Sun Solaris File System - Overview

Sun Solaris File System

In the early 1990s Sun replaced the BSD-derived SunOS 4 with a version of UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4), jointly developed with AT&T. The underlying release name was SunOS 5.0, but a new marketing name was introduced at the same time: Solaris 2. While SunOS 4.1.x micro releases were retroactively named Solaris 1 by Sun, the name Solaris is almost exclusively used to refer to SVR4-derived SunOS 5.0 and later.
Solaris is considered to be the SunOS operating system plus a graphical user environment, ONC+, and other components. The SunOS minor version is included in the Solaris release name; for example, Solaris 2.4 incorporated SunOS 5.4. After Solaris 2.6, Sun dropped the "2." from the name, so Solaris 7 incorporates SunOS 5.7, and the latest release SunOS 5.10 forms the core of Solaris 10.

Supported architectures

Solaris uses a common code base for the architectures it supports: SPARC and x86 (including x86-64). It was also ported to the PowerPC architecture (PowerPC Reference Platform) for version 2.5.1, but the port was cancelled almost as soon as it was released. Support for Itanium was at one time planned but never brought to market. Sun also plans to implement support for the ABI of the Linux platform in a future update to Solaris 10, allowing Solaris to run native Linux binaries on x86 systems. This feature is called "Solaris Containers for Linux Applications" or SCLA
Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to SMP, supporting a large number of CPUs.[5] It has historically been tightly integrated with Sun's SPARC hardware, with which it is designed and marketed as a combined package, and has included support for 64-bit SPARC applications since Solaris 7. This has often led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium over commodity PC hardware. However, it has also supported x86 systems since Solaris 2.1 and the latest version of Solaris, Solaris 10, has been designed with AMD64 in mind, allowing Sun to capitalize on the availability of commodity 64-bit CPUs based on the AMD64 architecture. Sun has heavily marketed Solaris with its AMD64-based workstations and servers, which range from dual-core to 16-core models as of December 2006.

Desktop environments

The first Solaris desktop environment was Open Windows, previously bundled with SunOS 4.1.x releases. It was superseded by CDE in Solaris 2.5 onwards. Sun's Java Desktop System, which is based on GNOME, is included with Solaris 10.