Hidden Features of Solaris/OpenSolaris

Question

What are useful commands, tools, or tricks that one would find on Solaris or OpenSolaris that aren't available on a typical Linux distribution?

score 14 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 06 '09 at 12:11

ZFS, DTrace and SMF are hardly hidden features since anyone who has ever heard of Solaris also has heard of them.

If you'd really like to get to know some hidden/less known features of Solaris, I recommend you read the Less known Solaris Features ebook by Jörg Möllenkamp.

Matt · Accepted Answer · 2009-06-02T14:50:27.743

Live Upgrade, which uses ZFS, creates writable snapshots of the operating system boot environment. With Live Upgrade, you can apply patches to a snapshot boot environment, then make that snapshot bootable. Upon the next reboot you get a patched OS environment. If you discover an issue with a patch, you can make the old snapshot bootable, reboot and you've backed out your changes. Its a pretty impressive solution to patching.

ZFS for the boot environment requires Solaris 10u6 or newer.

Also, Solaris Zones are pretty useful for application isolation. Obviously DTrace is very nice but RedHat is playing catchup with System Tap.

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 02 '09 at 07:10

7

Don't forget SMF (Service Management). I have yet to see something comparable for linux (any pointers gratefully accepted). It did save me (and colleagues) a lot of ticket handling :)

answered Jun 02 '09 at 07:10

Vincent De Baere

1,793

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 06 '09 at 07:27

There are a number of features that Solaris has that Linux people wish they had. These include:

ZFS: a filesystem that provides extreme flexibility, more than anything now available. Dynamic growth and reduction, snapshots, clones, and more - all available for free.
DTrace: a debugger that can present you with details on how the kernel is working. Because of the way the kernels are written, DTrace is inherently much more flexible than SystemTap.
SMF: yet another system to replace System V init scripts - but this one seems to have more people interested in it than any of the others.
Zones and Containers: these are very flexible and have a lot of people excited: they provide for very flexible virtualization.

score 5 · Answer 5 · edited Jun 11 '20 at 10:02

A few personal experiences...

I find Zones so easy and useful that I've simply created one for each service I am running at home - this way I can play and test things out without trashing it all. One of the zones is reverse proxy (Sun Web Java Proxy) so that I can play with different web servers easily.

Also I find the opencsw (previously known as Blastwave) packages hierarchy much better that anything yet seen - it always takes care of all the dependencies.

And - not to forget - binary compatibility. If an app is specified to need Linux with kernel 1.2.3_4 you better have it. On Solaris everything just works on future releases. For me this means upgrade when I want and no stress doing it.

Here are several interesting documents if you want to dig deeper: Less known Solaris features

Just for taste - Adminstration specials:

Live Upgrade Service Management Facility Resource Management pfiles fuser /export/home? /home? autofs? lockfs About cores and crashes CacheFS Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit

(do I sound like an ad? sorry...)

score 4 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 02 '09 at 03:58

4

The two biggest, compelling reasons for Solaris seem to be DTrace and ZFS, neither of which is directly available for Linux.

answered Jun 02 '09 at 03:58

jtimberman

7,665

score 4 · Answer 7 · answered Jun 26 '09 at 06:38

4

kstat to get all kinds of awesome kernel statistics.

answered Jun 26 '09 at 06:38

X-Istence

782

score 3 · Answer 8 · answered Jun 09 '09 at 05:49

Not necessarily hidden, but not obvious to Linux people are the process observation utilities: pstack, pmap, pflags, pfiles, pcred, psig, and pldd. Also prstat, which is more or less equivalent to top, but can also aggregate resource usage by user, zone, project, and display microstate accounting.

Look at projects and tasks for managing lots of applications in one OS instance.

I don't know of an equivalent to coreadm in Linux, though it's probably scattered around /proc somewhere.

Logadm is a bit obtuse but a good replacement for logrotate, and generally more powerful/flexible.

The arrangement of multi-level security (roles, authorizations, profiles) is different from Linux (SELinux contexts, AppArmor).

THe Image Packaging System (IPS) in OpenSolaris is pretty neat, but still under heavy development.

Also, +1 for LiveUpgrade. It's great, especially with ZFS snapshots.

Most of the GNU userland stuff you're used to is available, and probably installed by default on a sufficiently new Solaris.

notpeter · Answer 9 · 2009-07-02T16:37:51.963

2

Fast Reboot for OpenSolaris skips the normal HW Probing/BIOS POST/GRUB process on x86 hardware, allowing for reboots to occur in <10sec instead of ~2mins. Even supports booting alternate Boot Environments (e.g. reverting a botched upgrade).

edited Jul 02 '09 at 16:37

answered Jun 29 '09 at 16:50

notpeter

3,535

score 1 · Answer 10 · answered Jun 06 '09 at 09:04

ZFS and SMF are great, but a real pain with solaris is that package manager is ages behind its linux counterparts.

Also all utilities are different in subtle ways(killall anyone?), if you admin linux machines most of the time, switching to solaris means reading man pages again and again. A sucky "more" pager and always slightly misconfigured terminals make your life difficult.

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Jun 28 '09 at 02:40

1

Solaris Crash Analysis Tool - best tool to assist the analysis of Solaris kernel crash dumps.

answered Jun 28 '09 at 02:40

Aaron

229

score 1 · Answer 12 · answered Sep 11 '09 at 07:47

kssl, kernel SSL module. Quote from ksslcfg(1M)

ksslcfg manages smf(5) instances for the Kernel SSL proxy module. An SSL-enabled web server can use the services of its Kernel SSL proxy to improve the performance of the HTTPS packets processing.

score 1 · Answer 13 · answered Dec 08 '09 at 21:31

1

Unlike Linux, "lsof -o" (show file offsets) works. This can be useful for showing how far along a process is when it's reading or writing large amounts of data.

answered Dec 08 '09 at 21:31

Gerald Combs

6,591

score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Sep 09 '11 at 07:16

Probably the biggest trap for new players, a typical Linux user might be tempted to run killall on a Solaris host;

System Administration Commands                        killall(1M)

NAME
     killall - kill all active processes

SYNOPSIS
     /usr/sbin/killall [signal]

DESCRIPTION
     killall is used by shutdown(1M) to kill all active processes
     not directly related to the shutdown procedure.

     killall terminates all processes with open files so that the
     mounted file systems will be unbusied and can be unmounted.

     killall sends signal (see kill(1)) to the active  processes.
     If no signal is specified, a default of 15 is used.

     The killall command can be run only by the super-user.

ATTRIBUTES
     See attributes(5) for descriptions of the  following  attri-
     butes:

     ____________________________________________________________
    |       ATTRIBUTE TYPE        |       ATTRIBUTE VALUE       |
    |_____________________________|_____________________________|
    | Availability                | SUNWcsu                     |
    |_____________________________|_____________________________|

SEE ALSO

     kill(1), ps(1), fuser(1M), shutdown(1M), signal(3C),  attri-
     butes(5)

SunOS 5.10          Last change: 14 Sep 1992                    1

score 0 · Answer 15 · answered Dec 08 '09 at 20:04

0

The consolidated "Less known Solaris Features" tutorials is helpful.

answered Dec 08 '09 at 20:04

Brian Carlton

161

Hidden Features of Solaris/OpenSolaris

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