Solaris on Course to Merge with Linux
Source: ZDNet
When I interviewed Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell last August, he hinted at a blurring of the lines between Linux and Solaris, if not an outright merger. Said Gingell: "Five years from now, when all the tribes intermarry, who is going to know what's Solaris and what's Linux, and who's going to care?"
So, while attending a recent chalk talk at Sun's Burlington, Mass., campus, my ears perked up when the company's chief technology officer Greg Papadopolous talked about how applications designed to run on Red Hat Linux can run unmodified on the Intel version of Sun's Solaris x86.
As it turns out, this wasn't the news I thought it was. Binaries designed to run on Red Hat Linux don't natively run on Solaris x86 without some help--yet. Achieving this level of compatibility requires a Linux emulator called Lxrun. Lxrun is an open-source project that's been around since 1997, and to which Sun has contributed engineering resources in order to guarantee its compatibility with Solaris x86. (Lxrun does not run on versions of Solaris designed for the Sparc architecture.)
The way Lxrun works is relatively straightforward. First, Solaris x86 users install Lxrun on their systems. Depending on which distribution of Linux they want to emulate (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, et al), they also must load the libraries from that distribution into a directory where Lxrun will be looking for them. It is indeed possible to write an application that runs on one distribution of Linux, but not others. The difference is in the distribution-specific libraries and the chance that a developer may or may not take advantage of them. (The UnitedLinux movement is an important sidebar to this library business that I'll get to shortly.)
When Sun's Papadopolous mentioned compatibility with Red Hat Linux, almost as if to exclude the other popular distributions, it wasn't a slip of the tongue. There has been a lot of speculation about which of the many Linux distributions Sun will go with when its Linux business is running on all cylinders. Still, Papadopolous' comments don't make Red Hat a shoo-in.
