Showing posts with label Sun Microsystems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sun Microsystems. Show all posts

Monday, October 4, 2021

Differences Between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11.4

 

Differences Between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11.4

Abstract:

Sun Microsystems used to migrate between operating systems fairly regularly. A new trend had come to the software development community referred to as Continuous Delivery. Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems. Solaris 10 acquired many new features, the life expectancy was extended significantly, and Solaris 11 was released mid-way through the significantly lengthened support cycle. Instead of releasing Solaris 12, Oracle made the executive decision to roll all features of Solaris 12 into Solaris 11.4.

Solaris 11.4 aka Solaris 12

What are some of the differences between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11.4?

Oracle published a document summarizing the differences, with links to major documents.

Key Differences between Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11

Upgrading from Oracle Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11 requires a fresh installation of Oracle Solaris 11.

Tools to help you make the transition include the following:

  • Oracle Solaris 10 branded zones. Migrate Oracle Solaris 10 instances to Oracle Solaris 10 zones on Oracle Solaris 11 systems.

  • ZFS shadow migration. Migrate UFS data from an existing file system, either local or NFS, to a new local ZFS file system. Do not mix UFS directories and ZFS file systems in the same file system hierarchy.

    You can also remotely mount UFS file systems from an Oracle Solaris 10 system onto an Oracle Solaris 11 system, or use the ufsrestore command on an Oracle Solaris 10 system to restore UFS data (ufsdump) into an Oracle Solaris 11 ZFS file system.

  • ZFS pool import. Export and disconnect storage devices that contain ZFS storage pools on your Oracle Solaris 10 systems and then import them into your Oracle Solaris 11 systems.

  • NFS file sharing. Share files from an Oracle Solaris 10 system to an Oracle Solaris 11 system. Do not mix NFS legacy shared ZFS file systems and ZFS NFS shared file systems. Use only ZFS NFS shared file systems.

For the main Oracle Solaris documentation, see Oracle Solaris Documentation. For additional documentation and examples, select a technology on the Oracle Solaris 11 Technology Spotlights page.

Applications that run on Oracle Solaris 10 should also run on Oracle Solaris 11 if they use only public Oracle Solaris interfaces. Oracle Solaris Preflight Applications Checker 11.3 can determine the Oracle Solaris 11 readiness of an application by analyzing the working application on Oracle Solaris 10. A successful check with this tool strongly indicates that you can run the application without modification on Oracle Solaris 11.

Versions of FOSS and other software are updated. In some cases, a system can have more than one version of a command or tool simultaneously installed. If your application depends on a particular version, use the full path to the executable rather than depend on a link.

See End of Feature Notices for Oracle Solaris 11 for lists of commands and tools that are no longer available in Oracle Solaris 11. In most cases, Oracle Solaris 11 provides alternative commands and tools. The list also includes hardware that does not support newer Oracle Solaris 11 versions.

A graphical desktop is not included by default with some system installations. If you want a graphical desktop, install the group/system/solaris-desktop IPS package.

Installation and Upgrade Changes

The following are key changes from Oracle Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11:

  • Installation and upgrade:

    • Instead of JumpStart, use Automated Installer.

    • Instead of Live Upgrade, use the text installer or Image Packaging System (IPS) pkg commands.

    • Software packages are delivered in package repositories, similar to Linux package repositories.

  • Archive and recovery: Instead of Flash Archives, use Unified Archives.

  • System services: More system configuration is done by setting Service Management Facility (SMF) service property values and not by directly editing configuration files. Look for comments in the configuration files and see the documentation for that configuration.

  • root user: By default, root is a role, not a user. Instead of doing privileged tasks as root, create and assign roles targeted to each set of related tasks.

  • Shell: The default shell for the root user is ksh. The default shell for other users is bash. Default user PATH also has changed.

Changes in How to Configure Oracle Solaris Features

More configuration is provided by partial configuration files in the /etc/system.d directory, where customer-specific system configuration files should also be stored. Routinely editing /etc/system should be avoided. In some cases, the partial configuration file is created by an SMF service using service property values that you provide.

For network configuration, Oracle Solaris 11 assigns generic names to each datalink on a system by using the net0, net1, netN naming convention. Configuration is also managed through SMF service property values rather than by directly editing configuration files. In addition, new commands for setting up datalinks and IP interfaces have been introduced to replace the commonly used commands in Oracle Solaris 10, such as ifconfig.

Networking in Oracle Solaris 11 has advanced to provide better network performance, efficient network resource management, higher network availability, and new technologies such as in the area of network virtualization. See the documentation in Administering Oracle Solaris Networks and Administering Network Services in Oracle Solaris.

Changes in User Environment

  • Default login and other shell changes - In Oracle Solaris 11, /bin/sh is the Korn shell (ksh93), and the default interactive shell is the Bourne-again (bash) shell. When used as a login shell, bash retrieves configuration information from the first instance of .bash_profile, .bash_login, or .profile file.

    • The legacy Bourne shell is available as /usr/sunos/bin/sh.

    • The legacy ksh88 is available as /usr/sunos/bin/ksh from the shell/ksh88 package.

    • Korn shell compatibility information is available in /usr/share/doc/ksh/COMPATIBILITY.

  • Default user path and PATH environment variable – The default user path is /usr/bin. The default path for the root role is /usr/bin:/usr/sbin. The default PATH environment variable for bash is /usr/bin:/usr/sbin

For more details about user environment in Oracle Solaris 11.4, see About the User Work Environment in Managing User Accounts and User Environments in Oracle Solaris 11.3.

Changes in Security

Security in Oracle Solaris 11 supports industry standards more closely. For an overview of security in Oracle Solaris 11, see Security: An Oracle Solaris Differentiator.

Other enhancements increase hardening, add compliance functionality, and enable remote administration of security:

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Monday, May 31, 2021

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 - USB Boot

 

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 - USB Boot

Abstract

UNIX Systems Manufacturers originated their markets as workstations, during a time when they used 32 bit systems and the rest of the PC market was concentrating on 8 and 16 bit systems, and some CPU vendors like Intel use segmentation to keep their 16 bit software alive while struggling to move to 32 bit architectures. Some of the original servers were stacked workstations on a rack in a cabinet. The former high-powered video cards were merely ignored, as remote management needed command line interfaces. Engineering quickly determined that console access needed to be built into a new class of systems: rack mounted servers. These early servers offered boot functionality from Network and Disk. One such boot capability was from USB Disk..


Sun Enterprise T5120

The Sun Enterprise T5120 is a server with a second generation OpenSPARC processor. It comes with a Lights Out Management (LOM) capability referred to as Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM.) The Advanced Lights Out Management (ALOM) shell may be it's default. Most remote systems management work can be done from the LOM. The system, when looking at the front of the chassis: the T5120 has 2x USB ports next to the DVD drive on the right and 2x USB ports located in the back left corner.

DVD Drive USB Ports

When a SanDisk USB Flash Sticks are plugged into the USB ports located to the right of the DVD drive, they can be seen at the OpenFirmware prompt, and can be selected into a copy-paste buffer, for easy use.

{0} ok show-disks
a) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,emlxs@0,1/fp@0,0/disk
b) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,emlxs@0/fp@0,0/disk
c) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@2/scsi@0/disk
d) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk
e) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@1/disk
f) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/storage@2/disk
g) /iscsi-hba/disk
q) NO SELECTION
Enter Selection, q to quit: d
/pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk has been selected.
Type ^Y ( Control-Y ) to insert it in the command line.
e.g. ok nvalias mydev ^Y
         for creating devalias mydev for /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk
{0} ok 

Note: the USB stick in position "d" (this lettered position may change as new USB sticks are plugged or unplugged) has it's device name copied into a "copy-paste" buffer by selecting "d"

Failed Boot from a USB Stick

It looks like this when one boots from a USB stick with no operating system & boot environment on it:

{0} ok boot ^Y
{0} ok boot /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk
Boot device: /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk  File and args:
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
{0} ok

Creating a USB Boot Stick

The USB port can be used to create boot environment that the chassis is compatible with or even not compatible with! For example, creating a Solaris 11.4 USB Boot Stick from Solaris 11.3 after inserting a SanDisk USB stick into the front port next to the DVD Drive:

T5120/root# echo | format -e | grep -i SanDisk
       4. c7t0d0 <SanDisk'-Cruzer Fit-1.00 cyl 1945 alt 0 hd 255 sec 63>
       5. c8t0d0 <SanDisk'-Cruzer Fit-1.00 cyl 1945 alt 0 hd 255 sec 63>

T5120/root# ls -al *usb
-rw-r--r--   1 dh127087 staff    1217341440 May  3 19:38 sol-11_4-text-sparc.usb

T5120/root# time dd bs=16k if=sol-11_4-text-sparc.usb of=/dev/rdsk/c7t0d0s2
74300+1 records in
74300+1 records out

real    8m57.25s
user    0m0.47s
sys     0m13.99s

T5120/root# echo "par\nprint\n" | format -e c7t0d0 | tail -14 | nawk '$NF!="0" && !/partition/'
Total disk cylinders available: 148 + 0 (reserved cylinders)

Part      Tag    Flag     Cylinders       Size            Blocks
  0 unassigned    wm       0 - 147        1.13GB    (148/0/0) 2377620
  2 unassigned    wm       0 - 147        1.13GB    (148/0/0) 2377620

T5120/root#

This USB stick can now be tested from, from OpenBoot Firmware

Test Boot Solaris 11.4

After shutting down the OS, while on the console port, attempt to boot from 11.4, which is too new:

T5120/root# cd / ; sync ; sync ; init 0
svc.startd: The system is coming down.  Please wait.
svc.startd: 137 system services are now being stopped.
syncing file systems... done
Program terminated
ChassisSerialNumber BEL07492JB

SPARC Enterprise T5120, No Keyboard
Copyright (c) 1998, 2017, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.33.6.h, 16256 MB memory available, Serial #78384094.
Ethernet address 0:14:4f:ac:b:de, Host ID: 84ac0bde.

{0} ok show-disks
a) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,emlxs@0,1/fp@0,0/disk
b) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,emlxs@0/fp@0,0/disk
c) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@2/scsi@0/disk
d) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk
e) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@1/disk
f) /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/storage@2/disk
g) /iscsi-hba/disk
q) NO SELECTION
Enter Selection, q to quit: d
/pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk has been selected.
Type ^Y ( Control-Y ) to insert it in the command line.
e.g. ok nvalias mydev ^Y
         for creating devalias mydev for /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk

{0} ok boot ^Y
{0} ok boot /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk
Boot device: /pci@0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@4/storage@2/disk  File and args:
'cpu:SUNW,UltraSPARC-T2:SUNW,sun4v-cpu:sun4v' is not supported by this release of Solaris.
Program terminated
ChassisSerialNumber BEL07492JB

SPARC Enterprise T5120, No Keyboard
Copyright (c) 1998, 2017, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.33.6.h, 16256 MB memory available, Serial #78384094.
Ethernet address 0:14:4f:ac:b:de, Host ID: 84ac0bde.

{0} ok

Note: The OpenSPARC T2 processor is not supported by Oracle Solaris 11.4, but Sun Microsystems Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, and Oracle Solaris 11.0 - Solaris 11.3 are all supported on the chassis.



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Monday, October 7, 2019

Solaris 11.4: Eliminating Silent Data Corruption

Solaris 11.4: Eliminating Silent Data Corruption

Abstract:

Storage has been increasing in geometric proportions, for decades. As storage has been increasing, a problem referred to as Silent Data Corruption has been noticed. Forward thinking engineers at Sun Microsystems had created ZFS to manage this risk by having discovery & correction occur passively & automatically upon future reads & writes. Oracle later purchased Sun Microsystems and introduced proactive automated discovery & correction on a monthly basis, as part of Solaris 11.4

The Problem:

Silent Data Corruption has been measured by various industry players dealing with massive quantity of storage.
the fast database at Greenplum, which is a database software company specializing in large-scale data warehousing and analytics, faces silent corruption every 15 minutes.[9] As another example, a real-life study performed by NetApp on more than 1.5 million HDDs over 41 months found more than 400,000 silent data corruptions, out of which more than 30,000 were not detected by the hardware RAID controller. Another study, performed by CERN over six months and involving about 97 petabytes of data, found that about 128 megabytes of data became permanently corrupted.
 As storage continues to expand, the need to resolve silent corruption became more important.

The Passive Solution:

Jeff Bonwick at Sun Microsystems created ZFS, specifically to address storage as data storage quantities increased. The ZFS File System was not a 32 bit File System, like 30 year old technology, but was engineered to be a 128 bit filesystem, projected to accommodate data into the next 30 years. With such  a massive quantity of data to be retained, Silent Data Corruption was addressed by performing a checksum on the data during the write and verifying it on future reads. If the checksum does not match on the read, then a redundant block of the data on the ZFS File System will be automatically read, and a correction would occur to the formerly read bad block. This feature was very unique to Solaris.

A system administrator can read every block via an operation referred to as a "scrub".
sc25client01/root# zpool list rpool
NAME   SIZE  ALLOC  FREE  CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool  416G   296G  120G  71%  1.00x  ONLINE  -

sc25client01/root# zpool scrub rpool 
sc25client01/root#
This scrub will continue in the background until all disks had all of the blocks read. The scrub always reads data at a rate which does not interfere with the operation of the platform or applications.


The Proactive Solution:

With the release of Solaris 11.4, formerly known as Solaris 12, an automated schedule of reading every byte of data in the entire pool is scheduled by default in the storage pool once a month. By reading every block of data once a month, silent data corruption can be rooted out and corrected automatically, which is a very unique feature of Oracle's Solaris!

Under an older OS release (Solaris 11.3 SRU 31),  notice that the property does not exist.
sc25client01/root# uname -a
SunOS sc01client01 5.11 11.3 sun4v sparc sun4v

sc25client01/root# pkg list entire
NAME (PUBLISHER) VERSION                    IFO
entire           0.5.11-0.175.3.31.0.6.0    i--

sc25client01/root# zpool get lastscrub rpool
bad property list: invalid property 'lastscrub'
For more info, run: zpool help get
Under a modern OS release (Solaris 11.4 SRU 13), the last scrub occurred less than a month ago.
sun9781/root# uname -a
SunOS sun1824-cd 5.11 11.4.13.4.0 sun4v sparc sun4v

sun9781/root# pkg list entire
NAME (PUBLISHER) VERSION                    IFO
entire           11.4-11.4.13.0.1.4.0       i--

sun9781/root# zpool get lastscrub rpool
NAME   PROPERTY   VALUE   SOURCE
rpool  lastscrub  Sep_10  local
The last scrub details can be seen through the status option.
sun9781/root# zpool list
NAME   SIZE  ALLOC  FREE  CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
rpool  278G  36.9G  241G  13%  1.00x  ONLINE  -

sun9781/root# zpool status
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format. The pool can
        still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done, the
        pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 16m24s with 0 errors on Tue Sep 10 03:42:44 2019

config:
        NAME                       STATE      READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool                      ONLINE        0     0     0
          mirror-0                 ONLINE        0     0     0
            c0t5000CCA0251CF0F0d0  ONLINE        0     0     0
            c0t5000CCA0251E4BC8d0  ONLINE        0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
The above 278 Gigabyte pool was able to be read in a little over 15 minutes, and checked with no errors to be corrected.

Conclusions:

Network Management is well aware that the more storage that is needed that the more critical the data recovery process becomes. Redundancy through advanced file systems like ZFS under managed services class operating systems like Solaris are a good choice. Solaris 11.4 keeps data healthy, no matter what quantity of physical disks managed or data being retained.
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Monday, July 29, 2019

NYLUG: Talk on ZFS on Linux

NYLUG: Talk on ZFS on Linux

Abstract:

Older file systems were based upon 32 bit UFS (UNIX File System) technologies, which lasted about 10 years, but started becoming tight with modern storage. Sun had produced a modern file system to last the next 10 years - it was called ZFS. ZFS is a 128 bit file system, created by Sun Microsystems, who was acquired by Oracle Corporation, is the primary active maintainer, and feature record of reference. ZFS was open sourced with OpenSolaris and other Open Source distributions started to use it, including Illumos. Eventually, Linux started to leverage ZFS. This talk is by Paul Zuchowski with a little bit of information regarding ZFS on Linux.


New York Linux User Group:

Paul Zuchowski is a former Sun Microsystems engineer. I became aware of him when he left a comment on a blog that I followed, He recently gave a talk at the NYLUG in April 2019 regarding the current state of ZFS on Linux. Many of the features, which are currently in the Oracle Solaris 11 release of ZFS are being actively worked on, in order to catch up, in the Linux Community.


Conclusions:

While some performance problems engineered by Oracle for Solaris based ZFS features may not even be a sparkle in the Linux community's eye, they are actively trying to find solutions. Hundreds of PB's of storage is currently contained in ZFS on Linux, just with a couple of companies, so clearly ZFS under Linux is mainstream enough for production use.
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Tuesday, June 4, 2019

The Business Plan for Sun Microsystems

[Sun Microsystems Logo]

The Business Plan for Sun Microsystems

Have you ever wondered what the business plan looked like for a tech startup which becomes a multi-billion dollar international corporation?

Well, this is an example Business Plan for Sun Microsystems, from back in 1982!
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Monday, March 11, 2019

Fujitsu: Run Solaris 10 & 11 Natively on New Bare Metal

[Fujitsu Logo, courtesy Fujitsu Ltd.]

Fujitsu: Run Solaris 10 & 11 Natively on New Bare Metal

Abstract:

Sun Microsystems originally designed the SPARC processor and merged AT&T and BSD UNIX together to form Solaris. Fujitsu tarted developing clone hardware, which provided a second manufacturing source, fufilling military applications requirements. Oracle purchased Sun and later ended the native support of Solaris 10 on newer SPARC platforms. Fujitsu continues to support Solaris 10 & 11 on native Fujitsu SPARC M12 Platform.

[Fujitsu SPARC64

The M12

In 2017, Fujitsu released the SPARC64 XII processor, reaching the fastest performance in the industry, of all processors in the market.  This processor was placed in a chassis named the M12. Unlike the newer Oracle chassis, these platforms can run native Solaris 10 or 11, without virtualization.

This chassis comes in 2 flavors: M12-2 and M12-2S. The M12-2S is perhaps, the most interesting: the 2S can scale be adding up to a total of 12 chassis in a system to provide 32 sockets and support over 3000 threads by merely adding one chassis at a time!

[Solaris Logo, courtesy of Sun Microsystems, now Oracle]

Solaris 10

It should be noted, Solaris 10 does have a definitive life expectancy. New features are not expected, as the OS is now in Extended Support. Extended support offered Solaris 10 Patch Clusters. April 17 in 2018 marked the first set of Extended Support Patches, in Classic Solaris. As of this publishing, Oracle released another set of Solaris 10 Patches in January 9, 2019. The details for most current Recommended Solaris 10 Patch Set can be found by following the link. The final set of Extended patches will be released in January 2021. There is an uplift for Solaris 10 Extended Support, while Solaris 11 is a free update... and this is preferable!

Conclusions:

While bare metal may be appealing to some applications, such as dedicated clustered solutions where redundancy is built at the application layer, most engineers prefer the portability of LDoms on a chassis cluster, where LDoms can be live migrated onto another chassis as planned maintenance is conducted on the drained chassis. The Solaris 10 bare metal support offered by Fujitsu provides large scale users, who desire bare metal performance the least amount of complexity, an option offered by no other SPARC vendor.
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Friday, November 16, 2018

The First SPARC Workstation... and The Future

[Sun Microsystems Logo]






The First SPARC Workstation... and the Future

Abstract:

When former Sun Microsystems employees gather for reunions, stories formerly only known to a small group of original inventors will often become known. One such story was the creation of the first SPARC based desktop workstation. This story was referenced in an IEEE publication from 2014.

[Sign outside Xerox Palo Alto Research Center]

The Workstation and Xerox Parc

Xerox had a research center in Palo Alto California, which was decades ahead of its time. Xerox, a corporation built around document processing, conceptualized the modern computer, and inspired an industry.

 
[Alto I Computer System, Xerox (PARC), US, 1973, courtesy flickr]

A tale of inspiration

Sun co-founder and chief hardware designer Andy Bechtolsheim recalls spending a lot of time at Xerox Parc as an unpaid consultant during his graduate student days. These days, the position might have been considered an internship, but in those more informal times, Bechtolsheim recalls, it was more like an invitation to hang around, and he did so as much as possible, mostly testing chip design tools in development. At the time, Parc researchers did their jobs using Parc technology—like the Alto computer, with its bitmapped display and Ethernet connectivity. “That’s where the idea of building a personal workstation for engineers and scientists originated," said Bechtolsheim. "It was obvious even as a grad student that the world needed such a product, particularly for engineers who wanted to do chip design or board design.”

 

The First Workstations

He wanted one for himself, but Xerox wasn’t turning it into a product for engineers. So he built it himself using mostly off-the-shelf parts. That attempt turned into the Sun workstation. 
Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla reported that when he met Bechtolsheim and expressed interest in the technology, Bechtolsheim offered it to him at his standard licensing fee—US $10 000. Khosla said he told Bechtolsheim “I want you, not your technology. I don’t want the golden egg, I want the goose.”
For its first official week of existence in 1982, Sun Microsystems was "Sun Workstation." That was until the founders figured out that nobody knew what a workstation was.
The very first Sun workstations delivered to a major customer in May 1982 didn’t run Unix; instead, they were used as IBM 360 terminal emulators.

[Sun 100 desktop workstation spotted at Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum in Paderborn, Germany]

Sun-1 Motorola 68000 Workstations

The very first workstations did not include graphics, but included an embedded UNIX Operating System. The Sun 1 "workstation was based on the Stanford University SUN workstation designed by Andy Bechtolsheim (advised by Vaughan Pratt and Forrest Baskett), a graduate student and co-founder of Sun Microsystems."


[Sun 2/50 diskless workstation]

 Sun-2 Motorola 68010 Workstations

The Sun-2 "series of UNIX workstations and servers was launched by Sun Microsystems in November 1983.[1] As the name suggests, the Sun-2 represented the second generation of Sun systems, superseding the original Sun-1 series. The Sun-2 series used a 10 MHz Motorola 68010 microprocessor with a proprietary Sun-2 Memory Management Unit (MMU), which enabled it to be the first Sun architecture to run a full virtual memory UNIX implementation, SunOS 1.0, based on 4.1BSD."
[A Sun 3/60 workstation with disk and tape]

Sun-3 Motorola 68020 & 68030 Workstations

The Sun-3 is a series of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched on September 9, 1985.[1] The Sun-3 series are VMEbus-based systems similar to some of the earlier Sun-2 series, but using the Motorola 68020 microprocessor, in combination with the Motorola 68881 floating-point co-processor (optional on the Sun 3/50) and a proprietary Sun MMU.

[SPARC Logo, courtesy SPARC International]

 SPARC Workstations Considered

The development project that created a workstation based on the SPARC processor only happened because Bechtolsheim went rogue. Bechtolsheim tells the story: “The company was building Motorola-processor based workstations, and Motorola wasn’t keeping up CPU development. Meanwhile, Bill Joy convinced the company that we should use the SPARC chip. By ‘86 Sun was shipping its first SPARC server. By ‘87, there was a discussion—should we put this into a workstation. But the VP of engineering thought this was lunatic, too much risk. Sun at that point was a public company. As a public company, people get instantaneously conservative and make decisions the way Digital Equipment Corp. would make a decision, which wasn’t quick.
But Bechtolsheim thought the risk was worth it, in part because he was worried about what Steve Jobs was doing with his then-new company, Next. “I knew what was going on at Next, because I had a friend who worked there, and I grew concerned that they were building a better product. They were using the [Motorola] 68000 [microprocessor], so I wanted to have a product with a faster CPU, because in terms of cost/performance there’s nothing better than a faster chip."
[SPARCStation 1+]

The First SPARC Workstation

So Bechtolsheim informally split from Sun in 1987, starting a separate corporation called Unisun. The moniker was intended to give the impression that the new business was going to go after the university market, and not Sun's regular business customers, but, said Bechtolsheim, it was always intended to be a general purpose workstation.
Khosla, who by then had left Sun to join venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, funded the venture. "We agreed to fund Andy to essentially rip-off Sun technology,” Khosla recalls.  “We told the board we were going to do this whether they liked it or not, but they could buy back at cost," that is, purchase the company and its intellectual property for the amount of Kleiner's investment.
 “Three or six months after we got going Sun decided it should indeed be a Sun product line, and it came out in 1989; it was Sun’s best selling workstation.”

Epilogue

The irony of history is sometimes hard to get past. One can sometimes have the most advanced hardware and software solutions, but not know how to market it for economic advantage... thus was the case for Xerox. Wrapping off-the-shelf products with a clean software design with built in Ethernet Interfaces resulted in the creation of an entirely new class of computing systems and ultimately The Internet. With the advent of The Internet, The Market transitioned from Workstations to Servers... ironically, often by stacking Sun Workstation "pizza boxes" on a shelf in a rack, connecting their embedded Ethernet cards. Sun used to say "The Network Is The Computer", and they were right.

[Oracle Logo, Courtesy Oracle Corporation]

SPARC Today

Today, the highest performing general purpose microprocessor on the market continues to be SPARC. Oracle, a software company, now owns a proverbial "Golden Egg", with Fujitsu being the other. June 2016 marked the time when Oracle resumed shipping commodity competitive systems based upon  the SPARC S7. September 2017, Oracle cut SPARC "Core" Team employees. SPARC firmware continues to roll out, providing the most secure microprocessor platform on the market.


SPARC Tomorrow

Also in September 2017, once again released the fastest processor on the market - the SPARC M8. As 2020 approaches, the market looks forward to what will most likely be the fastest processor on the market, the SPARC M8+. With SPARC stunning performance, the market debates where the proverbial "Goose" still lives.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2018

DoD: 5-10 Year SPARC Processor Contract Award

[SPARC M8 Processor, Courtesy Oracle Corporation]

DoD: 5-10 Year SPARC Processor Contract Award

Abstract: 

The SPARC family of processors had been produced by manufacturers, both foreign and domestic, for decades. Sun Microsystems created the first SPARC specification, with dozens of manufacturers creating their own implementations. Vendors such as Fujitsu and Oracle continue to produce SPARC processors, today. Vendors have been providing On-Premise to Off-Premise compute power in recent years. The Department of Defense had awarded another contract, SPARC support for 5-10 years to ViON, who provides both on and off premise SPARC compute resources.
 
 
[SPARC Logo, courtesy SPARC International]

SPARC Introduction:

The SPARC Processor was created to out scale older processor chips in the 1980's, becoming one of the most successful 32 bit commercial RISC processors. The first 64 bit SPARC processors were released in 1993, a decade before Intel processor clone manufacture AMD created an x86 64 bit processor using AMD64 in 2003, with Sun porting Solaris. Intel followed a year later with Intel64 in 2004, a full decade after Sun had released 64 Bit SPARC. SPARC continued to be the fastest single thread, largest memory footprint, or largest scalable SMP multiple threaded workhorse in the industry, for decades to come... with CPU chips supplied from various vendors.
 
[Oracle SPARC M8 Processor Addition in 2017, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

Today's SPARC:

SPARC continues to be the fastest single thread, single core, single, socket, and SMP multiple socket performer, on the market today... with many additional features such as database accelerators, cryptographic accelerators, and decompression accelerators. The need for the fastest processing continues to be needed by high end customers, such as government, defense, and large enterprises.
[Fujitsu/Oracle SPARC M12 Chassis, courtesy Fujitsu]

Fujitsu's M12 Processor

Fujitsu's latest April 2017 implementation of SPARC is the M12 processor, with 12 cores per socket, 8 threads [vCPU] per core, more co-processors, and ability to expand to 32 sockets in a pair of racks. This allows for massive compute & memory capacity on a scale unachievable in in other architecture platforms. Platforms such as this is optimal for massive Government and Multi-Nation Enterprises.

 

[Oracle SPARC M8 Block Diagram, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

Oracle M8 Processor

Oracle's latest August 2017 implementation of SPARC is the M8 processor, with 32 compute cores, 8 threads [vCPU] per core, more co-processors, phenomenal performance outrunning all non-SPARC processors [as has been consistent, for years.] Oracle implemented 8 Sockets per chassis, to meet their own Enterprise based Engineered System requirements.

 

[SPARC Physical and Logical Virtualization, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

SPARC Virtualization:

Before other mainstream vendors had built some degree of virtualization, a mature 64 bit SPARC platform offered many options of virtualization, adding various layers over time:
  • Physical Domains (1993 by the Cray Superserver 6400)
  • Zones [Containers] (2004 by Sun Microsystems on Solaris 10 Beta Build 51)
  • Logical Domains (2007 by Sun Microsystems on their SPARC T1 processors)
Vendors like ViON can technically provide compute resources via any one of these technologies, including bare-metal physical.

Conclusions:

SPARC and the Solaris Operating System, which provides amazing flexibility to larger installations. It appears that this latest government contract will last well into the next SPARC release, projected by both Oracle & Fujitsu - where both vendors expect the next SPARC release to be 2020.
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Monday, October 5, 2015

Happy Birthday Seymour Cray!

[Cray Super Computer rendering - Courtesy: The Register]

Happy Birthday Seymour Cray! 

Had you been around, this would be your 90th Birthday...
[Cray CS6400 - Courtesy CrayWiki]

Thank you for the Super Computer and massive CS6400 SPARC system, code named the SuperDragon while in development..
[Sun Microsystems E10K, courtesy Wikipedia]

The Business Systems Division of Cray Research was sold to Sun Microsystems and formed the core of the ground-breaking E10000 code named StarFire - a massively sized 64 SPARC Processor based Symmetric Multiprocessor Platform [SMP] system.

Systems like these were data-centers in a cabinet... data-centers in a single OS image... or a single chassis broken up into multiple OS images... depending on the required processing needs. These were not unlike what Oracle sells today, in their high-end systems, as Oracle continues Sun Microsystems, who continued Cray's vision for SMP SPARC Systems.
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Monday, August 24, 2015

Coming Soon: SPARC M7 and Solaris 12

[SPARC M7 Die, Courtesy The Register]

Coming Soon: SPARC M7 and Solaris 12

Abstract:

Operating Systems and Software Vendors continue to struggle with the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit architectures, but the SPARC family of processors continues to roll out 64 bit CPU chips for data flagship Solaris 64 bit Operating System. Watching companies announce new products ahead of time is tricky because of Government Regulation, but sometimes watching less overt routes can provide a great level of insight as to what is coming soon.

[SPARC and Solaris Public Roadmap, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

Roadmap: Foretelling the Future

Oracle has a history of releasing public road maps for SPARC and Solaris. They have been fairly accurate, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. The roadmaps are subject to change, but they give the Architect a good idea of what is coming and how to plan for it. As of August of 2015, Oracle's public roadmap indicates that a new SPARC is in Test and Solaris 12 is coming early next year. The naming for that SPARC processor is not clear in the image, but

[System Controller and Console image, courtesy Oracle]

Firmware: What's in the Wild

SPARC M7 is operational!

A recent firmware release indicates the following bug numbers have been resolved:

20246063 Kernel Zone panics on first boot on M7-8
20003379 New FRUID enums for 4S variants of M7-8 chassis
19336643 Internal error: Oops: 17 [#1] on M7-8 with SysFW build_33

The new SPARC M7, more than a dream, appears to be a reality. Understanding Oracle's naming conventions, the firmware notes indicates support for an 8 socket chassis. The Chassis and Processor clearly exists.

[Sun Microsystems Solaris Logo]

Solaris 12 is running under OpenBoot!

A recent firmware release indicates the following bug numbers have been resolved:

9485526 obp assumes an executable heap and fails on Solaris 12

Solaris 12 is apparently running on existing SPARC platforms at Oracle, which is a good sign!


[San Francisco Bridge & City, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

JavaOne and OpenWorld 2015

The place to be will be Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, California during October 25-29.OpenWorld will offer many seminars to attend, but there is also JavaOne! Register & Fly to one of the most anticipated conferences of 2015. Why is this so anticipated?

Seminars & Sessions at OpenWorld & JavaOne 2015

How big can you get? If you are struggling for performance: SPARC, Solaris, and Java can fix it.
Operating a 16-Terabyte JVM...and Living to Tell the Tale [CON1855]
Antoine CHAMBILLE, Global Head of Research and Development, Quartet Financial Systems
Amir Javanshir, Principal software engineer, Oracle
Is there a limit to the size of the heap the Java Virtual Machine can handle? Java blogs often report 100 GB as the maximum amount of memory the JVM can manage effortlessly. Yet Quartet FS develops ActivePivot, an in-memory analytic database written in pure Java that is frequently deployed in a terabyte of memory. In fact, earlier this year, it partnered with Oracle to deploy a large credit risk use case in 16 TB of memory and the 384 cores of an M6-32 SPARC server from Oracle. Yes, you can do it, once all the layers of the solution come together: data structures and thread management in the Java code, garbage collection in the JVM, memory management in the OS. This presentation shares all the steps to achieve this.
Conference Session
Do you use Oracle RDBMS? It runs fastest in Oracle silicon, but WHAT silicon? M7 is a good bet!
Top 10 Tips and Tricks to Run Oracle Database Best on Oracle Solaris Systems [CON2742]
Ken Kutzer, Principal Product Manager, Oracle
Viraj Nr, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle
Oracle Engineering has focused on the codevelopment of Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, microprocessors, and Oracle Storage Cloud, resulting in significant advantages for customers who deploy these products together. With each new release, deeper integration results in breakthrough enhancements in security, performance, and ease of management. This session outlines these enhanced capabilities and how they benefit you. Learn the top tips on how to optimize your configurations for the best-possible results. Areas covered include tuning tips for reliable performance and faster database startup with Oracle’s revolutionary new Software in Silicon database features.
Conference Session
Security: Solaris under SPARC M7 Processor making Buffer Overflows obsolete.
Learning to Use SPARC M7 Application Data Integrity to Detect Buffer Overflow Attacks [HOL5447]
Claude Teissedre, Market Development Engineer, Oracle
Programming errors or input data checking inadequacies are vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers to alter the behavior of programs, and the “linear buffer overflow” attack remains a major threat to many applications today. Application Data Integrity (ADI), a Software in Silicon feature powered by Oracle’s SPARC M7 chips, allows the CPU to detect such memory corruptions at almost zero cost. This hands-on lab is primarily aimed at detecting simple attack patterns using the Oracle Solaris memory allocators and the Oracle Solaris Studio Discover ADI features. In this lab, advanced developers learn how to use the Application Data Integrity API to adapt a memory allocator to the ADI technology and to create a user and signal handler to customize the ADI error handling behavior.
HOL (Hands-on Lab) Session
 Database: More of Oracle RDBMS is executed in Silicon under Solaris with SPARC M7 Processor.
Speeding Up Oracle Database Using SPARC M7 Hardware Acceleration [HOL6011]
Adina Kalin-florescu, ISVE engineer, Oracle
Ling-yun Li, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle
Wen-sheng Liu, Oracle
Angelo Rajadurai, Technology Lead Oracle System, Oracle
Data Analytics Accelerator (DAX) is a Software in Silicon feature built into Oracle’s SPARC M7 chips. Eight DAX database offload engines are present on the SPARC M7 chip in addition to 32 cores. Many of the Oracle Database In-Memory 12c functions can run natively on the DAX, freeing the cores to do other work. Oracle has been integrating hardware and software together to give our customers the best platform for running Oracle Database. This lab looks at the advantage of Oracle Database In-Memory 12c on the SPARC M7 chip.
HOL (Hands-on Lab) Session
Next Generation: What is coming on Oracle's Roadmap. Solaris 12 will probably be there.
General Session: Oracle Solaris Strategy, Engineering Insights, and Roadmap [GEN8606]
Markus Flierl, Vice President, Oracle
This session discusses the strategy and roadmap for Oracle Solaris. It covers how Oracle Solaris 11 is being deployed in cloud computing and the unique optimizations in Oracle Solaris 11 for the Oracle stack. The session also offers a sneak peek at the latest technology under development for Oracle Solaris and what customers can expect to see in the next major release. The speaker is joined by a key customer executive who shares the benefits and value experienced with Oracle Solaris and the business challenges solved.
General Session
SPARC: Software in Silicon for Security and Speed. New SPARC design is probably M7.
General Session: Software in Silicon and SPARC Outlook—Secure, Smarter Database/Applications [GEN6421]
Masood Heydari, SVP, Hardware Development, Oracle
Software-in-silicon technology is the most important development in enterprise computing of the decade, created by Oracle’s unique vision of breakthrough microprocessor and server designs through coengineering with the database, applications, and Java. This session will help you understand the advanced features that secure your application data with less effort, accelerate the performance of the Oracle Database In-Memory option of Oracle Database 12c, and run Java middleware in the most efficient and fastest-possible way. You will also understand Oracle’s strategy for creating the SPARC server technology that is changing the way customers look at their cloud infrastructure and IT system and will hear about the outlook for systems based on the new SPARC design Oracle has just unveiled.
General Session
The SPARC M7 appears to be a soon to be realized reality, with various discussions coming up in OpenWorld and Java One!

Conclusions:

Firmware being released on SPARC Servers are a clear indication of what is here. Oracle will be discussing the usage of SPARC M7 as a reality with live labs. If you are building Network Management platforms, this is the time to start your planning for hardware acquisition, to get the most "bang for the buck".



 


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