Oracle puts out Solaris 11 compatibility tester
Will your Solaris 10 app make the jump?
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The Oracle Technology Network Garage – the blog where system administrators and developers hang out in the World According to Larry – has announced that the software giant has put out a tool to help customers figure out if their Solaris applications will be compatible with the upcoming Solaris 11.
"Most applications currently running on Oracle Solaris 10 will continue to run unmodified on Oracle Solaris 11 Express, but you wanna be sure," explain Rick Ramsey and Kemer Thomson, who are in charge of the Solaris 11 compatibility checker, in a blog posting. "Some applications could have incompatibilities."
At the moment, the compatibility checker works on Solaris 11 Express, the quasi-production development release of Oracle's flagship Unix operating system platform. Presumably it will also work on the production Solaris 11 release, which is due sometime this year. The exact nature of the incompatibilities was not disclosed by Oracle, and Oracle had not yet responded to questions from El Reg at press time. By definition, the tool has to work with applications running on Solaris 10, but it is not clear if it will also work with apps coded for and running on Solaris 8 and 9. That would no doubt be useful.
Solaris 11 Express was announced in November 2010 and replaces the OpenSolaris open source development project started by the former Sun Microsystems six years ago. Like Sun used to do, Oracle is allowing customers to buy tech support for Solaris 11 Express if they want to be out there on the bleeding edge. There was some suggestion that Oracle might use Solaris 11 Express in its SuperCluster database and Exalogic Java middleware appliances, but it is unclear if this ever transpired.
Solaris 11 Express and the production Solaris 11 will be available for x64 and Sparc platforms, as was Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. Solaris 11 Express is only available as a binary, but Oracle has committed to putting out the final Solaris 11 code out as an open source stack once that operating system is formally rolled out.
At this time, the Solaris 11 compatibility checker, as the OTN Garage blog explains, does static binary analysis and source code analysis on applications running on earlier Solaris releases. It will soon be updated to do runtime analysis. The readme file for the tool is here and points you to where the download for the compatibility checker can be found.
Oracle has also updated the documentation for Solaris 11 Express in recent weeks.
No word from Oracle or on the street about when we might see the actual Solaris 11 this year. ®
COMMENTS
Moving to windows server
You're changing from a Solaris system to Windows Server for your *database*?!
Good luck with your next outage...
Solaris
I am a huge Linux fan, but Solaris is technically the best OS of all, by some margin, and not just because of ZFS. That is why it survives, plus the large user base among banks, telcos and other corporations.
All the same, there must be doubts about Solaris long term. It grew from a atmosphere of innovation which existed in Sun but does not exist at Oracle.
What is a 'Solaris box' ?
not sure I'm familiar with the term.
At our site we run Solaris on IBM servers, HP servers and Sun servers (X86 and SPARC). Why do people insist on using the word 'Solaris' as a synonym for SPARC I do not know. If you are unhappy with SPARC box what has that to do with a yes/no choice on Solaris as an OS? You do realize that Solaris gives you the choice right ?
Solaris is no better, no worse than say RHEL or AIX, but one very big advantage is that it allows us to pick the right CPU arch for the job without introducing another OS. As a telco we have to span multiple use cases like very IO intensive jobs, HPC jobs, etc
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