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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."
I hope they decide to use the FreeBSD userland on top of the OpenSolaris kernel. The FreeBSD userland is the premiere UNIX-like userland environment available today, and is also released under an extremely liberal license that maximizes everybody's freedom.
No, but perhaps the codebase is cleaner and has fewer bugs? Clearly, someone is interested in it.
Palm trees and 8
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.
Don't forget Crossbow.
While I applaud this effort, I have to wonder if enough folks with the requisite skills to do kernel/driver development will be motivated to assist. It was an excellent product with some cool features (ZFS, Zones, Dtrace, Crossbow, etc.), but it was very clear that the vast majority of the development came from paid Sun engineers. The OpenSolaris community was never anywhere near the size of the Linux community, and even with Linux a significant portion comes from corporations (see "The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker" from last year: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/20/1342223). I really do hope OpenSolaris continues (or Oracle changes the license to be GPL compatible), but at this point I wouldn't be basing any new projects on the platform.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Development on OpenSolaris has all but stopped
Except it hasn't?
I mean biweekly, binary development builds haven't been released since 134 in March, but development clearly marches on.
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=125446&tstart=0
http://cr.opensolaris.org/
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/RecentChanges
Think for yourselves..
Community (outside Oracle) development may have been frozen, and it might be worthwhile to have a liberal, free spirited fork to try new things, but if Oracle wanted OpenSolaris dead, there's a very fast an efficient way of doing that, and they have not. Don't call something dead unless you're pretty darned sure it aint going to wake up the next morning.
I'd rather call it a foon. It sounds cooler.
Yes. Zones, ZFS, SMF, dtrace, RBAC, and zero effort porting to Solaris on x86 or sparc. Linux has at best half-assed simulacrums for these features. The first three features alone are enough to justify OpenSolaris over Linux in many situations.
That said, Oracle's ham fisted approach to Solaris is effectively going to kill it. Lack of movement on OpenSolaris and new draconian licensing for Solaris means I'm going to be pushing for Linux to replace Solaris at my sites. I can deal with the reduced features if it means fewer licensing headaches.
Sporks have never left, they still lurk among us if you know where to look.
You mean other than API/ABI stability, less bugs and cleaner code base?
So, we have Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/NetBSD, and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Does this mean we'll have Debian GNU/Illumos next?
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.
I am a user of Solaris (formerly known as SunOS) for 20 years now. Most of the time, i have worked for a Sun partner. But now i have said my goodbyes to the company that once was Sun. While i still think that Solaris has the best kernel in respect of networking and multicore usage, i just cannot afford to let my attachment cloud business decisions. I should have cut my ties the moment Oracle anounced the takeover.
While it is well known that being a partner and being treated like a partner are quite different things, Oracle has taken this to new unexpected heights. That someone intentionally breaks the business model of partners (while not profiting oneself from that decision) is still something that puzzles me. I know what they intend, but they are really, really busy making enemies. If it were just me, but i have dozens of once loyal customers profanely swearing now, if the name Oracle/Sun is mentioned. I have seen IT managers, who controll several dozen million $ IT budget, vowing to never purchase a system from them again.
Solaris is dead, no fork or spork will change that. Even if they manage the code side, the well upon they sit is well poisoned. May Solaris rest in peace.
CU, Martin
P.S. Hate to post anonymously, but i don't dare other.
P.P.S. ... and it hurts like hell to write it.
Would you perhaps like to explain to me and people like me how "Zones" are different from "virtual machines?"
Palm trees and 8
And they are still useless for most purposes. It makes a lousy spoon, because liquids spill through the tines. It's like eating soup with a fork. It makes a lousy fork, as the tines are too short.
So, they're saying this OS is built by combining the useful parts together to build one that doesn't fit any real purpose.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Zones are not VMs. FreeBSD jails are probably the closest thing to it. Virtualization technologies are eventually going to render both of those obselete, I think, but it hasn't gotten there yet. And if you think a FUSE driver is any kind of substitute for a full implementation, you have no business running a data center. Even FreeBSD's port of ZFS isn't always up to snuff, and it's leaps and bounds beyond the FUSE driver.
Look, you've obviously picked a "side" and you'll pull out any comparison you need to support it, so stop pretending you can offer any kind of objectivity. I rather doubt you've even got any experience with a Unix OS that isn't Linux.
Joyent care very deeply about it.
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)
On the other hand I find they are great for eating chicken noodle soup as I like to leave the majority of the broth for last and eat it with bread.
Theres a niche-use field for almost everything :)
a dtrace script will work when run against a solaris10 server regardless of patch levels. Systemtap has some similarity, but the scripts that work on one are not reliably portable between patch revisions or systems.
I can deal with the reduced features if it means fewer licensing headaches.
Not to mention the fact that most of those features will likely have equivalents with GPL-compatible licensing within a year or two.
Whenever someone asks if Linux supports some cool feature that this niche project does, rather than "No.", a more appropriate answer will typically be "Not yet.".
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
LXC will one day be a zones alternative. Right now it's a pre-1.0 alpha with severely reduced functionality. I consider it basically unusable in its current form.
Same deal for BTRFS. One day it will be a ZFS alternative. Right now it's only for BTRFS developers.
Ok, so how is this different from OpenVZ or FreeBSD jails?
When I started trying out OpenSolaris early this year, ZFS actually saved me from losing files to a hard drive that was silently corrupting data. Needless to say, my file server now runs OpenSolaris, even though the rest of my network is a mix of Linux and Windows.
Yes, FreeBSD has ZFS now, but it lags behind the OpenSolaris version - and I don't have the time for the compile-the-world approach for updates that the FreeBSD world prefers.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Right. FreeBSD jails, AIX LPARs, and Solaris Zones are all about the same thing, with perhaps AIX LPARs and Solaris Zones being the two most scalable.
And I don't think that full virtualization or even paravirtualization is going to replace these technologies anytime soon. They are far more scalable, far easier to setup, and have had high availability features for years that virtualization technologies only recently have begun adding. For example, an AIX LPAR can run on one machine, and if that machine goes down, another machine with an identical instance can pick it up and run with it -- all without the LPAR's users even knowing about it. I think Zones can do this too.
On the filesystem front, the Linux equivalent that will eventually be on-par feature-wise with ZFS is btrfs. Unfortunately, btrfs isn't ready for prime-time yet. In the meantime, high-end NAS/SAN devices like EMC's Celerra do what ZFS does, only better.
My blog
When I read the title and started reading the article for a minute I thought someone had taken a spork and built an OpenSolaris system into it. Now I'm sad and disappointed. :(
ad astra per alia porci
"lsof -o" and SIGINFO come to mind.
but none of those are required to do mission critical business computing, which is why Solaris and OpenSolaris have lost (too little too late in both cases) and GNU/Linux has won. Go ahead and flog your dead horse, but the Solari are toast.
no, but FreeBSD jails are basically the same thing as Solaris Zones, and FreeBSD supports ZFS and DTrace, too. Plus, the added benefit of also not being Linux.
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.
OpenSolaris has DTrace, ZFS, Zones........While Linux' hardware support is wider than that of OpenSolaris, the latter does benefit from having a static driver interface. Where in Linux hardware support might actually break as time goes by, 10 year old Solaris drivers will still work today. There's also a Device Detection Tool which will tell you if your hardware is compatible with OpenSolaris. However the number of applications to choose form is quite limited compared to what Linux distributions generally have to offer. DTrace is really cool you can learn more about it here http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html Cheers - Jeffery
The same tired argument that Solaris does not support sound cards from 1995.
Nobody running high-end modern servers cares whether or not Solaris supports obsolete hardware.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I'm glad my Linux doesn't have the FreeBSD feature of seizing up under heavy IPC under SMP load because the locking model is too complex
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.
I am annoyed at how I have been 'defending' Microsoft lately -- but you might want to revist that analogy since IIS7 is actually a pretty decent web server now :)
On topic, I think it's worth mentioning that the current OpenSolaris codebase doesn't support sparse root zones, which makes me sad. IPS apparently doesn't account for them at this point. Last I checked, they were still discussing wether to implement them or just scrap them in favor of full root zones with ZFS deduplication.
OpenSolaris is still useful, though.
OT, but I wonder what would have happened if IBM bought Sun instead of Oracle.
less setup, doesn't require a kernel patch (which i think OpenVZ does) http://cgrouphacking.blogspot.com/
Supporting platforms beyond the commercial viability of them(e.g. sun4m machines and early sun4u machines)?
Oh, wait. That's OpenBSD and Linux.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Incorrect. Linux will "never" have ZFS.
Except that Sun (er, Oracle) took obsolete to mean "no longer commercially viable", with much regard to technological capability.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Zones = OpenVZ / Linux Containers (and they have some features that Solaris lacks)
DTrace = SystemTap (fairly mature)
ZFS = btrfs (not very mature yet)
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
???
LXC now has network/PID/FS virtualization, and is even supported by SELinux. There's also support for live migration of containers.
Its userspace tools are indeed immature, but kernel-level features are OK.
That's the million-dollar question tonight, here in Solaris-land tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
Coming up next-- Yet-Another-Patent-disputed, filed by... tune in at 10 O'Clock to find out who!
In spite of the licensing issues, has anyone tried to just port ZFS code directly to Linux?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Feature parity? THat's being generous. Linux has nothing that compares with those features (or containers) in and of itself. (And this coming from someone who loves linux and has used it for almost 15 years.) Particularly, (Open)Solaris ZFS is light years ahead of any other filesystem - and yes, I'm excluding the other ZFS implementations from being awesome, because they really aren't yet.
OpenSolaris has also done some work integrating VirtualBox into Containers; it supposedly works very well.
If nothing else, SOlaris provides (or rather, Sun provided) a single, clean, understandable interfacing tool (or set of tools) for their architectures (ZFS, zones, DTrace, VirtualBox) which is something Linux tends to lack. BSDs do it, too (well, mainly NetBSD), but Solaris's is very nice.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
ZFS if you want to run a storage server. You can probably get ZFS running in Linux using FUSE, but it won't be so good, or you could port it as a kernel module, but it won't be legal.
As others have said, you're clearly confused.
Zones ~= BSD jails or Linux jail environment, but better in many ways (security/compartmentalization, independence, implementation, configuration, adaptability). Security can be much more tightly defined as to what the zone can or can not do (more like a host level ACL) as can be in Linux.
Containers ~= virtual machines. It's a zone with the ability to do true VM type stuff. Except better, in that it's able to run pretty much anything (try vbox under a container, for instance). Except unlike VMWare, Xen, XenServer, or the like, it's actually pretty easy to change a bunch of settings like bandwidth, memory allocation, nice, etc. of a container instance, and has been possible for some time - unlike the "real soon now" for many VM implementations.
And surely you're trolling about ZFS. ZFS FUSE is even worse than the FreeBSD implementation in terms of performance and stability.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That's only the start of the list. There's also:
Dynamic (hardware) reconfiguration, projects, resource management and resource pools, processor sets and binding, investigative tools and fault management.
I like Linux. It has some definite advantages over Solaris. But Solaris is the best server OS I've used, and after 15 years of being a Unix admin I've used most of them - certainly everything currently Unix or Linux and supported today. It's going to be a real shame when Oracle kills it.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Not to mention the fact that most of those features will likely have equivalents with GPL-compatible licensing within a year or two.
I've been hearing that since DTrace was announced. Before then, I was hearing it when Solaris 8 was new and Linux servers had to be rebooted to see new disk, or a reboot caused them to renumber the disks they had. It takes years to get these features implemented, tested, stable and bug-free. Pretending Linux will magically have something that's taken years for a major OS company to get right is delusional.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Would you perhaps like to explain to me and people like me how "Zones" are different from "virtual machines?"
Zones have 1% overhead:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/virtually_no_overhead_solaris_zones
Virtual machines (specifically VMware) can have 36% overhead:
http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/sun_x4270_virtualized_for_two
Zones are super-charged FreeBSD jails (they're explicitly mentioned as a source of inspiration). They add the ability to mount /usr and other file systems (and even raw disk devices) as R/O so that you only have to keep one OS image patched (though you can optionally have an independent /usr et al.).
Recent improvements include Project Crossbow:
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+crossbow/WebHome
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=999
Solaris also runs just fine in VMware and Xen if you want to use that. You can actually have a Solaris VM on ESX, and then create zones in that VM. Zones work the same whether under x86 or SPARC.
Add Solaris Cluster, and you can also have fail over services or even entire zones from one physical machine to another.
Yeah, I can see where I'd be mad about that, too, if I'd ever encountered it using FreeBSD since 2.2.8 in both a hobbyist and professional environment. Luckily, it's never been an issue.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace don't have equivalents in Linux with feature parity.
The ZFS storage layer for linux is done, you can use it now. The ZFS POSIX layer isn't done, the project needs help.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Zones share the same kernel. Much, much less overhead than full-blown VMs, both in setup and resource use.
This used to be true, but thanks to market pressure, VMs are competitive in the resource and overhead areas. For example, with kernel same-page merging it's possible to run multiple VMs and overcommit memory usage with relative transparency. Now that processors have virtualization extensions (and have for several years) the expensive operations (from a CPU standpoint) are now cheap. The benefit of VMs, IMHO, is that no substantive changes are needed on the OS or toolset. Zones are great, no doubt, and some of the technology will get merged or copied into VMs, but it appears that the market is leaning towards virtualization.
If there is a true fork/spork of the OpenSolaris, it may actually provide a better opportunity for community growth. Under Sun's management, the community never had the chance to thrive, since the vast part of control and development remained internal to Sun. If the community now has the opportunity to participate on equal footing, as with *BSD/Linux/etc., the project should have no trouble attracting people and companies.
That, and someone really needs to revamp the build process to make development more fun and less painful. Compared to FreeBSD for example, it is a nightmare...
Something or other is keeping them from allowing sparse roots, I imagine this has something to do with the new packaging system. As I recall, someone has gotten the inherit-pkg-dir properties to be allowed, and the resulting zone worked fine. I became curious when they didn't mention upgrade-ability, but then I became distracted and/or hungry and thought nothing more on the subject. This bug supports the pkg root cause though: http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=2550
FreeBSD jails are certainly no longer ill-supported second-rate tack-ons. Care for virtualised network stacks per Zone? ;)
...so I guess all these uni scientists who create for-profit spinoff companies and patent the living crap out of everything, including patenting life itself, which is rather bogus..that they do all this from altruism, and just want to give everything away for the good of Gaia and stuff and work for a pittance, simply refuse most of their stipends and salaries, etc., and just creative commons license everything for free or..err.how does that work again, which is it? And they publish on those free..er..journal paywall sites that want a month's pay for people in the developing world to read an article...That's certainly altruistic....not...
Too broad, man. Scientists are humans, that's it, with the same wild and varied mix of greed to altruism everyone else has. There just *ain't* too many pure Gandhis** on this planet, never has been, and it will be a really long time until there is.
**well, OK, I suppose some wisenheimer will now link me to the white pages of india phone book to prove me wrong. %^)
I run NetBSD on an IPX.
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace don't have equivalents in Linux with feature parity.
I am the Unix admin at work (mainly Solaris 10, with some REALLY old linux we haven't gotten around to migrating, FC1 and RH 7.2 for those morbidly curious), and I agree, I love those 3 features in Solaris 10. I just wish I had time to really dig in to the dtrace stuff.
One thing I don't recall anyone mentioning as specific to Solaris is services. Basically they are the init scripts with dependencies and self-restarting built in. I've often wondered, does nobody else appreciate/like services? Or, am I showing inexperience and they have equivalents throughout the unix world? When I first heard of them I wondered why unix folks hadn't done something like that years ago.
I'm sorry.
From the post it is not completely clear, but I guess this sporked OpenSolaris will still include the possibility of zones. Now I know Linux has similar features, but Containers/Zones have been a hit in the Solaris world from day one. And are widely used, including production environments where it does the segmentation / isolation of Oracle databases.
(I'm former Sun guy, been there, done that.)
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
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
> Solaris Zones is an example of operating system virtualisation. There is no direct equivalent on Linux.
You should check out VServers before you bet your house on that.
> Solaris Zones is an example of operating system virtualisation. There is no direct equivalent on Linux.
You should check out VServers before you bet your house on that.
Not a direct equivalent. OpenSolaris has a FAQ on this:
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zones/faq#HQArecontainerslikeLinuxvServers
Let me quota the FAQ you linked in:
Q: Are containers like Linux vServers?
A: The basic model used to implement the Solaris 10 Containers feature set and the Linux vServers project are fairly similar. However, the implementation is different. (More coming soon!) [Updated August 2005]
So, basically, five years ago they said nothing except that the feature set is similar and they said nothing ever since.
Not much answer for a "in what ways it is better" question, I think.
Not much answer for a "in what ways it is better" question, I think.
The "in what ways it is better" question was answered 5 posts up. Your question was about direct equivalency. The fact that they have different implementations is all the proof you need that they are not direct equivalents.
The "in what ways it is better" question was answered 5 posts up.
You, Sir, are full of shit.
You weren't even mentioning VServers 5/6 posts up.
You were talking about hardware virtualization and stating that Linux has no operating system virtualization (like VServer).
And you are trying to pull a strawman on me.
You are a nice fit with Oracle, it seems.
You, Sir, are full of shit.
You weren't even mentioning VServers 5/6 posts up.
You were talking about hardware virtualization and stating that Linux has no operating system virtualization (like VServer).
I said Linux has no direct equivalent to Solaris Zones. That statement is true, your foul mouth non-withstanding.
And you are trying to pull a strawman on me.
You are a nice fit with Oracle, it seems.
You should re-read the definition of strawman. You aren't using the term correctly.
I said Linux has no direct equivalent to Solaris Zones. That statement is true, your foul mouth non-withstanding.
No, you said:
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.
All the above is true to Linux VServers - single kernel, single set of device drivers, single process tree*, potentially a single storage system, and it is extremely lightweight compared to virtual machines.
You should re-read the definition of strawman.
I still beleive that you are trying to pull a strawman. You said that there is no kernel-level virtualization for Linux - I pointed out that there is a kernel-level virtualization for Linux with roughly the same advantages/features you listed in the above quote, and now you are trying to imply that I said the VServer and Zones have exactly the same features. That looks like a nice fat strawman.
You should re-read the definition of strawman. You aren't using the term correctly.
And then you are trying to attack my person instead of trying to counter my statements. You are indeed full of shit.
You are right that I have a foul mouth, on the other hand.
* I think it's a single process tree per context, but it can be viewed as one tree with "vpstree".
No I didn't. You are a crazy person. Go be crazy elsewhere.
but none of those are required to do mission critical business computing
Clearly you don't do much mission critical business computing. Cause if you did you'd probably understand the respect Oracle/Sun gets in the trenches. All this stuff (Zones, ZFS, DTrace) are used heavily where I work, which is a pretty damned large "business critical computing" company... and it's not Oracle. ; )
it started in 5.2 with the move to fine-grained smp, but bugs still being weeded out - like the UFS with QUOTA locking order fix that just was put out for 8.1
OpenVZ is the Linux equivalent.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Since when does Solaris have a BSD ABI module? Just curious. Can't seem to find it in the documentation. Unless you are referring to SunOS compat?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Is it possible to create a special loader based on fuse.ko, with appropriately licensed headers (Apache?) to get around this? Or would it suffice to create a general mechanism for statically linking user mode fs's with libfuse and fuse.ko? That would make it very simple to get around the issue, with no more than a plain ELF crunching utility.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
but none of those are required to do mission critical business computing, which is why Solaris and OpenSolaris have lost (too little too late in both cases) and GNU/Linux has won. Go ahead and flog your dead horse, but the Solari are toast.
Secular, proprietary systems built from or borrowing from BSD projects have "won". Linux has "won" in its reality distortion bubble where the inhabitants are convinced if something free isn't available to them they don't need it.