Specifications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Solaris Porting Guide
4
Chapter 1 Introduction
The purpose of this document is to enable developers to resolve issues faced during the migration of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) applications to Oracle Solaris 11. The document describes
similarities and differences between the two environments in terms of architecture, system calls, tools,
utilities, development environments, and operating system features. Wherever possible, it also provides
pointed solutions and workarounds to address the specific porting issues that commonly arise due to
implementation differences on these two platforms.
Using the information presented in this guide, developers should be able to tackle projects ranging
from the smallest data conversion to the largest legacy native-code migration projects.
This document also includes best practices to help developers get the most out of their applications
when running them on Oracle Solaris 11. Specific guidance is offered to help avoid some of the pitfalls
that are common to migration projects.
In the interest of larger developer groups with varied development and functional requirements, as well
as to maintain the general usefulness of this guide, the guide avoids going too deep into the specifics of
a given problem. Instead, pointers are provided to direct readers to additional relevant information for
further reading. Oracle strongly advises both novice users and those familiar with the Oracle Solaris
operating system to use man pages to obtain accurate and detailed information about Oracle Solaris 11
and its features.
What’s New in Oracle Solaris 11?
Oracle Solaris 11 delivers the industry's best cloud operating system. It is designed to meet the security,
performance, and scalability requirements of cloud-based deployments. As the first fully virtualized
operating system, Oracle Solaris 11 provides comprehensive, built-in virtualization capabilities for OS,
network, and storage resources. It offers comprehensive management across the entire infrastructure—
operating system, physical hardware, networking, and storage, as well as the virtualization layer. Oracle
has made a strong commitment to Oracle Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems. Oracle is working
to help its customers understand its strong commitment and the importance of offering a single
operating system that runs on both SPARC (RISC) and x86 (CISC) processors.