The History of SPARC Processor

When we talk about Sun Microsystem’s hardware, SPARC will always be the first that come directly into our mind. Indeed, SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) has been Sun Microsystem’s flagship processor architecture for over note years.
With Sun’s dedication to innovation and flexibility, the processor had gone through many revisions over the years in an endeavor to stay on the cutting edge. Eighty-eight of the 500 super-computers in the world used SPARC by June 2002.

In 1985, the SPARC microprocessor instruction set architecture was originally designed, but quickly underwent a 32-bit revision in 1986 (SPARC Version 7) They first designed for use in Sun-4 workstation and server systems, replacing the Motorola 68000 family. SPARC processors apace gained in popularity, and were utilized in SMP servers built by, among others, Sun, Solbourne, and Fujitsu.
Even though the processor was designed for and used in SunOS (Solaris), SPARC processor can be used with other operating systems, such as FreeBSD,OpenBSD,NetBSD and Linux. In attempt to increase processing speed as much as possible, The SPARC instruction set was designed to be minimalist, with as few feature as possible (including the inability to multiply or divide)
The SPARC processor was also designed to be scalable by allowing all types of processor from tiny dedicated processors to huge server-level ones to use the same core instruction set. The first example of SPARC processor contained 128 general-purpose registers-eight global, 32 available to software, and 24 for a run window to transfer duty call parameters and return values.
The SPARC Version 8 (V8), the enhancement architecture, was released in 1990. Adding 16 highly flexible double-precision registers instead of the previous 32. Its instruction set regained the multiply and divide. Every double-precision register, could be utilized as either two single-precision registers (for a total of 32 single-precision registers) or, by using an odd-even pair of double precisions-registers, be utilized as a quad-precision run (resulting in 8 sib precision registers
In 1993, SPARC Version 9 (56-bit data and addressing), also known as SPARC64, was released. Adding sixteen more double-precision registers that could be combined and used as eight quad-precision registers. But could not be used a 32 single-precision registers.
In third-quarter of 2005, Sun Microsystem released the UltraSPARC T1 source code to an open-source project called OpenSPARC. Nowadays, three fully open source versions of the SPARC architecture exists. LEON, a 32-bit, single thread SPARC V8 version, OpenSPARC T1, a 64-bit, 32-thread version of SPARC V9, and OpenSPARC T2, a 64-bit, 64-thread version of SPARC V9.

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SCSA Certification

Just like linux, Solaris is another “ derivative product” of UNIX. Even though Linux is more popular in UNIX market, having a SCSA (SUN Certified System Administration) certification will make you have a better income and grow professionally.
The SCSA holders are in high demand in larger sectors such as Telecommunication, Financial firms, Oil or even in Military and so on. It means that the will make some money more easily.
This certification, in general, measure the essential system-administration-management skills of Solaris operating system. And it’s also useful for technical application support staff who responsible for administering and maintaining a network server running on the Solaris operating system.

Off course, an IT professionals working as a system administration (sys-admin) in a UNIX environment must have this kind of certification. Solaris 8, 9 and 10 SCSA program are offered by SUN Microsystem. It consists of two parts. And the candidates must have passed both part to acquires claim their certificate
If you have already had the previous version of this certificate, you must upgrade it by taking an upgrade exam.This certificate has their own lifetime. It is only valid for two years from the date of certification.

Even though there are some mandatory requirements, it’s better for you to have at least six months of experience in the field of system administration before taking the first part of the exam. And you’ll need one more year experience before appearing for the second part of the exam.Besides that, you must have a basic understanding, if not a master, of UNIX fundamental and good knowledge of Solaris OE commands before you can take the SCSA certification.
SCSA exam is quite easy, for the person who is well prepared course :D.

Lots of book and study guide you can find nowadays. You can search it here amazon or anywhere else.
Or maybe you want to order some certification package, it’s a comprehensive study-guide made exclusively made for the purpose. Even there are many SCSA workshops available.
Those simulations will not only sharpen your knowledge but also will give you great understanding on the subject so you can get a 100% in the exams.

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A Brief History of Solaris

Solaris, the UNIX-based operating system developed by SUN Microsystem, was born in 1987. AT&T and SUN Microsystem tried to combine the leading Unix versions (BSD, XENIX, and System V) into one operating system.
In 1991, SUN Microsystem replaced it's existing Unix operating system (SunOS 4) with one based on SVR4, called Solaris 2.
Contained with many new advances, including use of the Open Network Computing (ONC) functionality, NIS+ and OpenWindows graphical user interface, Solaris 2 was specially designed for symmetric multiprocessing.

And now, for more than twenty-years, numerous versions of Solaris has been released with great innovations to adapt the changing of the computer environment, trying to anticipate where the computer world is going.
Innovations that Solaris OS has made will takes pages to be described. I’ll show you some of the most important milestones:
1. 1996 – Solaris 2.5.1 – NFSv3 file system and NFS/TCP, CDE (Common Desktop Environment), included support for the Macintosh PowerPC and the CDE (Common Desktop Environment), expanded user and group IDs to 32 bits.
2. 1997 – Solaris 2.6 – Kerberos 5 security encryption, WebNFS file system and large file support to increase Solaris internet performance
3. 1998 – Solaris 2.7 (renamed just Solaris 7) – 64-bit released, dramatically increased its performance, capacity, and scalability. Native support for file system meta-data logging (UFS logging)
4. 2000 – Solaris 8 – first OS to combine datecentre and dot-com requirements, offering support for IPMP, IPv6 and IPSEC, Multipath I/O.
5. 2002 – Solaris 9 – OpenWindows (in favour of Linux compatibility), and added a Resource Manager, the Solaris Volume Manager, extended file attributes, and the iPlanet Directory Server
6. 2005 – Solaris 10 – free of charge, more compatible with Linux and IBM system, Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), NFSv4, Java Desktop System based on GNOME, ZFS (later in 2006)
7. 2006 – OpenSolaris Project – In the first year, the community had grown to 29 user groups globally with over than 14,000 members, working on 31 active projects.
The “evolution” of the Solaris OS shows the capacity of Sun Microsystem to be on the cutting edge of the computing world without losing touch with the current computing environment. New versions of Solaris is regularly released incorporated the latest development in computer technology and also included more cross-platform compatibility and incorporating the advances of other systems.

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UNIX in a nutshell

An operating system (or “OS”) is a set of programs that controls a computer. It controls both the hardware (things you can touch – keyboards, displays and disk drives) and the sotfware (application program that you run, such as a word processor).
Some computers have a single-user OS, which means only one person can use the computer at a time. Many older OSes (like DOS) can also do only one job at a time. But almost any computer can do a lot more if it has a multiuser, multitasking operating system like UNIX. These powerful OSes let many people use the computer at the same time and let each user run several jobs at once.Unix operating systems are widely used in both servers and workstations. The Unix environment and the client-server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers

As mentioned above, Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be strung together through a command line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are known as the Unix philosophy.

There are many different versions of UNIX . Until few years ago, there were just two main versions: the line of UNIX releases that started at the AT&T, and the other line from the University of California at Berkeley. Some other major commercial versions include SunOS, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX and ULTRIX. Some of the freely available versions include LINUX and FreeBSD.

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Basic UNIX Command (part I)

UNIX is an operating system developed by AT&T Bell LABS in 1969. Today the term Unix is used to describe any operating system that conforms to Unix standards, meaning the core operating system operates the same as the original Unix operating system. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University of California, Berkeley) by commercial startups, the most notable of which are Solaris, HP-UX and AIX.

And I think, in order to mastering the SUN Solaris OS, we definitely need to know some of the very basic UNIX commands :D

First thing to remember: UNIX is case-sensitive.
COMMAND and command are not the same

FILES

ls	lists your files
ls -l	lists your files in 'long format', which contains lots of useful information, e.g. the exact size of the file, who owns the file and who has the right to look at it, and when it was last modified
ls -a	lists all files, including the ones whose filenames begin in a dot, which you do not always want to see
more filename	shows the first part of a file, just as much as will fit on one screen
emacs filename	is an editor that lets you create and edit a file
mv filename1 filename2	moves a file
cp filename1 filename2	copies a file
rm filename	removes a file. It is wise to use the option rm -i, which will ask you for confirmation
diff filename1 filename2	compares files, and shows where they differ
wc filename	tells you how many lines, words, and characters there are in a file
chmod options filename	change the read, write, and execute permissions on your files
gzip filename	compresses files
gunzip filename	uncompresses files compressed by gzip
gzcat filename	lets you look at a gzipped file without actually having to gunzip it
lpr filename	print
lpq	check out the printer queue
lprm jobnumber	remove something from the printer queue
genscript	converts plain text files into postscript for printing
dvips filename	print .dvi files

For further explanation check the manual page.

root@ult10 # man command

...to be continued

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