🐧 Unix Families

The Unix variants

The Unix families

Historically, Unix split into two main branches:

• BSD : SunOS, FreeBSD, DEC ULTRIX.
• System V (AT&T heritage) : AIX, HP-UX, Solaris.
• A third branch would be the proprietary Unixes.

Today, most “Unix-like” systems are GNU/Linux — a separate family that adopts System V-style conventions: Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, openSUSE, CentOS, Slackware, Mint.

Solaris

Hardware

The hardware can be identified with uname -a:

• uname -a returns Sun4u → no native virtualization (M-1 / M-2 / M-3).
• uname -a returns Sun4v → native virtualization (T-1 up to T-5; there is a hypervisor notion that enables LDOM virtualization).

Deployment

• JumpStart — Solaris technology to deploy servers with a predefined configuration.

Volume managers

• SVM — native Solaris 8.
• VxVM — paid.
• ZFS — native Solaris 10.