Linux 2.6 vs. Solaris 10, from OSNews.

It, however, is very strange that I cannot feel such considerable performance improvement in Solaris 10. My summary is as followings.

There are several often overlooks positive features of Solaris as an alternative to Linux in lage enterprize environment:

• Solaris is more stable, especially in network intensive tasks.
• New T1 CPUs make Solaris on SPARC more attractive and provide a clean migration path from older UltraSparc models that fall behind in price/performance ratio.
• Due to the architecture of Solaris kernel and I/O subsystem there are several open source applications that can run on Solaris better then on Linux. Among them are all multithreading applications and open source databases. Solaris also significantly improves the security of open source applicators due to built-in protection from stack overflows.
• The recent test conducted by Sun [MySQL2006] had show that optimized for Solaris MySQL (UFS?) beats MySQL on RED HAT ES 4 (ext3?) by a considerable margin.
• It is unclear how it goes against ZFS in Solaris. Newer ZFS is still in too early stage for comparisons.
• For tracking system calls Solaris has an excellent truss utility. For Linux, the strace utility provides a similar but weaker function. For more complex situations Solaris has Dtrace. Currently Linux has no analogs for Dtrace.

There are also several disadvantages of Solaris:

• Linux has larger “knowledge space” especially noticeable in the number of published books. While Solaris has much better OS level security, Linux has better “open source knowledge infrastructure” including the information about securing open source applications, especially those implementing key application level TCP/IP protocols (HTTP, DNS, SMTP, ssh, Kerberos, etc)

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