Specifications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Solaris Porting Guide

RHEL conforms to the Linux Standard Base 4.0 (LSB 4.0) specification. The LSB is based on the

POSIX specification, the SUS, and several other open standards, but it extends them in certain areas.

Oracle Solaris supports IEEE Std 1003.1 and IEEE Std 1003.2, commonly known as POSIX.1 and

POSIX.2, respectively. Specifically, Oracle Solaris 11 conforms to POSIX.1-2004 (

POSIX.1-2001

update) and POSIX.1-2008 (POSIX.1-2004 update).

Since both the operating systems are POSIX-compliant (variants), there should be little difficulty

porting code from RHEL to Oracle Solaris, as long as specific operating extensions are not used. If

Linux-specific extensions are used, an equivalent Oracle Solaris extension will need to be used or the

extensions will need to be manually ported in order to achieve the desired result.

Tools and Development Environment

RHEL is a standards-based UNIX operating system that provides a development environment very

similar to Oracle Solaris 11. Most of the popular development and scripting tools used by Linux

developers are also available on Oracle Solaris 11. For example, the default shell for root on both the

operating systems is bash (version 4.1.x).

The k-shell (ksh) available on RHEL is ksh93, while the default shell for a new user on Oracle Solaris

11 is also ksh93. The availability of the same shell on both platforms makes it easier to migrate

scripts from RHEL to Oracle Solaris 11.

Oracle Solaris 11 ships with hundreds of standard commands, tools, utilities, and services. These

packages are built from the same open source code base that feeds Linux. The availability of these

packages along with the normal Oracle Solaris functionalities is a benefit to Oracle Solaris users. Users

can choose to use these Linux-like packages and, thereby, increase affinity with Linux. (Please note that

environment variables, such as PATH, might need to be altered in order to use similar tools on both

the platforms.)

Oracle Solaris 11 and RHEL are very similar in many ways; for example, they both have support for

Oracle Solaris Studio software and GNU tools. Both use X Windows as the GUI for their desktop

interface. It is worth noting that if the GNU family of compilers is used on RHEL and you would also

like to continue to use the GNU compiler for the SPARC platform, GNU compilers and tools are also

available on Oracle Solaris 11.

In short, since the shell and development tools are very similar on the two platforms, it is very easy to

move from RHEL to Oracle Solaris as an end user or a developer.

GNU Utilities and Popular Developer Tools

Given that Oracle Solaris 11 already provides a very significant RHEL baseline in terms of: commands,

tools, libraries, platform services, and software development environment, the task of porting an

application to Oracle Solaris 11 boils down to migrating the actual native code that needs to be

modified. If the same development tools and compilers are used on both sides, the tool-related

complexities during porting become minimal. Oracle has made Oracle Solaris Studio 12.x compilers

and tools available on both Oracle Solaris and RHEL platforms. It is also important to note that the