I’ve been tracking OpenSolaris for both Sparc and Intel (x86) platforms. Despite the fact that I primarily use MacOS X at home for my personal UNIX based systems, have owned and operated various UNIX derivatives, including Solaris, since 1995.

Although Solaris really shines on Sparc, the x86 beast is a functional ugly duckling. It’s SMP is, and was stronger than NT 4, and it was the first x86 commercial UNIX variant that supported SMP. However, being that it is Solaris on x86, it tends to offend those who have used it on Sparc, and are used to the advantages of it natively – and the x86 hardware support is dodgy, at best. As it is fully SMP capable, and has everything active ‘by default’, with few choices to disable them, it tends to run slower on x86 platforms than, say, Linux and FreeBSD – rather, it feels that way, which is a ‘good enough’ excuse to dislike it for most users.

I’ve dealt with this “ugly duckling” professionally since Solaris 2.6 (5/98 forever!) – and mighty changes are afoot for the release of Solaris 11.

From Solaris 2.x/x86 through Solaris 11 b19, the x86 variant still had four different bootstrap stages, where, upon being the active operating system, it first loaded the device configuration assistant, then the pre-boot system, which somewhat emulated the OpenFirmware functionality on the Sparc platform, and finally, if everything worked, would load the kernel.

With b20, this is no longer the case. The bootloader now uses GRUB, and seems to chain directly into the kernel. (I say ‘seems’, as I am still in the process of updating to it, and haven’t had the chance to poke about within it, yet.)

This makes things a bit bizarre, at least for me, as when adding device drivers, or modifying support to boot into single user, or reconfigure the onboard devices, I’ve become used to the ‘’, ‘’, ‘’ selection which would rescan the system’s devices and chain back to the kernel.

I find that this new functionality is certainly more condusive for ‘flow’, but I am a bit curious how they’ll eventually replace the DCA system.

[Note for would-be tinkerers]: Solaris 11 b20 is not quite ready for prime time. The new GRUB loader doesn’t like to work with the older boot system, so you’ll likely want to do a full reinstall, since an ‘upgrade’ does not quite work. The install system is also currently limited to text mode.

Oddly, audio drivers have been updated and imported, but the NIC drivers are still quite lacking.