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Illumos Sporks OpenSolaris
suraj.sun sends in this news from The Register. "If you were hoping that someone would fork the OpenSolaris operating system, you are going to have to settle for a spork. You know, half spoon and half fork. That, in essence, is what the Illumos, an alternative open source project to continue development on the core bits of OpenSolaris, is all about. ... Development on OpenSolaris has all but stopped, so Garrett D'Amore, a former Sun and Oracle software engineer who worked on Solaris for many years, decided to do something about it. ... What Illumos is doing is taking the core OpenSolaris kernel and foundation, which is called OS/Net or ON inside of the former Sun, and creating a repository and development community around that. ON includes the kernel, C libraries, shell and shell utilities, file systems, and networking functions of OpenSolaris. 'We are not a distribution in a normal sense,' says D'Amore. 'It is more of a code base.' And one that Nexenta, Belenix, and SchilliX, who do create alternative distros for OpenSolaris, can in theory base their future releases upon if they don't like what is — or isn't — coming out of OpenSolaris."
Didn't the OpenSolaris effort have problems because they were always waiting on Sun to compile certain libc binaries for them?
Is this resolved in Illumos or is there still a binary blob issue?
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace don't have equivalents in Linux with feature parity.
Unless I am confused, "Zones" are virtual machines. If you think there is no equivalent, I guess you are not familiar with Xen or KVM, or the dozens of other VMs out there. ZFS is available as a FUSE driver, and Linux already has attachable debugging, although perhaps not with "feature parity."
Palm trees and 8
lxc exists in linux as a Zones alternative.
I don't know first hand, but some would say systemtap is on the level of DTrace.
btrfs may eventually provide zfs parity (but not today, even if considered stable the featureset lags in some ways).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Unless I am confused, "Zones" are virtual machines.
This is easy, you clearly are.
If you think there is no equivalent, I guess you are not familiar with Xen or KVM
Yah, we've heard of that too. http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/category/solaris-xen/
although perhaps not with "feature parity."
Exactly.
one kernel shared amongst the zones, not VMs populated with independent OSes. The zones can "loopback" filesystems, so /usr is only created once . Each zone has independent configs for users and such, and is visible as files from the global OS. VMs dont have a global OS, they just sit on a hypervisor.
this is the first 5 seconds of differences. The biggest thing to note is they are nothing alike.
Wikipedia has a decent article on the subject.
[A] zone does not have its own separate kernel (in contrast to a hardware virtual machine)
explain to me and people like me how "Zones" are different from "virtual machines?"
Zones share the same kernel. Much, much less overhead than full-blown VMs, both in setup and resource use. You can flavor your zones to be Linux or BSD compatible. You can give them their own (virtual or physical) network adapters. Think Apache Virtual Hosts, but at the OS layer. Or a midaway cross between a chroot and a VM. It's really nice stuff.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Yes, you are confused, which probably indicates your lack of familiarity with Solaris Zones.
Xen, KVM, VMware, Sun Logical Domains, and Sun Virtualbox, are all examples of hardware virtualisation. They simulate a hardware platform; a virtual machine. Each VM has its own kernel and scheduler and memory space and device drivers and virtualised storage.
Solaris Zones is an example of operating system virtualisation. There is no direct equivalent on Linux. There is a single kernel for all the zones. A single set of device drivers. A single process tree. Potentially a single storage system. It's extremely lightweight compared to virtual machines.
Thinking of Zones as "virtual machines" is simply wrong. They are more like process groups, or process sets, and in fact on Solaris they are implemented in part by using resource groups. There is virtualisation but it's not at the machine layer; that's why they're not virtual machines.
To illustrate the significant differences, on the same hardware that Xen can run 10 VMs, Solaris can run 100s of zones. Xen can lose 10% or more CPU to overheads, Solaris Zones loses less than 1%. Xen can lose as much as 90% of I/O performance, Solaris Zones loses less than 1%. Xen places restrictions on the resources available to each VM, Solaris Zones can gain access to the full resources of the hardware. Xen requires each VM to be patched and maintained separately, Solaris Zones are patched and maintained through the "host" OS.
These benefits are only possible because Solaris Zones are not VMs.
OpenVZ and FreeBSD Jails are equivalent conceptually to Solaris Containers. The difference is the extent to which they've been implemented. Sun went the whole hog and made Solaris Containers "first class citizens". All the user space tools were modified to understand zones. All the documentation was updated. All the application suites were updated. They're not a ill-supported second-rate tack-on so you can tick the "we've got that" feature box.
If you want the analogy, it's like Microsoft saying "don't use Apache, we've got a webserver too" and pointing to IIS. In theory, true. In practise, bullshit.
Here you go: http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/
The most important bit (libc_i18n) is opened. The rest is in the process, and will be pushed into the repo in very short time.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
The referenced OpenSolaris is not the code, but the distribution OpenSolaris (formerly project Indiana).
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
I'm one of the NCP guys, and currently at Debconf. I'm hoping to engage the community about this. We'll have updates posted to the project on where NCP4 is headed soon.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
FreeBSD jails are certainly no longer ill-supported second-rate tack-ons. Care for virtualised network stacks per Zone? ;)
Linux VServer is very similar (one kernel, multiple contexts, shared memory, optionally shared or dedicated filesystems, optionally shared or dedicated network interfaces, minimal overhead). Debian has vserver enabled kernels in the repository - not sure about other distributions, because I don't really care ;) ;), putting other OSes and nasty stuff into full virtualization and performance-hungry tasks to Vservers.
I am running a dozen of less important and/or discountinued and/or shitty services in these vservers and I just love them.
The funny thing is that you can run KVM and Vserver on the same server (and maybe even Xen