OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective

MSa writes "How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go."

Comments

maybe I should go and play around with this!

[jacquesm]

Ever since the demise of SGI I haven't looked at anything but Linux / BSD, but this makes me wonder if there is maybe life for Solaris after all.

Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things, which is where I would expect you'd deploy solaris much sooner than on the desktop.

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean, the demise of SG-1? The Apophis was defeated and the replicators contained.

Oh, SGI. Sorry.

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a sys admin for FreeBSD and Linux machines for a computer club for a few years now.

I bet you have to beat the ladies away with a stick...

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[alancdavis]

The review didn't address desktop vs. server and as a "lightweight" review doesn't look any deeper than the distro package for answers to the questions and objections raised.
OpenSolaris works well as a server OS - that /is/ it's heritage. It's easier to run OpenSolaris headless and on a serial console than any of the *BSD and Linux distros that I've used over the years. All of the "standard" server packages are available to run web and net services out of the box. For truly lights-out server rooms it's still necessary to choose hardware that implements some sort of remote power cycle or remote system monitor capability.
The ZFS filesystem is interesting for desktop installations - it does allow seamless use of the 1-2 terabyte desktop disk configurations that are now possible. ZFS was designed for the datacenter - eliminating the need for the time-honored but fragile combination of journaling filesystem over software volume manager (usually over HW RAID). It's the first real innovation in filesystem architecture since journaling filesystems were developed.
Additional software packages are available from 3 well-known (in the Solaris community, at least) sites. Sun has it's own freeware site, blastwave.org and sunfreeware.com
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/s10pkgs_download.xml
http://www.blastwave.org/
http://sunfreeware.com/

The package manager for blastwave.org is their own, the others use the standard Solaris pkgadd commands. The package naming convention is a long-standing convention - each vendor uses a different prefix, making it easy to differentiate the source of packages.
OpenSolaris commands, where Sun hasn't replaced stock UNIX commands with their own, reflect SVR5 standard rather than the more Linux-ish BSD syntax.
One of the places where Sun has replaced "normal" functionality is the init process. SMF is Sun's attempt at fixing the long-standing problems and in-efficiencies of the BSD or SVR5 init process. Apple has launchd, there's openrc and gentoo's baselayout that all have similar goals. SMF works well and there's a fair amount of support on the net for integrating non-distro apps.
One of the "why OpenSolaris" answers is that there is value in running the same OS on the desktop as on the server. For Solaris shops OpenSolaris on the x86* servers provides a common platform that enables system management efficiencies to be extended.

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[outZider]

You've run ZFS in production, yet you can't see the improvement on Linux's model? You mean the fact that md is completely broken and LVM is unreliable and slow by comparison?

Re:maybe I should go and play around with this!

[Kent Recal]

I'd like to give Znork some credit here.
ZFS is really, really nice but it does have some warts and the biggest for many would be that arcane operating system that's dangling off its nutsack. Yes the solaris kernel is great, scales like a champ etc. but the userland and the lack of centralized package management (in 2008, no less!) are bad joke.

Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective

[igb]

I run a mixed Linux and Solaris shop, but having replaced some Solaris boxes with Linux we're swinging massively back to Solaris 10.

• ZFS, of course.
• SMF. Being able to start services in a dependency tree is excellent if you have a multi-processor machine. And having services self-heal, including restarting any dependencies, is good for things like mail servers that use a lot of flakey milters.
• FMA. Hardware self-healing (admittedly, this is essentially Sun hardware only, and in my experience better on Sparc than on AMD) is good.
• Zones. Because sometimes full-blown virtualisation is too much like hard work.
• Binary compatibility. I've got some SunOS 4.1.1 binaries from 1989, for which the source is long lost, running fine.
• There's probably a Linux equivalent of rcapd, to limit the physical memory use of particular groups of processes, but I've never found one.
• There's probably a Linux equivalent of processor sets, CPU shares and the Fair Shares Scheduler, but again I've never found one.

Horses for courses, but Solaris has much to offer even for shops that aren't traditionally tied to Sun. Hell, even my private ``1U box in someone else's datacentre'' server for my family is now a Solaris machine.

ian

Re:Nexenta

[Enderandrew]

Someone asked me this question recently. And for the sixth time I answered with a laundry list of things I didn't like about it. Agian, I was modded Troll for stating I don't like Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and then people got all in a huff.

Like I always say, it is marketed at a certain target audience, and it isn't me.

I suggest that you try out a really good KDE desktop (Arch's KDEMod, Sabayon, openSUSE 11, etc) and the differences should be immediately apparent to you.

As far as whether or not the KDE packages are available in Nexenta, I'm not sure actually.

Re:From an experienced Admin's perspective

[TheRaven64]

It doesn't matter how many drivers any given kernel supports. All that matters is if it has drivers for the hardware you want to run it on. If you're buying a server then you will typically buy one which comes with support for the OS you want to run and so you won't encounter driver difficulties (although you might pay a bit more).

Re:Nexenta

[bigstrat2003]

This is a matter of taste. "I don't like it" is sufficient reasoning for this arena, like it or not. Furthermore, you have no reasonable basis to say he's saying this "just to get a reaction". He doesn't give what you consider to be good reasons for his opinion, so he's stating his opinion just to get a reaction. Erm, no, it doesn't work that way.

People, not just on slashdot, but on internet forums in general, love to claim that those whose arguments they disagree with must be trolling. It's fucking pathetic, and is just a sign that these people can't handle an opposing point of view with any amount of dignity. Grow up already.

Re:md broken?

[outZider]

No offense taken, but your first line is a typical response from most linux users -- anything that goes wrong is either an admin issue or a hardware issue.

First, md forgetting drives is not a hardware issue. Linux sees the drive, the serial number of the drive is the same, the hardware does not change, the hardware works. Sometimes, you will boot, and it just loses the configuration, so you reconfigure the array, and wait for it to check everything out. For two hours. At 3am.

Wiping out configuration during upgrades happened for two consecutive releases of the master distribution. Everything is backed up, but 3/4's of the machines didn't boot properly after md was upgraded. Turned out this was a pretty known issue. No one ever thought that people would want things migrated. Everyone seems to have a few hours to manually move arrays over.

Look, I'm all for great, open, free technology. The problem is, most people don't think about the big picture. LVM and MD are fine for personal machines that don't do much more than serve up files, or play music, or what have you. Technology like ZFS is designed to be bulletproof, documented, and it has to be supported. Not only that, but given the right amount of RAM, ZFS can outperform many off the shelf RAID systems, and give you flexibility in mirroring, snapshots, and drive support that LVM cannot possibly compare to.

The only reason ZFS hasn't had much news in Linux land is that it 'wasn't invented here' and it isn't GPL. Last I heard, there was a movement underway to reimplement ZFS under the GPL. I would imagine we'll see something in five years or so.