There&#x27;s a lot of stuff Solaris got right, long before the Linux world did, and in some ways, it&#x27;s still catching up.<p>DTrace? Sure, there&#x27;s a plethora of dynamic tracing tools in linux, but it&#x27;s honestly just now starting to catch up with eBPF. If eBPF stack traces make it into 4.5, that might be the first time I can look at Linux dynamic tracing and go &quot;Yep, it&#x27;s arrived&quot;<p>Systemd certainly apes quite a bit of it&#x27;s functionality from SMF (and, personally, I&#x27;d argue SMF still does basically everything better...)<p>ZFS? Still the king of filesystem&#x2F;logical volume management. Btrfs might catch up someday<p>Zones? Again, still ahead of the linux equivalent in functionality. And lx branded zones are awesome.<p>I&#x27;m not saying nothing needs to advance ever again in the world of OS research, but I think we need to be honest about how much we owe to Sun for having created the modern template for a great amount of functionality that Linux is just now having come into existence, and it&#x27;s not like things at Joyent, OmniIT, Nexenta, and other Illumos developing shops have stagnated either.<p>I often disagree with Bryan on specific points, but I think you do him a disservice. While many of the things Sun did might be viewed as an incremental update to existing concepts, it&#x27;s still something that the Linux community has yet to catch up with.<p>Anyway, even when he is wrong, I think he often brings up a viewpoint that results in some interesting discussion.