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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I always thought a foon was more fork than spoon, and a spork more spoon than fork.
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.
Here I was, thinking that GNU was the premier userland, at least in terms of the number of users who depend on. Oh, wait, I see what you did there, you started a GPL-vs.-BSD license flamewar.
Palm trees and 8
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.
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.
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.
How do you count premiere? Features? How about code quality? Compare these two for a trivial example:
FreeBSD cp.c: view
Coreutils cp.c: view
The latter is embarrassing and the person should be ashamed to call himself a programmer. And this is, by far, one of the better-written GNU parts. I have long felt that the FreeBSD tools are better suited to being paired with Linux than the GNU tools are, as they both (FreeBSD & Linux) maintain similar coding standards, and the FreeBSD tools are better documented and undeniably more secure & bug-free.
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!
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
Well, and the BSDs also like to ignore standards like POSIX, e.g. OpenBSD having an nm without the -P option, some other BSD deprecating od in favour of some other tool that is even less standardized and certainly not part of POSIX.
They also since years don't manage to get such simple things like includes in the system headers right, you usually need to sprinkle random #include into code that works on almost all other systems (almost since in that regard they are quite similar to Solaris).
Not that I doubt you can find a lot of faults in GNU stuff, just saying that the BSD tools often are quite a PITA in their very own way.
Here you go: http://wiki.github.com/behlendorf/zfs/
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