Delivering outstanding performance from AMD 64-bit single and multi-core systems is good for your business, career, and self-esteem. Knowing you can achieve this goal with minimal effort on your part is almost as exciting as a hefty pay raise. Sun Microsystems certainly agrees and has infused Solaris 10 with new features and functionality optimized for AMD systems. Solaris 10 automatically handles many complicated tasks so you don't have to struggle with the nuances of code or processors to increase application performance on AMD 64-bit systems.
Numerous new features and performance enhancements are reason enough to switch over from whatever version of operating system you are currently using to Solaris 10 on your AMD systems. So is the fact that Sun regularly runs a variety of real world customer benchmarks against SUSE, Red Hat, and Windows, to ensure that Solaris 10 continues to outperform its competition.
To further entice you to move to Solaris 10, here are some compelling code features that illustrate how easy it will be for you to get your AMD 64-bit processors to fly on Solaris 10 with little effort on your part.
1. Solaris 10 automatically delivers super-charged performance on AMD processors.
Solaris 8 or 9 applications automatically run, on average, 25 percent faster when moved onto Solaris 10. Some networking applications such as financial trading applications had even more significant performance improvements. These results are based on Sun's internal performance and regression testing. Sun performed a matrix of over 1000 performance tests that include industry standard benchmarks and test cases provided by customers on every build of Solaris to validate these claims. Sun reports that Solaris 10 has set more than 50 world records using numerous industry-standard benchmarks or workload scenarios on AMD Opteron systems. See the details of 50 published world records [http://www.sun.com/x64/benchmarks/]. Furthermore, Solaris 10 improves your overall network performance without your having to change any code. Solaris 10 supports current IPv6 specifications, and streamlined TCP/IP and UDP/IP stacks significantly increases your application performance. The latest networking technologies, such as 10-Gigabit Ethernet, wireless networking, and hardware offloading are all supported out of the box.
2. Solaris 10 application compatibility guarantee.
Before your application can fly on AMD 64-bit processors it has to get off the ground. Sun guarantees that all applications currently running on Solaris 10 will benefit from the increased performance of AMD 64-bit processors as well as all the new operating system (OS) features without changing a single line of application code. Since SPARC and X86 processors are designed for feature parity, Sun offers guaranteed binary and source code compatibility on Solaris 10 as far back as Solaris 2.6. You can take advantage of AMD's 64-bit architecture via a straight recompile without making any major changes to the source code. After the recompile, your existing application makes use of Solaris 10's new functionality, security, and other enhancements, and runs faster on AMD processors. Sun claims it has already pre-compiled and tested more than 185 open source applications including Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, and others to back up its claim. If you have been working with Linux code, Sun's Linux Compatibility Assurance Toolkit 1.1 (LinCAT) scans and analyzes your C/C++ source code files to identify any porting issues that might exist and estimates the total effort required to port the Linux code to Solaris 10.
3. Predictive self-healing keeps your AMD system up and running.
Solaris 10 contains a vastly improved set of fault management enhancements and architecture that delivers high level error and fault detection, analysis, and remedies to keep your software or systems from crashing. These predictive self-healing features are only available on the AMD Opteron and SPARC systems. Solaris 10 automatically monitors AMD 64-bit processor telemetry and ECCs from the system's memory, CPUs, and I/O looking for potential signs of failure. Solaris 10 detects signs of impending failure down to a single core on a multi-core CPU and automatically moves the application and processes running on that CPU or core onto other CPUs or cores. Then it takes the failing CPU offline without shutting down the other processors. It can also take the failing core offline without shutting down the entire CPU. It can even remove a single thread. Solaris 10 is able to keep your AMD systems running because it recognizes and automatically responds to a variety of error types documented in the AMD Bios and Kernel Developers Guide including those that are serious enough to raise machine-check error exceptions. Solaris 10 has rules for monitoring, diagnosing, and responding to different error telemetry. An intelligent machine-check exception handler collects error data, determines the type of error that has occurred, logs the errors and takes appropriate action, if required. A memory-controller kernel driver module analyzes pertinent data about the memory configuration of a node. An enhanced "platform topology" library describes the inter-relationship of the hardware components of a platform and provides a repository for hardware component properties to help with managing and handling system errors. Diagnosis engines automate the process of detecting the cause of a problem. These engines work in conjunction with software agents that are capable of implementing a specific or defined set of procedures that need to be followed depending on the nature of the diagnosis. Furthermore, only the diagnosis appears on your console and it will reference specific locations for more detailed information about the problem. The error message that is displayed provides explicit details about the failure and actions taken.
4. Service manifests for automatic restarts of applications and Solaris services running on AMD servers.
Service manifests are an XML, text-based file that describes the details of how your service or application starts, stops, and runs. If the application fails, Solaris 10 will identify the conditions under which services and applications can be automatically restarted. If failures occur in the system, the service manifest detects if and when an application (or service) needs to be restarted. Solaris 10 understands application dependencies and will automatically restart any other resources a service requires in order to run successfully. It ensures that everything is synchronized correctly before restarting the service. It can even detect changes made to the configuration file that produced a failure and restart the service using the last configuration file that worked successfully before the failure occurred. Detailed error messages describe what actions were performed and why.
5. DTrace speeds up error detection, correction and kernel telemetry.
DTrace dynamically traces every line of code to help you optimize your system calls and application on any platform. DTrace can trace almost any type of function including applications, device drivers, libraries, system calls, and kernel function calls. Approximately 40,000 different probes let you monitor specific details of any execution. DTrace doesn't require any special options to trace how code executes, and lets you easily trace and pinpoint the reason for application or kernel failures without accessing the source code.
6. Memory placement optimization for greater performance on AMD.
Memory placement optimization insures that whenever possible a CPU processor will access the nearest memory for increased performance. AMD's 64-bit systems have NUMA functionality. Although each CPU has an attached memory cache, every CPU can address all the system memory. Since some memory is closer to one CPU than another, performance varies according to where data is placed into memory. Solaris 10 minimizes data latency and increases system performance by always trying to place data in the local memory of the CPU processing the data.
7. Early access to new AMD features through OpenSolaris.
The OpenSolaris community gives you a low-risk option for evaluating new features to enhance your AMD development efforts that may not be currently available in the latest release of the commercial version of the Solaris operating system. OpenSolaris is more than just an open source community—it is also a Web site for collaboration that gives you access to Solaris source code, as well as additional downloads, developer tools, mailing lists, user groups and events. You can find more information at: www.opensolaris.org. The next two Solaris features are examples of new capabilities that you can only access using OpenSolaris source code.
8. ZFS detects and corrects silent data corruption on AMD systems (only available in the open source version of Solaris 10).
ZFS, the next generation, 128-bit file system, is supported on AMD processors. ZFS will be incorporated into the next update of Solaris 10 in mid-June, 2006 but is currently available in OpenSolaris, the open source version of Solaris 10. The importance of this feature to enhance the accuracy of data handling on AMD systems makes it worth mentioning here. ZFS is self-healing, self-managing, and able to detect and correct silent data corruption, including phantom and misdirected data reads and writes. All data is protected with 64-bit checksums, which are stored separately from the data. ZFS offers unlimited scalability, and delivers unprecedented accuracy and performance. ZFS was designed to be endian neutral so you can take disks from a SPARC server and move them to your AMD server.
9. Xen open source virtualization technology maximizes use of AMD servers.
Xen makes it possible to run multiple or different operating systems like SUSE, Red Hat, and Windows on the same hardware, allowing you to maximize the use of your servers. Although Xen is not currently available in the next release of Solaris 10 (June, 2006), one of the advanced features that makes it worth mentioning, is the ability to freeze an operating system and its applications, migrate it to another system, and restart it without rewriting code or drivers. Xen is available through the open source community for early adopters. You can start working with these features by downloading the source code free download at www.sun.com/solaris/get.
So take Solaris 10 for a test flight. With hundreds of new features and more than 200 integrated, pre-built, and pre-tested, open source projects you have power and performance at your fingertips, and smooth air ahead.
Rikki Kirzner is a freelance writer and veteran computer industry professional with experience as an analyst and former Research Director for IDC, Gartner Group, and Meta Group and as a Senior Editor with Open Computing Magazine. Rikki covers software, development, open source, SOA, and mobile computing.
