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The Future of OpenSolaris
jjrff writes "Phoronix has a little piece about the future (or lack thereof) of OpenSolaris. It appears based on the current support lifecycle, OpenSolaris may be going away. There is a fun thread (read: mild flameage) on a ZFS list about it."
Nothing about this says OpenSolaris is going away. Just support for older versions
A/UX
IRIX
Unicos
Xenix
Ultrix
OSF/1
soon: OpenSolaris
and if Larry Ellison has a bad dream: Solaris
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However, it didn't detect ...
Of course it didn't. It's not a desktop OS, even if it does have a purdy interface. Go check the hardware compatibility list - it's pretty friggin' small.
When I put together my home file-server, I made damn sure to check the HCL before purchasing any hardware. Even after doing that, I still had an issue with the on-board LAN chipset - had to compile a different set of drivers in order to stop it from dropping the connection every 5 minutes. OpenSolaris is a great server OS, but it's just silly to expect it to be compatible with some random laptop.
If opensolaris doesn't support much hardware then who exactly is it aimed at?
Small business users, companies like Nexenta which produce their own server hardware/software products, and tech-savvy individuals looking for a home-server solution.
It's not exactly a huge market, but it is a niche (niches?) that needs to be filled. OpenSolaris is currently the best solution for projects such as mine. The ability to build a redundant array with automatic data corruption detection and a simple yet powerful snapshot functionality is what sold me on it. Nothing else on the market can do that, and the solutions which come close would have cost a lot more.
Well it's fairly simple. OpenSolaris is licenced under the CDDL, which is incompatible with the GPL, which is the license the Linux kernel is released under. Nothing "supposed" there, it's a fact.
It is, however, compatible with the BSD license, which is why FreeBSD has ZFS support now.
Note that FreeBSD ZFS is *not* in FreeBSD core (and never will be?) precisely because of it this, last I checked.
It's not in the core... but it is in base. FreeBSD ships with full support for ZFS (since 7.0) and only requires zfs_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf.
If you are using FreeBSD in a device and don't want or cannot use ZFS, there are several settings (WITHOUT_ZFS, WITHOUT_CDDL, WITHOUT_OPENSOLARIS) and such that can be dropped into /etc/src.conf to omit these bits completely from your build.
Sources for ZFS and other bits of non-BSD licensed software (that may be redistributed) are found under src/contrib and src/sys/contrib, where they can be easily segregated from the "pure" BSD bits.
AMD licensed the Alpha (EV6) interconnect from Digital. I'm not sure if the Althlon was ever mechanically compatible with the Alpha, but they used the same electrical signals to communicate with each other and with the the north bridge. There was some talk, before Intel came out with the Itanium hype, of producing motherboards that could take either chip, so that the Alpha could benefit from the same economies of scale as x86 chips. More recently, this idea was revived with IBM and others adopting Hypertransport.
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