]
Solaris JumpStart[tm]
Solaris Management Console
Sun Cluster 3.0
Sun Management Center
Solaris Volume Manager (formerly known as Solstice
DiskSuite[tm] software)
Technical success – Security
• IPSec for creating virtual private networks (VPNs)
• Smart card authentication compatible with the open
card framework (OCF) 1.1 specification
• “Role-based access control for distributing superuser
authorizations”
• Trusted Solaris
– extension of Solaris
– more security measures
Technical success – Security:
Trusted Solaris
• Mandatory Access Controls (MAC)
– allows information to be processed at multiple sensitivity
levels
• Labels: Sensitivity and Clearances
– Sensitivity labels are assigned to system objects accessed
by users
– Clearances set an upper and lower sensitivity boundary
where a user can work.
• Discretionary Access Controls (DAC)
– used to restrict access to information based on a user's
identity or group membership.
Advantages
• the Sparc and Intel versions are the same OS
• Solaris has the broadest application support of any
commercial Unix-based OS.
• Java compatibility
• Availability
• Manageability
• Security
• Presence in commercial environment
– Free Binary License
• Backwards compatibility
Disadvantages
• Sparc processors don't scale as efficiently as rivals’
• large-scale Sun systems are notoriously expensive
• Solaris ships with an anemic standard software bundle with
costly options
• Some advantages lost when majority of network is not
Sun-based
– E.g., Sun Management Center
7 FILE TYPES
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‘-’ Ordinary File
‘d’ Directory File
‘b’ Block Device File
‘c’ Character Device File
‘l’ Symbolic Link File
‘s’ Socket
‘p’ Pipe File
SOLARIS FILE SYSTEM
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Boot Block
Super Boot Block
Data Block
I-node List
Thread Creation and Control
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Threads created from process
Begin from main-like sub-routine
ID from creator
Shared verse local data
Thread Relationships
Thread Execution
• States of user-level threads:
– Sleeping
– Stopped
– Runnable
– Active
Thread Execution
• Events causing thread to exit active state:
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Suspension
Preemption
Yielding
Synchronization
Synchronization
• Uses four primitives to accomplish
synchronization
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Mutual exclusion locks
Semaphores
Multiple readers, single writer locks
Condition variables
Mutual Exclusion Locks
• mutex_enter() – obtains lock
• mutex_exit() – releases lock
• mutex_tryenter() – busy wait for blocked
Semaphores
• sema_p() - decrements
• sema_v() - increments
• sema_tryp() –decrements with out blocking
Readers/writer Lock
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rw_enter() – obtains lock
rw_exit() – releases lock
rw_tryenter() – obtains lock using busy-wait
rw_downgrade() – converts writer to reader
rw_upgrade() – converts reader to writer
Condition Variables
• cv_wait() – blocks
• cv_signal() – removes block
• cv_broadcast() – removes all blocks
Processes: Memory
• Has own virtual memory space
• Require address translation map and
memory management unit to access real
memory
– MMU must update translation maps when
context switch occurs
• Must contain a u area and kernel stack
Process Context
• Contains information about the process
– Hardware context:
• program counter, process status word, memory
management registers, floating point unit registers
– User Address Space
• Program text and data, user stack
– Control Information
• U area, proc structures, kernel stack, address
translation maps
Process Context Continued
• Credentials
– User and group Ids (real and effective)
• Environmental variables
• The u area must contain:
– Process control block, pointer to the proc
structure, info about system calls, signal
handlers, memory management info, table of
open files, pointers to current directory, CPU
usage statistics,
Threads
• Relatively independent set of instructions
• Control point within process
• Advantages:
– Context switches are cheaper
– Application is able to continue to run if
resources aren’t available to all threads
Kernel Threads
• Entity scheduled by the kernel
• Uses kernel text and data, but unique kernel
stack
Lightweight Processes
• Swappable portion of a thread
• Performs the processing for the application
• 12 states:
– Preempt, wakeup, stop, blocking, system, call,
dispatch, runnable, running, active, stopped,
continue
User Threads
• Created by lightweight processes
• Used to control time and locking issues
• Handles segmentation violations
Zombie Processes
• A process that has been killed by a parent
but has not been removed from the system
• Not accessible by scheduler
• Can be restored but only by programmer,
not system.
Sources
• http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/
• http://www.sun.com/trustedsolaris/
• “Six flavors run the gamut: The good, the bad, and the
ugly”, By Tom Yager, InfoWorld Test Center , 1/12/01;
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/01/15/010115
tcunix.xml
• “Microsoft Admits NT Trails Solaris”
(07/28/98, 12:40 p.m. ET) By Barbara Darrow and
Stuart Glascock http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980728S0004
• http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/webservers.html
Sources
• Sun tops charts with security system By Maggie
Biggs, For InfoWorld Test Center, 4/5/01;
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/04/0
9/010409tctsolaris.xml
• Fighting the threat within, Maggie Biggs, Federal
Computer Week, 3/26/01;
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/0326/tecsolaris-03-26-01.asp