Sun Microsystems and Intel for the past two years have been working to
optimize the Solaris operating system on the Xeon chip platform.
Since the February 2007 announcement of the development and marketing deal,
Sun and Intel have announced several steps in the partnership, including
several new Sun blade and rack servers powered by Xeon chips and the May 2008
launch of Solaris 10 Release 05/8, which continued the optimization of the
operating system on the Intel architecture.
However, while there have been advances, at the forefront of the work has
been Intel's new "Nehalem" microarchitecture, said Herb Hinstorff,
director of business management at Sun.
Intel is launching the quad-core Nehalem EP—now known as the Xeon 5500
series—for two-socket systems March 30, and will roll out another chip series
for servers with four or more sockets later in 2009. The new architecture
offers enhanced power management, performance and virtualization
capabilities, as well as an integrated memory controller similar to what
Advanced Micro Devices offers with Opteron.
"This generation of Nehalem is where people are going to really see big
benefits" of the Sun-Intel work with Solaris, Hinstorff said.
In the area of performance benefits, Hinstorff said Solaris is optimized to
take advantage of new instruction sets in the Nehalem architecture, as well as
such features as the QuickPath chip-to-chip interconnect and Turbo Boost speed
ramping technologies. In addition, Solaris has been enhanced to work well with
the upgraded multithreading capabilities in Nehalem, he said.
"You get full utility out of all those capabilities," he said.
Sun's ZFS file system also is a good match for the performance upgrades in
the new chip, Hinstorff said. Sun March 30 will announce new benchmarks that
illustrate Solaris' performance advantages with Nehalem.
In power efficiency, the Power Aware Dispatcher in Solaris and
OpenSolaris—which helps power down processing cores that aren't being fully
utilized—enhances the energy efficiency features in the Xeon 5500 chip, which
leads to a 20 percent drop in power usage for idle cores, Hinstorff said.
A blog post on Sun's Web site March 29 by Eric Saxe, a Sun engineer working
on Solaris, further outlined the working relationship between the OS and the
Nehalem architecture:
The Solaris Power Aware Dispatcher
(PAD) has increased awareness of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, such
that the workload can be efficiently utilized on available hardware threads,
with benefits for shared pipelines, shared caches, and shared sockets. The
Solaris PAD is able to communicate what processor resources are being used by
the operating system, and which are not.
The Solaris kernel now has the ability
to utilize those parts of the processor that are active, and continue to avoid
doing work on those parts that are powered down.
Together, these two capabilities work
together resulting in greater power efficiency without losing any performance.
This integration enables the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series to enter into a
deeper C-state, and do so with less latency. These capabilities are enabled by
default.
Hinstorff said the DTrace troubleshooting tool and PowerTop feature—which
keeps track of CPU utilization—in Solaris will further enhance the energy
efficiency capabilities of Nehalem.
"Mating [DTrace] with PowerTop … allows PowerTop to provide a much
better way of observing exactly where the power is being used in the
chip," Hinstorff said.
With its Fault Management Architecture, Solaris can help monitor the health
of the cores in Nehalem.
"In this way, systems can keep on running … and it's transparent to [the]
user," Hinstorff said.
Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, said the work Sun and Intel have
done with Solaris on x86 makes sense, particularly given the large number of
users—particularly developers—who use the operating system.
"There's a big Solaris base out there," Haff said.
Haff also pointed out that major OEMs are supporting Solaris on their
Intel-based systems. Most recently, Hewlett-Packard and Sun inked a deal in
February in which HP will distribute and support Solaris
10 on its ProLiant and blade servers.
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