OpenSolaris has been developed to make the most of the potential in the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series (code named Nehalem), or so Nischal Rao would have the readers of his blog "OpenSolaris Unleashes the Power of Intel Nehalem" believe. He cites several examples of the strengths to be found in OpenSolaris as the Nehalem processor of choice.
The collaboration between Sun's OpenSolaris team and Intel has produced results in the areas of power management and CPU utilization, Rao writes, resulting in the development of the PowerTOP tool, based on DTrace, that enables users to observe power consumption in the system, highlighting any inefficiencies in the Solaris OS
No longer is it necessary to occupy the system with such background processing tasks as clock interrupts since the service provided by the clock has been re-implemented so as not to require the system to awaken when there it is truly in an idle state. Rao says this feature is also useful in the management of the multiple clocks involved in the different instances of a virtualized server.
Rao is also fond of the Power Aware Dispatcher, which communicates with the power management system, keeping track of the resources being used, resulting in a reduction of around 20% in idle power consumption. He adds that this process is event driven and that no polling is involved in "waking up" the system.
Another advance is in the areas of the microcode update and the faster reboot, which enables bug fixes in the Intel processor without requiring updates to the BIOS. Changes can be made with the system running, and the reboot feature bypasses the BIOS, resulting in increased reboot efficiency, he writes.
There have been improvements in reliability as well, Rao observes, enabling the Solaris platform to employ its predictive self-healing capabilities with the Intel Nehalem processor. Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA), which detects and automatically avoids repeated hardware faults in system components, has been extended to utilize status information from Intel Nehalem, he explains.
Not surprisingly, the synergy of these two solutions has enabled Sun and Intel to set two new world-record benchmarks for Solaris on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series:
- Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark - This benchmark highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP software on Intel Xeon-based systems from Sun as well as seamless multilingual support available for SAP ERP applications.
- Thomson Reuters Market Data System Benchmark - This new benchmark demonstrates that Solaris 10 OS has a very robust implementation of 10Gb Ethernet protocol -- and that deploying traditional RDMS topology over that network infrastructure can result in throughput of up to 850,000 messages per second with end-to-end latency of less than one millisecond.
Finally, Rao blogs, Intel has named Solaris as its enterprise class, mission critical UNIX OS for the Intel Xeon processor-based servers.