OpenSolaris Governing Board Dissolves Itself

mysidia writes "Last month, it was mentioned that the OpenSolaris governing board issued an ultimatum to Oracle. It turns out that Oracle continued to ignore requests to appoint a liaison after the governing board's demands. This morning, the board unanimously passed a resolution to dissolve itself. Source code changes are no longer available, and it would appear that OpenSolaris and community involvement in the development of Solaris have been killed as rumored. We recently discussed a 'Spork' of OpenSolaris called Illumos. Perhaps now, this will have a chance at becoming a true fork."

Comments

Re:What momentum may that fork have?

[Galactic Dominator]

[quote]First, FreeBSD's ZFS may be "well underway", but it's showing no signs of being usable any time soon. Let it suffice to say that anyone paying attention or using FreeBSD ZFS for much more than one or two small servers is likely to agree that their implementation is not "enterprise ready" as they so arrogantly claim.[/quote]

Hmm, it's been usable for many of us for quite some time. Not to say there haven't been problems with it, but less the equivalent point in OpenSolaris history since FreeBSD is able to import well tested code and patches for issues the first gen ZFS had in OpenSolaris.

[quote]Second, I'm not so stupid as to fool myself into thinking ports on BSD is a sustainable administrative tool. Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.[/quote]

Again, many of us have used ports with great success for a long time. Personally, I find it easier than working with deb packages, and far easier than working with rpm's.

[quote]FreeBSD appears to be in decline as a project. I can't speak for developer activity, but I can say that their ability to actually ship code that works has become diminished since 7.1 or so. Entire subsystems have not worked for quite some time, yet they keep shipping it and saying "it'll be fixed in a couple years" (referring to USB and AHCI). Quite a few drivers have also had regressions.[/quote]

Wow this is like a broken record. The are no problems with either AHCI or USB for the vast majority of users. There were some changes to USB in 8.0, eg switched to being based off of libusb, device renaming, etc. AHCI and some the other related controller drivers were new in 8.0 as well, There were a few corner cases that didn't work well, but it's seen widespread usage with a great deal of success. The updates included in 8.1 address the corner cases and some further performance improvements. It's hard knowing what your issue is since you speak in generalities, but I assure you there are far more happy FreeBSD users than people like you.

[quote]In addition to ZFS, the Solaris kernel has dtrace, zones, and BrandZ.[/quote]

It's true OpenSolaris's zone are more advanced than FreeBSD jails, but for most uses the differences negligible. BSD Jails also integrate nicely with ZFS and FreeBSD's GEOM layer. OpenSolaris also has XEN dom0 support, I'm surprised you didn't take the opportunity to bag on FreeBSD's lack of it.

[quote]ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexenta is usable today. Not only does it "have" it, but you're able to trivially export an iSCSI device, use deduplication, and (not 100% sure on this one, just read about it having been added to Solaris in April) do differential filesystem snapshots. FreeBSD's implementation has none of this, giving it little more appeal than current btrfs on mdraid (and in some ways, less).[/quote]

It's trivial to export ZVOL on FreeBSD as iscsi targets. Granted it's not quite as nice as OpenSolaris since FreeBSD doesn't have an iscsi target in it's base system but there is a great one in ports and with a two minute wrapper script you have exactly the same functionality.

People talk of deduplication like it's some sort of magic bullet, but I think most of those people have no idea the overhead that imposes on the file system. Once they discover the resources necesscary to run it effectively, much of the enthusiasim fades away. It's a really a very select usage were deduplication would be economically feasible to implement.

Doesn't seem like you understand much about ZFS. Differential snapshot are integral to ZFS, you can't have ZFS with getting it so yes FreeBSD does have differential ZFS snapshots. Perhaps you're misidentifying this? http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2010/03/zfs-snapshot-differences.html Interesting, they have integrated diff into ZFS now. Trivial to do without the integration, if that's actually a make or break feature you need a new sys admin.

While you're getting some learning here, you s

Re:64-way DB Servers

[TheRaven64]

Saying RHEL runs on mainframes is a bit misleading. RHEL runs in smallish partitions of a mainframe. You can run a few thousand RHEL instances on an IBM Z-series (or whatever they're called this week) mainframe, but you can't just run a single instance of RHEL as you can with z/VM. The RHEL support is there for people who have a mainframe and want to use some of the spare capacity to replace some x86 servers. It's not something you would buy a mainframe for.