Solaris is a proprietary

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

originally developed by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, th ...

. After the

Sun acquisition by Oracle The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. After the acquisition was completed, Oracle, only a software vendor prior to the merger, owned Sun's hardware product lines, such as SPARC Enterprise, a ...

in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris. Solaris superseded the company's earlier

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 and ...

in 1993, and became known for its

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

, especially on

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed i ...

systems, and for originating many innovative features such as

DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released unde ...

ZFS ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an open ...

and Time Slider. Solaris supports SPARC and

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''worksta ...

s and servers from Oracle and other vendors. Solaris was registered as compliant with the Single UNIX Specification until 29 April 2019. Historically, Solaris was developed as

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and in ...

. In June 2005, Sun Microsystems released most of the

codebase In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code files; thus, a code ...

under the CDDL license, and founded the

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around th ...

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

project. With OpenSolaris, Sun wanted to build a developer and user community around the software. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010, Oracle decided to discontinue the OpenSolaris distribution and the development model. In August 2010, Oracle discontinued providing public updates to the source code of the Solaris kernel, effectively turning Solaris 11 back into a

closed source Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and in ...

proprietary operating system. Following that, OpenSolaris was forked as

illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device ...

and is alive through several illumos distributions. In September 2017, Oracle laid off most of the Solaris teams. In 2011, the Solaris 11 kernel

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

leaked. Through the

Oracle Technology Network Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

(OTN), industry partners can gain access to the in-development Solaris source code. Solaris is developed under a proprietary development model, and only the source for open-source components of Solaris 11 is available for download from Oracle.

History

In 1987,

AT&T Corporation AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...

and Sun announced that they were collaborating on a project to merge the most popular Unix variants on the market at that time:

Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

UNIX System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

, and

Xenix Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and e ...

. This became Unix

System V Release 4 Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

(SVR4). On September 4, 1991, Sun announced that it would replace its existing BSD-derived Unix, SunOS 4, with one based on SVR4. This was identified internally as ''SunOS 5'', but a new marketing name was introduced at the same time: ''Solaris 2''. The justification for this new overbrand was that it encompassed not only SunOS, but also the

OpenWindows OpenWindows is a discontinued desktop environment for Sun Microsystems workstations which combined SunView, NeWS, and X Window System protocols. OpenWindows was included in later releases of the SunOS 4 and Solaris operating systems, until its r ...

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

and

Open Network Computing __NOTOC__ Open Network Computing (ONC) Remote Procedure Call (RPC), commonly known as Sun RPC is a remote procedure call system. ONC was originally developed by Sun Microsystems in the 1980s as part of their Network File System project. ONC is ba ...

(ONC) functionality. Although SunOS 4.1.''x'' micro releases were retroactively named ''Solaris 1'' by Sun, the Solaris name is used almost exclusively to refer only to the releases based on SVR4-derived SunOS 5.0 and later. For releases based on SunOS 5, the SunOS minor version is included in the Solaris release number. For example, Solaris 2.4 incorporates SunOS 5.4. After Solaris 2.6, the ''2.'' was dropped from the release name, so Solaris 7 incorporates SunOS 5.7, and the latest release SunOS 5.11 forms the core of Solaris 11.4. Although SunSoft stated in its initial Solaris 2 press release their intent to eventually support both SPARC and x86 systems, the first two Solaris 2 releases, 2.0 and 2.1, were SPARC-only. An x86 version of Solaris 2.1 was released in June 1993, about 6 months after the SPARC version, as a

desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

and uniprocessor workgroup server operating system. It included the Wabi emulator to support Windows applications. At the time, Sun also offered the

Interactive Unix Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 19 ...

system that it had acquired from

Interactive Systems Corporation Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 19 ...

. In 1994, Sun released Solaris 2.4, supporting both SPARC and x86 systems from a unified source code base. On September 2, 2017, Simon Phipps, a former Sun Microsystems employee not hired by Oracle in the acquisition, reported on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, an ...

that Oracle had laid off the Solaris core development staff, which many interpreted as sign that Oracle no longer intended to support future development of the platform. While Oracle did have a large layoff of Solaris development engineering staff, development continued and Solaris 11.4 was released in 2018.

Supported architectures

Solaris uses a common

code base In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

for the platforms it supports: 64-bit

and

. Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to

symmetric multiprocessing Symmetric multiprocessing or shared-memory multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware and software architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single, shared main memory, have full access to all ...

, supporting a large number of

CPUs A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

. It has historically been tightly integrated with Sun's SPARC hardware (including support for

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A comput ...

applications since Solaris 7), with which it is marketed as a combined package. This has led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium compared to

commodity In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. The price of a co ...

PC hardware. However, it has supported x86 systems since Solaris 2.1 and 64-bit x86 applications since Solaris 10, allowing Sun to capitalize on the availability of commodity 64-bit CPUs based on the

architecture. Sun heavily marketed Solaris for use with both its own x86-64-based Sun Java Workstation and the x86-64 models of the

Sun Ultra series The Sun Ultra series is a discontinued line of workstation and server computers developed and sold by Sun Microsystems, comprising two distinct generations. The original line was introduced in 1995 and discontinued in 2001. This generation wa ...

s, and servers based on

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufact ...

Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sledge ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same arc ...

processors, as well as x86 systems manufactured by companies such as

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), Server (computin ...

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

, and IBM. , the following vendors support Solaris for their x86 server systems: * Dell – will "test, certify, and optimize Solaris and OpenSolaris on its rack and blade servers and offer them as one of several choices in the overall Dell software menu" * Intel * Hewlett Packard Enterprise – distributes and provides software technical support for Solaris on BL, DL, and SL platforms * Fujitsu Siemens

Other platforms

Solaris 2.5.1 included support for the

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM� ...

platform (

PowerPC Reference Platform PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP) was a standard system architecture for PowerPC-based computer systems (as well as a reference implementation) developed at the same time as the PowerPC processor architecture. Published by IBM in 1994, it allo ...

), but the port was canceled before the Solaris 2.6 release. In January 2006, a community of developers at

Blastwave In fluid dynamics, a blast wave is the increased pressure and flow resulting from the deposition of a large amount of energy in a small, very localised volume. The flow field can be approximated as a lead shock wave, followed by a self-similar sub ...

began work on a PowerPC port which they named ''Polaris''. In October 2006, an

community project based on the

efforts and Sun Labs' ''Project Pulsar'', which re-integrated the relevant parts from Solaris 2.5.1 into OpenSolaris, announced its first official source code release. A port of Solaris to the Intel

Itanium Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computin ...

architecture was announced in 1997 but never brought to market. On November 28, 2007, IBM, Sun, and Sine Nomine Associates demonstrated a preview of

OpenSolaris for System z OpenSolaris for System z is a discontinuedGavin Clarke, 29 March 2010Sun's IBM-mainframe flower wilts under Oracle's hard gaze ''The Register'' port of the OpenSolaris operating system to the IBM System z line of mainframe computers. History O ...

running on an

IBM System z IBM Z is a family name used by IBM for all of its z/Architecture mainframe computers. In July 2017, with another generation of products, the official family was changed to IBM Z from IBM z Systems; the IBM Z family now includes the newest mod ...

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

under

z/VM z/VM is the current version in IBM's VM family of virtual machine operating systems. z/VM was first released in October 2000 and remains in active use and development . It is directly based on technology and concepts dating back to the 1960s, wi ...

, called ''Sirius'' (in analogy to the Polaris project, and also due to the primary developer's Australian nationality: HMS ''Sirius'' of 1786 was a ship of the

First Fleet The First Fleet was a fleet of 11 ships that brought the first European and African settlers to Australia. It was made up of two Royal Navy vessels, three store ships and six convict transports. On 13 May 1787 the fleet under the command o ...

to Australia). On October 17, 2008, a prototype release of Sirius was made available and on November 19 the same year, IBM authorized the use of Sirius on System z

Integrated Facility for Linux The Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) is an IBM mainframe and Power Systems processor dedicated to running the Linux operating system. On IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE machines, IFLs can be used with or without hypervisors such as z/VM and KVM. IF ...

(IFL) processors. Solaris also supports the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which in ...

platform

application binary interface In computer software, an application binary interface (ABI) is an interface between two binary program modules. Often, one of these modules is a library or operating system facility, and the other is a program that is being run by a user. An ' ...

(ABI), allowing Solaris to run native Linux

binaries A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. The term "binary file" is often used as a term meaning "non-text file". Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text; for example, some computer document file ...

on x86 systems. This feature is called ''Solaris Containers for Linux Applications'' (SCLA), based on the

branded zones Solaris Containers (including Solaris Zones) is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization technology for x86 and SPARC systems, first released publicly in February 2004 in build 51 beta of Solaris 10, and subsequently in the fi ...

functionality introduced in Solaris 10 8/07.

Installation and usage options

Solaris can be installed from various pre-packaged software groups, ranging from a minimalistic ''Reduced Network Support'' to a complete ''Entire Plus

OEM An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...

''. Installation of Solaris is not necessary for an individual to use the system. Additional software, like Apache, MySQL, etc. can be installed as well in a packaged form from ''sunfreeware'' and OpenCSW. Solaris can be installed from physical media or a network for use on a desktop or server, or be used without installing on a desktop or server.

Desktop environments

Early releases of Solaris used

as the standard desktop environment. In Solaris 2.0 to 2.2, OpenWindows supported both

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. New ...

and X applications, and provided

backward compatibility Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especially ...

for

SunView SunView (Sun Visual Integrated Environment for Workstations, originally SunTools) is a discontinued windowing system from Sun Microsystems developed in the early 1980s. It was included as part of SunOS, Sun's UNIX implementation; unlike later U ...

applications from Sun's older desktop environment. NeWS allowed applications to be built in an

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...

way using

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug B ...

, a common printing language released in 1982. The

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

originated from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Project Athena Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. , At ...

in 1984 and allowed for the display of an application to be disconnected from the machine where the application was running, separated by a network connection. Sun's original bundled SunView application suite was ported to X. Sun later dropped support for legacy SunView applications and NeWS with OpenWindows 3.3, which shipped with Solaris 2.3, and switched to

X11R5 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

with

Display Postscript Display PostScript (or DPS) is a 2D graphics engine system for computers which uses the PostScript (PS) imaging model and language (originally developed for computer printing) to generate on-screen graphics. To the basic PS system, DPS adds a num ...

support. The graphical look and feel remained based upon

OPEN LOOK OPEN LOOK (sometimes referred to as Open Look) is a graphical user interface (GUI) specification for UNIX workstations. It was originally defined in the late 1980s by Sun Microsystems and AT&T Corporation. History OPEN LOOK was created at a ...

. OpenWindows 3.6.2 was the last release under Solaris 8. The OPEN LOOK Window Manager (

olwm olwm (OPEN LOOK Window Manager) was the default stacking window manager for OpenWindows, the original X11 desktop environment included with SunOS and Solaris. Its unique characteristic is its implementation of the OPEN LOOK look and feel. Scot ...

) with other OPEN LOOK specific applications were dropped in Solaris 9, but support libraries were still bundled, providing long term binary backwards compatibility with existing applications. The OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager (olvwm) can still be downloaded for Solaris from sunfreeware and works on releases as recent as Solaris 10. Sun and other Unix vendors created an industry alliance to standardize Unix desktops. As a member of the

Common Open Software Environment The Common Open Software Environment (COSE) was an initiative formed in March 1993 by the major Unix vendors of the time to create open, unified operating system (OS) standards. Background The COSE process was established during a time when th ...

(COSE) initiative, Sun helped co-develop the

Common Desktop Environment The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercial ...

(CDE). This was an initiative to create a standard Unix desktop environment. Each vendor contributed different components:

contributed the

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...

, IBM provided the

file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage computer files, files and folder (computing), folders. The most common Computer file#Operations, operations performed on files or groups of files inclu ...

, and Sun provided the

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

and calendar facilities as well as drag-and-drop support (

ToolTalk ToolTalk is an interapplication communications system developed by Sun Microsystems (SunSoft) in order to allow applications to communicate with each other at runtime. Applications supporting ToolTalk can construct "high-level" messages and hand ...

). This new desktop environment was based upon the Motif look and feel and the old OPEN LOOK desktop environment was considered legacy. CDE unified Unix desktops across multiple open system vendors. CDE was available as an unbundled add-on for Solaris 2.4 and 2.5, and was included in Solaris 2.6 through 10. In 2001, Sun issued a preview release of the open-source desktop environment

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its character ...

1.4, based on the

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propriet ...

toolkit, for Solaris 8. Solaris 9 8/03 introduced GNOME 2.0 as an alternative to CDE. Solaris 10 includes Sun's

Java Desktop System Java Desktop System, briefly known as OpenSolaris Desktop, is a legacy desktop environment developed first by Sun Microsystems and then by Oracle Corporation after the 2010 Oracle acquisition of Sun. Java Desktop System is available for Solaris ...

(JDS), which is based on GNOME and comes with a large set of applications, including

StarOffice StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary office suite, intended to compete with the marketing-leading Microsoft Office. It served as the basis for open-source suites OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the OpenOffice.org XML ...

, Sun's

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings ...

. Sun describes JDS as a "major component" of Solaris 10. The Java Desktop System is not included in Solaris 11 which instead ships with a stock version of GNOME. Likewise, CDE applications are no longer included in Solaris 11, but many libraries remain for binary backwards compatibility. The open source desktop environments

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

and Xfce, along with numerous other

window managers A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjuncti ...

, also compile and run on recent versions of Solaris. Sun was investing in a new desktop environment called

Project Looking Glass Project Looking Glass is a now inactive free software project under the GPL to create an innovative 3D desktop environment for Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It was sponsored by Sun Microsystems. Looking Glass is programmed in the Java language u ...

since 2003. The project has been inactive since late 2006.

License

Traditional operating system license (1982 to 2004)

For versions up to 2005 (Solaris 9), Solaris was licensed under a license that permitted a customer to buy licenses in bulk, and install the software on any machine up to a maximum number. The key license grant was: In addition, the license provided a "License to Develop" granting rights to create derivative works, restricted copying to only a single archival copy, disclaimer of warranties, and the like. The license varied only little through 2004.

Open source (2005 until March 2010)

From 2005–10, Sun began to release the source code for development builds of Solaris under the

Common Development and Distribution License The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under oth ...

(CDDL) via the

project. This code was based on the work being done for the post-Solaris 10 release (code-named "Nevada"; eventually released as Oracle Solaris 11). As the project progressed, it grew to encompass most of the necessary code to compile an entire release, with a few exceptions.

Post-Sun closed source (March 2010 to present)

When Sun was acquired by

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ''o ...

in 2010, the OpenSolaris project was discontinued after the board became unhappy with Oracle's stance on the project. In March 2010, the previously freely available Solaris 10 was placed under a restrictive license that limited the use, modification and redistribution of the operating system. The license allowed the user to download the operating system free of charge, through the

, and use it for a 90-day trial period. After that trial period had expired the user would then have to purchase a support contract from Oracle to continue using the operating system. With the release of Solaris 11 in 2011, the license terms changed again. The new license allows Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 to be downloaded free of charge from the Oracle Technology Network and used without a support contract indefinitely; however, the license only expressly permits the user to use Solaris as a development platform and expressly forbids commercial and "production" use. Educational use is permitted in some circumstances. From the OTN license: When Solaris is used without a support contract it can be upgraded to each new "point release"; however, a support contract is required for access to patches and updates that are released monthly.

Version history

Notable features of Solaris include

Doors A door is a hinged or otherwise movable barrier that allows ingress (entry) into and egress (exit) from an enclosure. The created opening in the wall is a ''doorway'' or ''portal''. A door's essential and primary purpose is to provide security by ...

Service Management Facility Service Management Facility (SMF) is a feature of the Solaris operating system as of version 10 and OpenSolaris-descendant illumos with its illumos distributions, that creates a supported, unified model for services and service management on each S ...

Solaris Containers Solaris Containers (including Solaris Zones) is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization technology for x86 and SPARC systems, first released publicly in February 2004 in build 51 beta of Solaris 10, and subsequently in the fi ...

, Solaris Multiplexed I/O,

Solaris Volume Manager Solaris Volume Manager (SVM; formerly known as Online: DiskSuite, and later Solstice DiskSuite) is a software package for creating, modifying and controlling RAID-0 (concatenation and stripe) volumes, RAID-1 (mirror) volumes, RAID 0+1 volumes, RAID ...

, and

Solaris Trusted Extensions Solaris Trusted Extensions is a set of security extensions incorporated in the Solaris 10 operating system by Sun Microsystems, featuring a mandatory access control model. It succeeds Trusted Solaris, a family of security-evaluated operating syst ...

. Updates to Solaris versions are periodically issued. In the past, these were named after the month and year of their release, such as "Solaris 10 1/13"; as of Solaris 11, sequential update numbers are appended to the release name with a period, such as "Oracle Solaris 11.4". In ascending order, the following versions of Solaris have been released: A more comprehensive summary of some Solaris versions is also available. Solaris releases are also described in the Solaris 2 FAQ.

Development release

The underlying Solaris codebase has been under continuous development since work began in the late 1980s on what was eventually released as Solaris 2.0. Each version such as Solaris 10 is based on a snapshot of this development codebase, taken near the time of its release, which is then maintained as a derived project. Updates to that project are built and delivered several times a year until the next official release comes out. The Solaris version under development by Sun since the release of Solaris 10 in 2005, was codenamed ''Nevada'', and is derived from what is now the

codebase. In 2003, an addition to the Solaris development process was initiated. Under the program name ''Software Express for Solaris'' (or just ''Solaris Express''), a binary release based on the current development basis was made available for download on a monthly basis, allowing anyone to try out new features and test the quality and stability of the OS as it progressed to the release of the next official Solaris version. A later change to this program introduced a quarterly release model with support available, renamed ''Solaris Express Developer Edition'' (SXDE). In 2007, Sun announced ''Project Indiana'' with several goals, including providing an open source binary distribution of the OpenSolaris project, replacing SXDE. The first release of this distribution was ''OpenSolaris 2008.05''. The ''Solaris Express Community Edition'' (SXCE) was intended specifically for OpenSolaris developers. It was updated every two weeks until it was discontinued in January 2010, with a recommendation that users migrate to the OpenSolaris distribution. Although the download license seen when downloading the image files indicates its use is limited to personal, educational and evaluation purposes, the license acceptance form displayed when the user actually installs from these images lists additional uses including commercial and production environments. SXCE releases terminated with build 130 and OpenSolaris releases terminated with build 134 a few weeks later. The next release of OpenSolaris based on build 134 was due in March 2010, but it was never fully released, though the packages were made available on the package repository. Instead, Oracle renamed the binary distribution Solaris 11 Express, changed the license terms and released build 151a as 2010.11 in November 2010.

Open source derivatives

Current

– A fully open source fork of the project, started in 2010 by a community of Sun OpenSolaris engineers and

Nexenta OS Nexenta OS, officially known as the Nexenta Core Platform, is a discontinued computer operating system based on OpenSolaris and Ubuntu (operating system), Ubuntu that runs on IA-32- and x86-64-based systems. It emerged in fall 2005, after Sun M ...

. Note that OpenSolaris was not 100% open source: Some drivers and some libraries were property of other companies that Sun (now Oracle) licensed and was not able to release. *

OpenIndiana OpenIndiana is a free and open-source illumos distribution Unix-derived System V SVR4 operating system, started as OpenSolaris continuation project. Forked from OpenSolaris after OpenSolaris was discontinued by Oracle Corporation, OpenIndiana ...

– A project under the illumos umbrella aiming "''... to become the de facto OpenSolaris distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are required free of charge.''" * SchilliX – The first LiveCD released after OpenSolaris code was opened to public. * napp-it – A webmanaged ZFS storage appliance based on Solaris and the free forks like OmniOS with a Free and Pro edition. *

NexentaStor NexentaStor is an OpenSolaris or more recently Illumos distribution optimized for virtualization, storage area networks, network-attached storage, and iSCSI or Fibre Channel applications employing the ZFS file system. Like OpenSolaris, NexentaStor ...

– Optimized for storage workloads, based on Nexenta OS. *

SmartOS SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with Linux's KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributed to the illumos project. It features several technologies: Cros ...

– Virtualization centered derivative from

Joyent Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics. Services Triton, J ...

Discontinued

– A project initiated by

, discontinued after the acquisition by Oracle. *

(discontinued October 31, 2012) – First distribution based on

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

userland with Solaris-derived kernel. * StormOS (discontinued September 14, 2012) – A lightweight desktop OS based on

and Xfce. * MartUX – The first

distribution of OpenSolaris, with an

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

prototype released by Martin Bochnig in April 2006. It was distributed as a

Live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading f ...

but is later available only on DVD as it has had the

community software added. Its goal was to become a desktop operating system. The first SPARC release was a small Live CD, released as marTux_0.2 Live CD in summer of 2006, the first straight OpenSolaris distribution for SPARC (not to be confused with GNOME metacity theme). It was later re-branded as MartUX and the next releases included full SPARC installers in addition to the Live media. Much later, MartUX was re-branded as OpenSXCE when it moved to the first OpenSolaris release to support both SPARC and Intel architectures after Sun was acquired by Oracle. * MilaX – A small Live CD/Live USB with minimal set of packages to fit a 90 MB image. *

Dyson Dyson may refer to: * Dyson (surname), people with the surname Dyson * Dyson (company), a Singaporean multinational home appliances company founded by James Dyson * Dyson (crater), a crater on the Moon * Dyson (operating system), a Unix general- ...

– illumos kernel with

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

userland and packages from

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of Deb ...

. Project is no longer active and the website is offline. * EON ZFS Storage – A

NAS Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones. Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to: Aviation * Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea * National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia ** Nas Air ...

implementation targeted at embedded systems. * Jaris OS – Live DVD and also installable. Pronounced according to the IPA but in English as Yah-Rees. This distribution has been heavily modified to fully support a version of Wine called Madoris that can install and run Windows programs at native speed. Jaris stands for "Japanese Solaris". Madoris is a combination of the Japanese word for Windows "mado" and Solaris. * OpenSXCE – An OpenSolaris distribution release for both

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculati ...

and

x86 platforms and

microprocessors, initially produced from OpenSolaris source code repository, ported to the illumos source code repository to form OpenIndiana's first SPARC distribution. Notably, the first OpenSolaris distribution with illumos source for SPARC based upon OpenIndiana, OpenSXCE finally moved to a new source code repository, based upon DilOS.

Reception

*Robert Lipschutz and Gregg Harrington from

PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...

reviewed Solaris 9 in 2002: *Robert Lipschutz also reviewed Solaris 10: *Tom Henderson reviewed Solaris 10 for

Network World International Data Group (IDG, Inc.) is a market intelligence and demand generation company focused on the technology industry. IDG, Inc.’s mission is centered around supporting the technology industry through research, data, marketing technol ...

: *Robert Escue for

OSNews OSNews is a computing online newspaper. It originally focused on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997, but is now aggregating consumer electronics news. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner. ...

: *Thomas Greene for

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tech ...

References

External links

*
Solaris Documentation
*
Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle and Sun System Software and Operating Systems
*
SunHELP
– Sun/Solaris News, References, and Information
Nikolai Bezroukov. Solaris vs. Linux: Ecosystem-based Approach and Framework for the Comparison in Large Enterprise Environments
– Large Softpanorama article comparing Solaris 10 and Linux 2.6 * – Solaris information site by Michael Holve {{DEFAULTSORT:Solaris (Operating System) 1993 software Formerly free software OpenSolaris Oracle Corporation Oracle software Proprietary operating systems Sun Microsystems software UNIX System V X86 operating systems