Comparison of SVR4 and the Solaris Operating Environment

This section describes the main differences between SVR4 and the Solaris operating environment. It points out features that the Solaris operating environment includes that are not available in SVR4 and a few SVR4 features that are not available in the Solaris operating environment.

Additional Features in the Solaris Operating Environment

The Solaris operating environment offers value-added components in addition to the SVR4-based operating system. These make computing easier and create new opportunities for users, system administrators, and developers.

In general, the merge of established UNIX variants into SVR4 and the Solaris operating environment was done by consolidating the existing functionality while maintaining compatibility for existing applications. As a result, features and commands were added or withdrawn in some cases.

Features for the User

For users, the Solaris operating environment incorporates a suite of powerful DeskSet^TM applications to enhance personal productivity. All DeskSet applications rely on the drag-and-drop metaphor, enabling users to carry out complex UNIX commands with a mouse. Some of the features are:

• Workspace manager. Provides basic window management services (open, close, move, and so on), as well as tools that enables user to customize their workspace.

• Desktop integration services. These include ToolTalk^TM, drag and drop, and cut and paste, providing the foundation that enables applications to seamlessly integrate with one another.

• Graphics libraries. These include XGL^TM, Direct Xlib^TM, Solaris PEX^TM, and XIL^TM, providing support for 2D and 3D graphics applications.

• Calendar Manager. A time management application that displays appointments and ToDo items for a day, week, or a month at a glance. It also contains a multibrowse feature that makes scheduling meetings among a group of users easy. Multiple calendars can be overlaid simultaneously to determine convenient meeting time slots at a glance.

• Image Tool. Enables you to load, view and save images of over 40 different formats including PICT, PostScript^TM, TIFF, GIF, JFIF.

• Other tools include a print tool, audio tool, shell tool, clock, and text editor.

Features for the System Administrator

For system administrators, the Solaris operating environment offers a variety of new tools to simplify the administration of a distributed computing environment. These include:

• A 64-bit Solaris application and operating environment (SPARC platforms only) for developing 64-bit applications, allowing new 64-bit applications to manipulate large address spaces, and running a larger number of existing 32-bit applications.

• Device information. Administrators can use these optional utilities to obtain information about installed devices including device names, attributes, and accessibility. Administration can be simplified by creating device allocation pools, a feature not previously found in UNIX systems.

• File system administration. These utilities enable administrators to create, copy, mount, debug, repair, and unmount file systems; create and remove hard file links and named pipes; and manage volumes.

• Interprocess communication. Two interprocess communication utilities create, remove, and report on the status of the system's interprocess communication facilities (message queues, semaphores, and shared memory IDs). They provide information helpful in tuning the system.

• Process management. The process management utilities help you control system scheduling. Using these utilities, you can generate reports on performance, logins, disk access locations; and seek distances to better tune system performance. In addition, you can change the system run level, kill active processes, time the execution of commands, and change the default scheduling priorities of kernel, timesharing, and real-time processes.

• System accounting. The accounting utilities enable system administrators to track system usage by CPU, user, and process for better resource allocation.

• System information. These utilities report system memory and system configuration. The system administrator can use the utilities to change the names of the systems and the network node.

• User and group management. With these utilities, a system administrator can create and delete entries in group and password databases, specify default home directories and environments, maintain user and system logins, and assign group and user IDs. The utilities support both primary and supplementary user groups.

• Admintool. Admintool, which runs under the OpenWindows^TM environment, provides system management facilities to help add hosts, manage the network, and perform many other routine tasks on local systems.

• Auto configuration. The Solaris operating environment has a dynamic kernel, which means that it loads drivers and other modules into memory when the devices are accessed. You no longer need to rebuild the kernel after installation, nor must you add or remove drivers.

• Network Information Services Plus (NIS+). An upward-compatible version of the NIS name service with simpler hierarchical administration, improved security, and faster updates.

• Installation. The Solaris operating environment has an install GUI to ease installation or upgrades. Automatic installations and upgrades are also possible over the network.

• Security. The automated security enhancement tool (ASET) is a utility that improves security by allowing system administrators to check system file settings including permissions, ownership, and file contents. ASET warns users about potential security problems and, where appropriate, sets the system file permissions autonomically according to the specified security level.

• AnswerBook2 man page format. Man pages are available in AnswerBook2 (SGML), rather than AnswerBook format. This provides improvements in navigation and links to man pages directly from other AnswerBook2 documents.

Features for the Developer

For application developers, the Solaris operating environment includes a variety of toolkits and features to simplify the development of complex applications with graphical user interfaces.

• Multithreaded (MT) kernel. MT provides for a symmetric multiprocessing kernel where multiple processors can execute the kernel at the same time. Applications can be structured as several independent computations rather than as one thread of control. Independent computations execute more efficiently because the operating system handles the interleaving of the independent operations. This benefit of multithreading is known as application concurrency.

• STREAMS. STREAMS is a flexible framework for character input and output (I/O) that has been implemented throughout SVR4. It is easily customized for applications.

• Expanded fundamental types. ID data types (uid, pid, device IDs, and the like) and certain other data types are expanded to 32 bits. This improves the scalability of the operating system in large systems and for use in large organizations.

• Device driver interfaces. There are three types of interfaces for Solaris device drivers: device kernel interface (DKI), device driver interface (DDI), and the device driver interface/device kernel interface (DDI/DKI). DDI/DKI conformance means that device drivers have better source and binary compatibility across SPARC platforms so developers can write one driver to support a peripheral on all SPARC platforms.

• Automatic device driver loading. This makes drivers easier to install and devices easier to access.

• Device configuration library. The libdevinfo library, used to obtain device configuration information, has been made more robust and comprehensive in Solaris 7 software. For more information, see the man page libdevinfo(3).

• Dynamic linking. The Solaris application environment supports static and dynamic linking of libraries. The linker uses the version numbers of the libraries and executables to link applications with the proper libraries, routines, and interfaces.

• Operating environment. Supports a 32-bit application and operating environment for developing 64-bit applications and running a large number of existing 32-bit applications. Also supports a 64-bit application and operating environment for developing 64-bit applications, allowing new 64-bit applications to manipulate large address spaces and running a large number of existing 32-bit applications.

• WebNFS Software Development Kit. The WebNFS Software Development Kit (SDK) provides remote file access for Java applications using WebNFS. Since it implements the NFS protocol directly, it requires no NFS support on the host system.

SVR4 Features Excluded From the Solaris Environment

In a few instances, features in SVR4 were not include in the Solaris operating environment. These features are specific to AT&T hardware, or features included primarily for backward compatibility with SVR3 features and are, therefore, of little value to SunOS users.

The Solaris operating environment does not include the System V file system and associated utilities because of their limitations compared to the UNIX file system. The SVR4 boot file system was not included because of its maintenance burden when compared to the SunOS traditional boot model.

The generic AT&T SVR4 model for device auto-configuration and for rebuilding kernels was replaced with a fully dynamically configurable kernel better suited to the needs of present and future users of SPARC systems.

Because there is no installed base of SPARC XENIX programs, the SPARC release of the Solaris operating environment does not include compatibility for XENIX applications.

The Solaris operating environment does not include the AT&T SVR4 sysadm utility. Because the sysadm menu utility was designed primarily for use with terminal devices on freestanding systems, GUI tools are used instead to simplify administration of distributed systems across a network. The Solaris operating environment provides the utilities and configuration directories that underlie the SVR4 sysadm utility but not the sysadm utility itself.