Sun Microsystems Inc is on a mission to lay to rest the notion that its Solaris on Sparc and Solaris on Intel operating systems are different beasts. Sun’s Unix systems competitors, including Intel server companies such as Sequent Computer Systems Inc which evaluated but subsequently rejected 64-bit Solaris x86, say Solaris x86 is crippled compared with the Sparc cut, that OEMs have no control over its direction, and that Sun has no incentive to do it properly because it does not sell Intel servers. Certainly Sun has taken a leaf out of Microsoft Corp’s book and has pretty much shut the door to anyone dabbling with its code. However Sun is adamant that the two versions of Solaris – it claims there is only one – are lock step in functionality and release cycles. They are cut from the same code tree, share the same APIs, but have processor- specific modules that represent less than 1% of the code base. It wouldn’t, for the record, allow us to run a source code check to prove this. The full 64-bit version, 2.7 is now in beta, though like all other Unix-on-Intel operating systems it certain 64-bit functionality can’t be utilized until Intel ships its IA-64 Merced processor. Solaris was originally written for the big-endian Sparc RISC, in which the most significant bits are read first. Intel CPUs process data in little-endian format. Sun claims there’s no issue and the Solaris source tree is byte-order independent and has been for years. Moreover it dismisses the notion that at the binary level the data in stored in the two systems won’t interoperate. It says the same data is readable by both Solaris Sparc and Solaris x86. This is true, if an ISV or a customer is willing to commit the resources to develop applications that can store data in both formats or in some kind of endian-neutral form. Or make the application understand which processor actually wrote the data to a file, as Solaris Sparc and Solaris x86 require that data written to files is ordered differently. ISVs can do all this but it’s more a question of whether there is a business case to justify the investment. For users it’s a genuine issue, say byte-sex analysts at research company Illuminata. It boils down to programming and money. What’s probably most critical is data stored in historical files that no-one knows the byte-sex of. ISVs and system vendors we spoke to – including Fujitsu sibling ICL Plc, which Santa Cruz Operation Inc UnixWare on its Intel servers – say the fact that Sun has no vested business interest in Solaris x86 because it doesn’t sell Intel servers is significant. Sun makes its money selling hardware and could junk Solaris x86 or lose interest in it at the drop of a hat. They don’t appear to trust Sun’s claim that ‘endianess’ has no implication for Solaris as far as application data is concerned. Moreover they figure there’s a huge cost involved in supporting and servicing two versions of an application. Sun’s latest but hardly unexpected Solaris x86 OEM win is Fujitsu Ltd and its Amdahl Corp subsidiary. Industry talk suggests Siemens Nixdorf Informationssystemes AG has lined up behind 64-bit Solaris for its Merced boxes – it currently uses its Sinix.
