There's a lot of stuff Solaris got right, long before the Linux world did, and in some ways, it's still catching up.
DTrace? Sure, there's a plethora of dynamic tracing tools in linux, but it's honestly just now starting to catch up with eBPF. If eBPF stack traces make it into 4.5, that might be the first time I can look at Linux dynamic tracing and go "Yep, it's arrived"
Systemd certainly apes quite a bit of it's functionality from SMF (and, personally, I'd argue SMF still does basically everything better...)
ZFS? Still the king of filesystem/logical volume management. Btrfs might catch up someday
Zones? Again, still ahead of the linux equivalent in functionality. And lx branded zones are awesome.
I'm not saying nothing needs to advance ever again in the world of OS research, but I think we need to be honest about how much we owe to Sun for having created the modern template for a great amount of functionality that Linux is just now having come into existence, and it's not like things at Joyent, OmniIT, Nexenta, and other Illumos developing shops have stagnated either.
I often disagree with Bryan on specific points, but I think you do him a disservice. While many of the things Sun did might be viewed as an incremental update to existing concepts, it's still something that the Linux community has yet to catch up with.
Anyway, even when he is wrong, I think he often brings up a viewpoint that results in some interesting discussion.
DTrace? Sure, there's a plethora of dynamic tracing tools in linux, but it's honestly just now starting to catch up with eBPF. If eBPF stack traces make it into 4.5, that might be the first time I can look at Linux dynamic tracing and go "Yep, it's arrived"
Systemd certainly apes quite a bit of it's functionality from SMF (and, personally, I'd argue SMF still does basically everything better...)
ZFS? Still the king of filesystem/logical volume management. Btrfs might catch up someday
Zones? Again, still ahead of the linux equivalent in functionality. And lx branded zones are awesome.
I'm not saying nothing needs to advance ever again in the world of OS research, but I think we need to be honest about how much we owe to Sun for having created the modern template for a great amount of functionality that Linux is just now having come into existence, and it's not like things at Joyent, OmniIT, Nexenta, and other Illumos developing shops have stagnated either.
I often disagree with Bryan on specific points, but I think you do him a disservice. While many of the things Sun did might be viewed as an incremental update to existing concepts, it's still something that the Linux community has yet to catch up with.
Anyway, even when he is wrong, I think he often brings up a viewpoint that results in some interesting discussion.