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OpenSolaris Indiana Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 05, @05:29PM
from the strangers-tempting-you-with-candy dept.
Sun Microsystems Operating Systems
Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"

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xtaski writes "Ted Ts'o, one of the earliest Linux developers, points out some serious flaws in OpenSolaris. There is a severe lack of developers, for one. Apparently, after 3 years, the OpenSolaris 'developer community' is still struggling to get the proper tools for developers to develop! Ted also points out some other flaws which make it clear just how disconnected the executives at Sun are from what's really going on in their 'open source communities.' He notes, 'It was never ... Sun's intention to try to promote a kernel engineering community, or at least, it was certainly not a high priority for them to do so.'"
Firehose:OpenSolaris Indiana Released by Lally Singh (3427)
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  • Hey! It's Debian! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius (137) * on Monday May 05, @05:33PM (#23305188) Homepage Journal
    Without all that free crap.

  • Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OriginalArlen (726444) on Monday May 05, @05:35PM (#23305206)
    I assert that it's too little, too late. If Solaris had been freed in the early part of the century, it might have made some headway against Linux. As it is, it'll be stripped of anything useful and portable and will be as irrelevant as HP/UX or OpenVMS for all but locked-in legacy users.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by njcoder (657816) on Monday May 05, @07:02PM (#23305978)

      I assert that it's too little, too late. If Solaris had been freed in the early part of the century, it might have made some headway against Linux. As it is, it'll be stripped of anything useful and portable and will be as irrelevant as HP/UX or OpenVMS for all but locked-in legacy users.
      This is an idiotic statement and I can't believe anyone modded you up. The source for OpenSolaris has been available for years. When will the stripping start? Where is ZFS for Linux? Where is DTrace, Zones, or any of the other cool new stuff?

      Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.
  • ...a hat and bullwhip?
  • With ZFS you can smash a hard drive and keep the system running:

    http://youtube.com/watch?v=CN6iDzesEs0 [youtube.com]

  • zfs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by trybywrench (584843) on Monday May 05, @05:47PM (#23305324)
    I've played around with ZFS, it's very cool. I mean very very cool.

    It's a crying shame the licensing issues keep it from being ported to Linux as part of the kernel

    • the true shame... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperBanana (662181) on Monday May 05, @06:49PM (#23305850)

      is that ZFS, despite all its goodness, lacks some incredibly basic features compared to 99% of the hardware and software RAID and LVM systems out there. You can't grow (please pay attention here) a ZFS pool except by adding similarly-redundant vdevs, and there is no way to remove a vdev from a pool, unlike LVM2.

      So. Got a 4-drive RAID-Z2 array, and you want to add more space by buying another drive to add in to your 5-bay hot-swap cage? You're shit outta luck. If you have a zpool with a vdev that consists of a pair of mirrored drives, you CAN add another vdev of two drives, then another, etc. You also CAN replace the drives in a vdev with larger drives. That's kind of half-okay, but still not on par with RAID cards of a DECADE ago. Even Linux's MD can grow RAID5/6 across more devices!

      Someone suggested the ability to grow redundant pools by single devices, and the reaction amongst solaris ZFS developers (!!!) was "now why would you want to do that?", and then when THAT was explained, "well shucks, I wonder how they do that" (they = almost every hardware and software RAID solution on the planet.)

      Absolutely astounding that a Solaris filesystem developer would not be able to at least guess as to how a RAID5 array would be re-striped to add a new drive.

      Far as I know, they've been working on the grow capability for more than a year and we have yet to see it.

  • Indiana... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stele (9443) on Monday May 05, @05:57PM (#23305428) Homepage
    We named the dog Indiana.

  • installing now (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lord Ender (156273) on Monday May 05, @05:57PM (#23305432) Homepage
    I'm installing it right now. It looks like a copy of Ubuntu. It has a LiveCD, standard GNOME desktop, and an online package manager (called pkg).

    Don't take that as criticism. Cloning Ubuntu is probably the best design decision an OS team can make these days.

    Personally, I don't care whether it's Solaris or Ubuntu or *BSD underneath it all, so long as it supports my hardware and runs my applications.

    • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gardyloo (512791) on Monday May 05, @05:37PM (#23305222)
      I'm tempted to tinker with ZFS just for its snapshotting abilities. You don't have to run a server to find that useful.

    • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Interesting)

      by QX-Mat (460729) on Monday May 05, @05:40PM (#23305246)
      They employ sexy-code formatting monkeys. The solaris kernel is a hack of a lot simpler to understand than the Linux kernel - I hege this on my comparison of the sources a while back.

      There is still no mighty IOKit killer on the horizon tho... Apple (and libkern, the cpp runtine) wins.

      Matt

        • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Insightful)

          by QX-Mat (460729) on Monday May 05, @06:00PM (#23305462)
          I'm missing g's and e's :(

          As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded, structured and organised than the Linux kernel. But alas, it lacks the many new features that have truly driven linux over the last decade.

          Naturally my opinions lie with the ease of code readability and ease of initial development - these are not the same as a lkml hardened pro

          • You misuse the semicolon. A semicolon is not used in the same contexts as a colon. Instead, it is used to join two sentences (which would otherwise be complete), or to separate items in a list when the use of a comma would be ambiguous. Therefore:

            "John was ready already; Anna made him wait."

            "They offered lasagne; hamburgers, chips and salad; tacos, enchilladas and burritos; or fried frogs legs."

            In no circumstance can you write "As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded..." without looking like a semiliterate try-hard. In general, the best advice for using a semicolon is "don't, unless you know you're sure".

            As a self-confessed geek, you should know the importance of correct punctuation. It's not just helpful to compilers.
    • ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers
      Don't want easy raid/storage expansion on your desktop? You don't want efficient storage?
      Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
      You don't want to know how your system is performing [opensolaris.org] in a way like never before? I'm not a developer, but a sysadmin and use dtrace every day to tell those pesky developers that yes, it's actually THEIR CODE that's at fault at not the server I setup for them. It's also neat to be able to easily see what process is using how much network bandwidth in realtime. That was difficult before.
      SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
      I don't like the complexity of SMF, but it's self-healing for the stuff that's already built for it is cool as is it's dependancy checking.
      IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
      It's better than just RPM, but it's about the same as deb or yum. It's a big step foreward for what was a commercial OS.

      I can tell you haven't even tried solaris 10, but give it a swig. Before solaris 10 I wrote (often rightly) wrote of Sun. Why would I pay a premium for something FreeBSD can do for free and outperforms it? The hardware is cool (see coolthreads processors...it's hyperthreading done right), it's affordable, and it's innovative. It may not be compelling enough to switch from linux or whatever if all you use from a desktop is firefox and thunderbird, but there is actually some VERY cool stuff in there. Don't write it off. There's a reason FreeBSD is taking in a lot of these features.

        • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)

          by Sillygates (967271) on Monday May 05, @06:50PM (#23305872) Homepage Journal

          ZFS is a marginal improvement at best over what's already available.
          I disagree. I guess you haven't seen one of the common types of data corruption that can happen with raided disks.
          It's a common misconception that raid "prevents" data corruption.

          RAID only protects you against (complete) hardware failures, and "noisy" IO errors.
          Consider:
          You have bad data on disk, but the hard drive reads the bad data without error.
          With parity, (even assuming the parity is read upon each read request, which would be a faulty assumption), raid 5 has no way of telling which disk is bad, or whether the parity is bad.

          Unlike raid, ZFS has end to end checksumming, so it knows when the data on disk is bad, and it knows which copy is bad, too.

          Unfortunately though, from what I've heard, ZFS isn't stable enough for production environments yet:
          http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/15/joyent_backup_services_down_for_three_days.html [datacenterknowledge.com]
          read these comments [prefetch.net]

        • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)

          by GuyverDH (232921) on Monday May 05, @11:17PM (#23308006)
          zfs is light years beyond typical raid environments... software or hardware...

          most raid environments don't do checksumming at every step of the data write / read process.
          most raid environments cannot detect silent corruption (bad cache, bad sector, flipped bit, etc) once the data has been read or written.
          most raid environments don't offer double parity.
          most raid environments require that the entire raid array be initialized at once, wasting potentially hours of time for the formatting/initializing to be completed.
          most raid environments when using off the shelf SATA/PATA drives can potentially go bad, even with parity... If you were doing a RAID 5 array with TB size drives, there's a potential that the MTBE can be reached while regenerating data on a replaced volume from parity causing the entire array to be toasted.

          All of these things are not issues with ZFS....

          ZFS is easily expandable, automatically realigns that data as you expand the pool, can have multiple sub-mount points (mounted anywhere) that can have different attributes - like compressing/shared/extended permissions/iSCSI and more on the way, like encryption, multiple compression algorithms, etc....

          I've played/worked with ZFS now for over 2 years and have never lost a single bit of data - even though I've tried...

          Build your RAIDZ pool on 20 drives, in 2 disk expansion units attached to 2 channels of a single SCSI card (10 drives per channel)... now shut the box down, remove all the drives, move them around between units, add an additional scsi card to the box, split the disks up between the scsi cards so they are now split 5 per channel, take one drive back out, and erase it... hold onto it for later...

          Bring the box back up... the pool will come back online without problems, running degraded as one drive is missing.
          now put the erased drive back in, and issue a resilver command, wait a while (not as long as a standard raid controller would take) and voila - all data that was stored on that erased drive is back and in place, and the pool is no longer running in degraded performance mode.

          try any of that with a standard raid controller and your data is f0rked!

    • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuantumRiff (120817) on Monday May 05, @06:59PM (#23305952)
      Sun has a video out that I'm too lazy to search for here, where they run ZFS on a bunch of pen drives, plugged into a USB 2.0 Hub. Faster, and fault tolerant. Pretty amazing. ZFS is not for just servers. Think of apples "time machine" software. Also, ZFS includes lots of Metadata and checksums, to prevent bit-rot of your files.

      • Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jedidiah (1196) on Monday May 05, @06:00PM (#23305456) Homepage
        I am not even sure I can get worked up about Solaris anymore even for "serious work".

        That train already left the station.

        It's not just good enough that you make something cool but you should also make it available when people want it rather than 10 years later.

        Now Sun has to put on a good showing just to keep from looking silly.

        Although this is ultimatey a good thing as it's one of the key benefits of free market competition.

        • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 05, @07:13PM (#23306054)
          (I work for Sun)

          These days we see a lot of performance related calls being logged by customers
          DTrace is a massive leap forwards
          I would really not write off Solaris, it's far from dead

      • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 05, @06:34PM (#23305730)
        Then you don't really understand the file system. Seriously, I think this is the BEST reason to look at Solaris .. ZFS is amazing: snapshots; Z-RAID; Zetabyte file ssytem; prevention of bit rot ...

        They have also forcibly crashed it over a million time and it has never lost data even once. Try doing that with your home PC.

        And what ... you don't care about your photos, docs and music???

        • Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 05, @08:51PM (#23306814)

          They have also forcibly crashed it over a million time and it has never lost data even once.

          Sorry, I'm calling you on your B.S. Sun fanboy.

          ZFS is *not* ready for production.

          I'm a working Solaris admin. I can point to several ZFS raidz arrays that have had to be recovered from tape due to ZFS bugs losing & corrupting data.

          This is clearly a case of ZFS marketing outstripping ZFS reality. They have implemented all the cool features, but have dropped the ball on robustness.

          Do a sunsolve search for ZFS panics or ZFS corruption. There are a half-dozen major bugs that are still un-resolved, and won't be until Sol10u6 - if then. [u5 was just released in the last week or so]

          rho

    • Re:Image Packaging System? (Score:5, Informative)

      by anilg (961244) on Monday May 05, @06:49PM (#23305852)
      "Image" in the name refers to the ability of the packageiung system to install to a chroot-like enviornment. The Distribution constructor (what actually builds the iso) basically creates an "image" area, installs the packages to this are, compresses it, and converts it to an iso.

      Apart from that, you can also create partial images, which is a space you as a normal user can install packages to. These link back to the libraries already installed.

      I'm sure some of these features are available in existing linux packaging systems. But these are things the Opensolaris community has wanted for a long time.

      Apart from these features IPS also has automatic snapshoting (using ZFS in the background), so you can revert your system back to earlier snapsots.

      All in all a very effective packaging system

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