Solaris

Group F

Kevin Franklin

Jay Lee

Greg Nesslerodt

Travis Thomas

Chris Woodley

Overview

• 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:• 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.

• 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, Time-Warner,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 Score

SGI Irix 6.5 SGI MIPS servers and workstations

Unix 95 2 out of 10

Hewlett-Packard HP-UX 11i

HP 9000 servers Unix 95 9 out of 10

IBM AIX 5L IBM RS/6000 and selected other systems running IBM Power and PowerPC series processors; Intel IA-64 edition planned

Unix 98 9 out of 10

SCO UnixWare 7.1 Intel PC workstations and servers

Unix 95 0 out of 10

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 Web-Application 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• 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

• ‘-’ 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

• Boot Block

• Super Boot Block

• Data Block

• I-node List

Thread Creation and Control

• 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:– Suspension– Preemption– Yielding– Synchronization

Synchronization

• Uses four primitives to accomplish synchronization– 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

• 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/01/01/15/010115tcunix.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/01/04/09/010409tctsolaris.xml

• Fighting the threat within, Maggie Biggs, Federal Computer Week, 3/26/01; http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/0326/tec-solaris-03-26-01.asp