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OpenSolaris Indiana Released
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!'"
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 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.
"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
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
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
read these comments
I fear the Y2038 bug
(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