sunpresentation/longforgettenunix

Sun Microsystems and their forgetten impact on modern linux and computing

Sun began in 1982 and they were known for their UNIX machines

Now, what is UNIX
UNIX was an Operating System developed at Bell Labs (AT&T) and was the inspiration for Linux
It started in 1969 by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others for use on their PDP-11 and VAX machines

AT&T at this time was not the AT&T we all know and tolerate today they werea much larger company doing many things, such as making UNIX.
They were able to do this because they had basically a total monopoly on the telephone market in the US and therefor had loads of cash

In 1956 they got naenaed with a antitrust consent decree that prevented them from selling UNIX direct to consumers among other things and all of UNIX development happened after 1956. They were able to license it to other companies
These other companies took UNIX's source code and hit it with bbq hammers and made their own UNIX that had features unique to their version. One of these companies was Sun.

Sun licensed UNIX and called their version Solaris

Sun believeing all of there stuff should be open wanted to opensource Solaris but the license that they got from AT&T wouldnt allow that
so they did what the BSDS did and remade parts of the system so they could opensource it. The opensourced version of Solaris was called OpenSolaris and every componant in it could be used elsewhere.
However the user had to adhere to the liccense terms OpenSolaris was licensed under which is the CDDL which is GPL incompatible

Sun made many things for Solaris that made their way to OpenSolaris that we use today.
NFS the network file system aka "allow me to access files over the network linux edition inator"
ZFS did compression, snapshotting, data bit parity magic or whatever and existed long before btrfs

Sun made other things not exclusivly for Solaris that ended up being open sourced as well
Java Sun made Java. The funny programming language that everyone likes and no one dislikes

Sun also had a habit of buying companies that made software
Virtualbox virutalization software
mysql database software
Netbeans IDE sun bought it then made it opensource
and many others

Lets shift over to what Solaris ran on.

Solaris run on Sun's own hardware. I'll use the Ultra25 as an example

The bios equivalent that it uses is called OpenBoot which is made by Sun.

OpenBoot is Sun's implementation of OpenFirmware, which Sun made, and they made it into an IEEE standard so that everyone could use and implement their own versions. Speciically it was IEEE 1275-1994
OpenBoot is really nice compared to what we had on PCs at the time before UEFI.

Features it had included
Interpreter uses the FORTH language
Network booting
Booting from many kinds of media
Can interact with OpenBoot entirly through serial or keyboard and screen.
Was designed to be platform indepentent, for example the device drivers for the GPU are stored on the GPU using FCODE which is like compiled forth and
OpenBoot can read the GPU and execture the FCODE on it. Unlike in x86 land where GPUs have x86 code stored on them which isnt very platform independent

OpenFirmware wasn't that widely used outside of Sun and today was surpassed by UEFI and U-Boot. But the most widely used platform that had OpenFirmware was Apple's PowerPC Macs
Which Apple started using UEFI after they switch to Intel.

But which CPU did Solaris run on?
Sun made their own CPU architecture called SPARC and made their own CPUS with it
SPARC is a RISC architecture that just like everything else SUN made is also an open archtecture. The SPARC ISA is also an IEEE standard. Standard IEEE 1754-1994 to be exact.
Their later core designs in the T era were even open so you could copy it and make your own SPARC cpu based off their design
Interestingly this happened well before the rise of RISC-V
SPARC had a 64 bit version in 1993 called SPARCV9 which released 10 years before AMD launched their Opteron line of CPUS that brought 64 bit to x86

the Ultra 25 came out in 2006 and when I ran a cpu benchmark (ffmpeg opus encode) it ran significantly worse than my core 2 duo 1.6 ghz laptop (same year) which i think isnt that good

Where is Solaris and friends today?

Basically dead!
One fateful day in 2010 Evil Oracle bought out Sun Microsystems and they were evil and made most things Sun made propritary again
Under Oracle's leadership they stopped making Opensolaris around 2010 and every version of solaris since was propritary and the same thing happened with ZFS
Then in 2017 Oracle laid off the people that worked on Solaris and their SPARC line ending development of Solaris and SPARC
The latest SPARC CPU came out in 2017.
Here in the year 2025 support for SPARC isnt that good anymore

Here is a list of Operating Systems that I have either tried or are marked as supported on my Ultra 25 with varying levels of funcitonality
Debian (ports) - the sparc64 port of debian is handled by the ports team and doesnt get that much support unlike x86_64 arm riscv etc.
for me I installed Debian 12 bookworm and it would kernal panic however Debian 9 worked fine but suffered from old and no repo syncdrome
Gentoo - I can barely wrap my head around Gentoo on x86_64 let alone on the Ultra 25. The live iso booted but thats as far as i have gotten
T2 SDE - it says it is supported and the live ISO boots but i havent managed to install it possible due to skill issue idk
NetBSD - is supported but i havent tried it because
OpenBSD - i tried OpenBSD and it is so far the best non solaris Operating System that i have gotten running on it. It works perfectly besides the fact the gpu is too old and doesnt have good drivers anymore
Solaris 10 - Works perfectly fine. Although today it is kinda archaic. For example it comes with no package manager that downloads from repos from the internet but you can install this thing called OpenCSW
so you can download more modern packages and it is even still up to date
And after extensive searching i havnt found any more modern OSes that still support the Ultra 25 or any other SPARC machine

I made this in blender