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OpenSolaris Governing Board Closing Shop?
echolinux writes "Frustrated by Oracle's refusal to interact with the OpenSolaris community or speak with the OpenSolaris Governing Board, the OGB has issued an ultimatum to Oracle: designate a liaison to the OGB by August 16th or the board will 'take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle.'"
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1. Register at sunsolve.sun.com.
2. Click "Downloads & Trials", and select "Top Downloads".
3. Under "Servers & Storage Systems" select "Solaris".
4. Download the option most suited to your needs. For certain releases, you may be asked some survey questions first. If you're not certain you want Solaris full-time on your workstation, I'd suggest going with the VirtualBox image.
The assertion that Oracle no longer allows you to download and use Solaris 10 for free is completely FALSE. I hate seeing this canard repeatedly trotted out as if it were true. There were a couple of days during the support transition and shutdown of legacy Sun data centers when Solaris downloads were affected, but that's been fixed for quite a while now.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Actually, Oracle DOES leverage OpenSolaris as an Oracle platform. The 7410 storage platform exclusively runs OpenSolaris under the hood. Bog-standard Solaris wasn't up to the job. We've bought a number of these storage platforms and are testing them out right now; other than annoying production delays due to unavailability of really-honking-big SSDs, they are extremely cool and high-performance storage solutions.
Also the newer T5240 boxes run way better on OpenSolaris than on stock Solaris 10. No ifs, ands, or buts. Better hardware support and faster I/O. You have to be running the 10/09 release of Solaris 10 to even support these boxes at all, and OpenSolaris supported them before they were even released.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Though a fork (in the sense of OpenBSD/FreeBSD) is not possible, a fork in the sense of Linus's tree, and Alan Cox's tree is possible. The Nexenta project itself already maintains such a tree (nexenta-gate) for the Nexenta and derivative distributions.
In short, though Oracle develops a major part of the kernel, it's open source nature still allows for multiple paths the community can take. The healthy Nexenta community is a testament to that.
We do have some plans for OpenSolaris in the near future. If you're attending DebConf in the first week of August, look me up (and my talk).
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Wow. You must be kidding. See below:
We're moving the OpenSolaris installs to FreeBSD
That, is a mistake. I strongly recommend you do some reading about the base requirements for ZFS on FreeBSD as well as its many shortcomings (at least compared to the OpenSolaris implementation).
Just a couple of the shortcomings I've hit against in the past couple months:
* stability issues. Even with the supposed "stable" 8 RELEASE and the 'required' ZFS tuning and hardware, I've had ZFS lock the system. It would appear the only significant difference between the 7.3 and 8 ZFS implementations is that in 8, they've removed the "EXPERIMENTAL!" warning on the opensolaris driver.
The limitations of running ZFS on 32-bit systems is well-documented. Try an amd64 box instead with the same amount of RAM you would get in a Sun box, like, oh, 8 GB or so. ZFS is *ported* to FreeBSD. It isn't magically shrunk down to require less resources.
* boot mechanisms. There is no 'official' way to boot off a ZFS zpool, and all the ways that exist to get around that shortcoming are poor compromises,
won't work from one release to another, or require use of unstable code (USB boot device, grub2, etc.)
Untrue. Our production SAN boxes are all GPT/ZFS-boot. Nothing compromising about it, it's rock-solid and quick. You have to follow some easy directions (the install program won't do it for you, and you must restore the boot code with gpart if you overwrite it). Google "FreeBSD Root on ZFS" for the instructions.
* ZFS requires a *minimum* of 4GB of RAM for supposed stable operation. It will use that memory, even on an infrequently accessed file server. You will have stability issues with less, even with the recommended FreeBSD ZFS tweaking.
Yes, which is less than an equivalent Sun box would require, isn't it?
* Compared to Linux or OpenSolaris, FreeBSD stability - largely related to device drivers - is pathetic and amateur.
You ignore historical Netcraft surveys which show BSD boxes run longer than Linux on average. Our own FreeBSD servers have a 99.99% uptime. We stick with name-brand devices which may explain our lack of driver issues. I would put driver quality in FreeBSD up against Linux any day, since I run both in our data center. Linux requires more care and feeding than FreeBSD. This has been my experience for over 15 years.
* A general "unprofessional asshole" attitude on the mailing lists. "I've discovered a bug, here it is" seems to result in things like "we're not going to fix that, we'll replace the system in the next release" or similar - if any response is made at all (admittedly, the only list I'm currently following is freebsd-usb).
There aren't as many folks working on the BSDs - no Fortune 500 companies employing armies of kernel developers like Linux. Sorry you got that impression. We're just overworked, not assholes. It sounds like someone was focused on a new system rewrite and didn't have the bandwidth to address a minor bugfix. Major bugs are addressed as a matter of course.
* ALong those lines, the inclusion of incomplete/dysfunctional systems (presumably) simply on the basis of superior design.
There's an old generalization which is fairly true: "BSD is developed by those coming from a Unix software background. Linux is developed by those coming from a PC software background." Superior design is part of the Way of Unix. It pays off handsomely later on. I wouldn't expect youngsters to understand.
Zones, however, would probably be pretty well implemented via jails. Those are cool. But ZFS is, IMO, not a good choice for picking FreeBSD. FreeBSD does a subset of things very well (networking, documentation, infrastructure design and naming), but ZFS is, unfortunately, not one of them (yet).
I'm very concerned th