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OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H)
The H reports
that the OpenSolaris governing board (OGB) is considering dissolution and
may relinquish control of OpenSolaris to Oracle. "At yesterday's OGB meeting, Simon Phipps, previously Sun's 'Open Source Evangelist', stated that collaboration between Oracle and the OpenSolaris community was just not happening. In his opinion, in its present form, the community no longer serves a useful purpose."
(Log in to post comments)
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 13, 2010 23:17 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Just curious: why people still use [Open]Solaris? Which features are not yet available in Linux?
btrfs in Linux seems to be maturing fast, so ZFS is less relevant. And Solaris Zones are available as Linux Containers.
I know that people are porting Nouveau for GPGPU support to Solaris (adding their own memory manager, etc.) So I'm genuinely curious about Solaris.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 13, 2010 23:39 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
Apparently it's a much better platform for burning CDs.
*takes cover*
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 13:42 UTC (Wed) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]
This is possibly one of the funniest comments I've read in a while.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 1:53 UTC (Thu) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]
I see what you did there. ;-)
For high-subscriber-number readers Posted Jul 15, 2010 18:07 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Care to explain to the unenlightened?
For high-subscriber-number readers Posted Jul 15, 2010 18:52 UTC (Thu) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]
It's a diss of Jorg Schilling, the iconoclast behind the original Unix optical disc writing software, and prominent Solaris-is-better-than-Linux fanboy. ;-)
For high-subscriber-number readers Posted Jul 18, 2010 12:26 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
He's on the OpenSolaris governing board? So much for anything that requires said board to negotiate with anyone, then. I have never in my life encountered anyone worse at negotiation or diplomacy.
For high-subscriber-number readers Posted Jul 20, 2010 12:33 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>I have never in my life encountered anyone worse at negotiation or diplomacy.
Ulrich Drepper?
For high-subscriber-number readers Posted Jul 20, 2010 13:44 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
No. Ulrich *can* sometimes be convinced that his position is wrong. It's just very difficult (probably a good attribute for a maintainer of something as critical as glibc), and an extremely unpleasant experience (because he doesn't know what politeness is for), but that doesn't mean he's unpersuadable. He's hard to work with but not impossible. glibc's community is unhealthy but it sort of exists, even if much of it has had to quasi-fork off to stay out of Ulrich's way. Ulrich does not appear to object to the existence of eglibc, so this compromise appears stable.
Jorg Schilling, as far as I can tell, is completely unpersuadable. I've never seen him reverse his position on *anything*, even if it is something that is outright loony or has been rendered completely wrong by the passage of time. I suspect that his much-laughed-at devotion to referring to devices by SCSI IDs is an example of the latter: back in the late 80s this was probably the right decision, as nearly all CD burners worthy of the name were horrifically expensive SCSI-only devices and OSes had few other ways to address them, but when better device frameworks emerged -- in Solaris first! -- his mind was made up and could not change. By the time he had to invent fake SCSI IDs to account for the fact that nearly all CD burners weren't actually SCSI anymore his position had moved, gradually, from reasonable to demented. Plus, his attitude to forks is best described as 'extremely jealous'. It's the last part that makes his software best avoided, in my opinion.
For high-subscriber-number readers Posted Jul 20, 2010 15:13 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
That was an excellent summary.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 13, 2010 23:50 UTC (Tue) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
ZFS is indeed the reason for the case I know of.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 0:16 UTC (Wed) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link]
Yes.
It's taken a few years for ZFS to mature, but it's very stable right now -- especially on Solaris 10.
btrfs still has a long ways to "bake" before I'd feel confident using it in production.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 2:34 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
Yes, even with Oracle and other sponsors supporting btrfs development, it will take them a bit to catch up with Oracle and their ZFS.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 0:19 UTC (Wed) by xorbe (subscriber, #3165) [Link]
I guess FreeBSD has ZFS, but my co-worker just tried it out and ran into a fairly bad known issue. It only works well if the entire system is ZFS -- mixing in native UFS causes ZFS to slow to a crawl, because it doesn't understand "inactive memory" (disk buffering for performance) used for UFS. So ZFS thinks the machine is out of memory ...
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 0:53 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]
We're seriously considering it for de-dup.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 1:52 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
ZFS + Dtrace are the two biggies that Linux lacks.
Btrfs will replace ZFS in a few years, as long as it avoids the patent lawsuit issues are hindering people that want to use ZFS for NAS devices.
But I don't think that anything is in the works for a comparable feature to Dtrace. I know that people have worked on tracing features for Linux, but they are not really up to the same level that Dtrace is.
Besides that it's all personal preferences and prejudices that some people have against Linux/for Solaris. These viewpoints may be justified, they may not. I am far from qualified to really understand everything in depth and the best I could do in comparing the platforms is bicycle shed'ng.
See Softparanoia.com for examples of these biases. Keep in mind that the guy is intellegant and has actual has valid reasons behind his (or the website's) viewpoints despite how much you may or may not agree with him.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 2:08 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I believe you mean Softpanorama.org?
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 5:54 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Ah yes. My bad.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 7:57 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> I know that people have worked on tracing features for Linux, but they are not really up to the same level that Dtrace is.
How does SystemTap compare these days? I tried both out for the first time recently, and after the slight difference in setup difficulty (no setup for DTrace vs two hours for SystemTap on Fedora 13 and half a day, despite the experience from Fedora, on Ubuntu 10.04) I didn't see any immediate difference. I assume that the differences come out when one moves to more advanced use. And of course SystemTap does feel horribly clumsy with the way it builds kernel modules out of trace scripts, although in some ways it is a rather nice idea.
> Besides that it's all personal preferences and prejudices that some people have against Linux/for Solaris.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 10:24 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
>> I know that people have worked on tracing features for Linux, but they are not really up to the same level that Dtrace is.
>How does SystemTap compare these days? Replying to myself, user space tracing with SystemTap is clearly not yet generally available, even if it is looking more hopeful again that it will be some day soon (c.f. https://lwn.net/Articles/387257/) . I have already made good use of user space tracing on OpenSolaris with DTrace.
Sweet SystemTap Posted Jul 14, 2010 11:04 UTC (Wed) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]
Where it is available it is actually pretty nice. See for example this blog post on how to track reference counting bugs in gnome applications with SystemTap (and static trace points in the core gnome libraries):
http://tecnocode.co.uk/2010/07/13/reference-count-debuggi... (The static trace points should even be source compatible with dtrace probes, so in theory this now also works for solaris.)
But yeah, it is taking some tricks to get all the support hooks accepted in the mainline linux kernel. Lots of pushing going on though. With tracehooks, ftrace, tracepoints and perf now being in we will hopefully see the more powerful systemtap features also trickle in over time. The realtime support also took a long time to get partially in even though lots of people were already using it outside mainline.
The next (1.3, not yet out) release of SystemTap can even give you user backtraces for when the kernel triggers a pagefault, which is pretty sweet. http://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git;a=blob;f=NEWS;...
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:13 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
<snark>Because Jumpstart + the HORRIBLE package manager is soooooo much better than kickstart + rpm</snark> Even in OSOL, the package manager is terrible.
Can you please define "heavy duty systems administration". For server deployment en mass, Linux spanks the pants off of Solaris. Period.
For threading (especially if you have the Niagra sparc processor in your servers), Solaris still beats the pants off of Linux. Ditto with recovering from hardware (such as dimm) errors although that is more due to sparc being designed for those things and x86 not really until recently.
In the interest of full disclosureNote that SystemTap is all good and great, but isn't a full DTrace equivalent until the uprobes patchset is merged. Until it is, you can't do full on userspace <---> kernel space tracing, but only kernel space tracing.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:51 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Can you please define "heavy duty systems administration". For server deployment en mass, Linux spanks the pants off of Solaris. Period.
Does that include updating the things and day-to-day maintenance?
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 13:19 UTC (Wed) by evad (subscriber, #60553) [Link]
Day-to-day maintenance could cover a multitude of things and I think this depends what you're doing with your OS - so comparing Linux and Solaris on that simple measure will always be difficult (and biased).
Updating Solaris vs. Linux systems is a lot easier. I'd argue that the easiest platform is Linux (yum, apt, etc), but Solaris isn't that much more difficult.
OpenSolaris and pkg make it very easy, and Solaris 10, although not quite as easy, is not at all difficult. Patch clusters and sets are easy to install and if you use pca its even easier. Unlike Linux systems you can use LiveUpgrade (although Fedora and btrfs are nearly there) and with patches you can roll patches back and know that its likely the rollback will work. On Linux with yum and apt you can, with difficulty, go back to older releases of packages but this isn't designed as so; you have no guarantee the process will work.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 13:34 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
But you have the abomination of patches that have to be applied incrementally on Solaris vs a rpm you can upgrade directly to while skipping the intermediate versions. Thats why updating to the latest greatest from a base install can take eons. Please someone prove me wrong, my Solaris experience isn't near as extensive as my Linux experience.
It reminds me of the torvalds vs tanenbaum microkernel debate. They are great in theory, but horrible in practice and most implementations.
In the end, posix is posix is posix. Any competent admin with a posix skillset can manage both.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 14:50 UTC (Wed) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link]
IMO, patching on Solaris is an abomination. Especially coming from the Linux world where you can easily "yum upgrade" and reboot at your convenience.
Sure, LiveUgrade helps with some of this, but unless you're using a ZFS root, it's still a pain, and the nature of how Sun/Oracle bundles patches leads to people cherry picking them and you end up with systems all over the spectrum in terms of fully-patched, partially patched, etc.
PCA is great, but it's not really a centralized tool (without some custom infrastructure).
Suffice to say the reality is the Linux environments end up being nearly always fully patched, while the Solaris environments lag behind and/or only spot apply patches that address specific bugs or security holes.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:22 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] ...vs two hours for SystemTap on Fedora 13Just curious -- what did you spend the two hours with? For me this always worked: yum install systemtap debuginfo-install kernel
SystemTap setup Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:37 UTC (Wed) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]
The debuginfo-install kernel is technically only needed for probing the kernel (which admittedly is often where the juicy events come from). If you are only doing user space probing you only need the relevant user space debuginfo.
Also SystemTap comes with "stap-prep" which does the above for the kernel case plus sanity checks (modulo a bug on Fedora 13, which has been fixed upstream: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=596083)
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:49 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Just curious -- what did you spend the two hours with? For me this always worked:
Finding the documentation for SystemTap, working out the procedure, including what you need to install at all, then trying to work out why I couldn't seem to get a kernel version as new as the debug symbols I had just installed (or debug symbols as old as the kernel I had) and trying to find a matching kernel. In the end it was just my inexperience with yum I think, I normally use Ubuntu.
Ubuntu who unfortunately still don't have debug symbols matching their released kernel version (just the upcoming one), so that when I installed it on my Ubuntu system I ended up rebuilding the package in the background when I installed. Wouldn't have been a big issue if it hadn't already been so hot in the office... Admittedly not quite half a day, but several hours in total from start until I could actually use it.
SystemTap documentation Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:55 UTC (Wed) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]
The Beginner Guide is pretty nice:
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/SystemTap_Beginners_Guide/
Other documentation on the sourceware homepage:
Debian is not also starting to ship debuginfo for the kernel, hopefully Ubuntu will pick that up:
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 15:26 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Ubuntu who unfortunately still don't have debug symbols matching their released kernel version (just the upcoming one), so that when I installed it on my Ubuntu system I ended up rebuilding the package in the background when I installed. Wouldn't have been a big issue if it hadn't already been so hot in the office... Admittedly not quite half a day, but several hours in total from start until I could actually use it.
Oh yes, not to mention that due to some broken sanity check in SystemTap I always got
ERROR: Build-id mismatch: "kernel" vs. "vmlinux-2.6.32-23-generic"
when I tried to run a script. I took the lazy path and compiled the check out, as I didn't have time to understand the details of what it was doing, and it worked fine after that.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 15:09 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]
Please report the bug formally.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 15:29 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Please report the bug formally.
Will do, I'm just always a bit embarassed reporting things I think I ought to be able to analyse myself without providing some sort of solution :)
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 10:27 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
There is nothing wrong with reporting something you ought to be able to analyze yourself but did not have the time to analyze. Besides, some things might take you hours or even days to fully analyze, but once pointed to a developer of the project, the developer sometimes is able to fully analyze and create a fix in minutes.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 14:53 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] It has been quite a while since I futzed around with Solaris (around 2000). Solarites were known to belittle Linux for its lack of sysadmin tools back then. My experience was quite the contrary (with Red Hat in particular). Software updates are almost painless in Linux. Software availability was much better with Linux, either as packages or easy-to-build source (Solaris had its quirks, which required scary stuff like replacing libc for halfway sane operation, plus the customary "GNU > /usr/local" to get a reasonable shell and other basic tools, ...). The "easy to use" tools were such heavy resource hogs, and required Sun's bloated version of X, that they were completely useless in practice. Plus you couldn't even look sideways at the configuration files without giving them fits. Besides, our Solaris server got compromised remotely due to a long-known vulnerability in said "administration tools", which we specifically had removed. A software update (re)installed them silently... Needless to say, an operating system than can be compromised remotely in a jiffy and stays that way for a couple of years isn't my first option. The machine was soon converted to Linux, and we never looked back. Have had taking a new look at Solaris 10 on my ToDo list for some time... will set up a virtual machine to do so one of this days.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 15:53 UTC (Wed) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]
You know, my Solaris experience is WAY out of date, but when I was forming my opinion of it in 1999, it was just ghastly. Out of the box, the machines didn't even have FTP, nor sz/rz, so we had to use kermit to get an FTP client onto the machine and then FTP to transfer the rest of a sane userland onto the box. The compiler, which cost an abusrd amount of money, was inexplicably installed in /opt/SUNWSPro/blah/blah/blah/bin/, so everybody's PATH was a mess. It was basically a really bad experience.
Recently I decided to try Nexenta, the frankenmonster offspring of OpenSolaris and Debian, only to find that the userland there is a years-old fork of Ubuntu Hardy. This did not make me feel like the Solaris ecosystem had rocketed to greatness over the last decade.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 19:05 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] But hey, at least it has nvi now.
Softpanorama Posted Jul 14, 2010 13:54 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Well maybe there's some good reasoning in there somewhere, but I don't think it's about Solaris at all, that's just an excuse.
The site exists to bash Free Software, focusing on Linux. What Solaris advocacy is there in an "unauthorized biography" of Linus Torvalds that's just full of bullshit (I use the term in its technical sense) ?
Softpanorama Posted Jul 14, 2010 15:19 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Yes, I started to read though that and found first of all a (mis)characterization of Linux/OSS advocates as a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics and poking fun at fanatics in general. Entertaining read, that part, but it says nothing relevant about Linux vs Solaris (or open source vs closed source Unices, for that matter). Except that it shows that the Solaris camp has its complement of rabid fanatics too. Didn't look much further, sorry. A technical comparision by someone who understands the various systems would be most wel come... but I'd probably better get my copy of the ULSAH and a quiet long weekend.
Softpanorama Posted Jul 20, 2010 12:50 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
'"unauthorized biography" of Linus Torvalds that's just full of bullshit (I use the term in its technical sense) ?'
you mean "bulshytt"? ;)
(for those that need an explanation: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Bulshytt)
Btrfs patent problems?? Posted Jul 14, 2010 15:12 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Hi,
Is anyone saying that Btrfs might suffer from NetApp's patents?
I'm documenting the NetApp v. NFS patent situation here:
Any info'd be appreciated. It can be added directly to the wiki, or if it's posted here, I'll add it later.
Btrfs patent problems?? Posted Jul 15, 2010 15:01 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
Useful thing to add would be that the patents are on their way to being invalidated.
Btrfs patent problems?? Posted Jul 15, 2010 17:17 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
You'll have to help me out on that one.
Is there a list somewhere of the patents they used in 2007 against Sun?
Is it just the four mentioned here:
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 9:16 UTC (Wed) by zzxtty (subscriber, #45175) [Link]
We use Solaris for our disk servers, zfs enables us to have separate resizeable partitions for each user. From a user point of view this is far superior to quota. We don't really use the RAID features of ZFS as we have hardware RAID, which is currently all Sun kit. Having everything from the same manufacturer means that when you get a hardware fault you just hand it over to them, you don't get involved with one company telling you it is another companies fault. We've all been there, you've got smoke coming out of manufacture X's disk array and they tell you they won't do anything about it and tell you its a problem with the server produced by manufacturer Y. That said Sun have been pretty rubbish at diagnosing faults on several occasions.
We use Linux for just about everything else now, apart from our SunRay servers. A single SPARC/Solaris server does a very good job of hosting lots of SunRay sessions. I cant say I've tried this on x86/Linux but past experience suggests they may not scale as well, although it's been many years since I've looked at this.
I will be moving away from Sun/Solaris, Oracle are very busy putting up prices, especially of our support contracts. Linux has matured a lot, but also hardware manufactures are more supportive of it. I can now buy a server and know that Linux will work on it with out faffing with binary driver downloads, this wasn't true 10 years.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 10:56 UTC (Wed) by evad (subscriber, #60553) [Link]
The approach of a ZFS file system per user doesn't scale up very well though, and until the most recent Solaris 10 update thats all we could do - there were no user/group quotas.
If you have <100 users, or maybe even <1000, a file system per user is a great idea. Our ZFS file server however has to cope with tends of terrabytes and 30,000+ users, Solaris stops mounting file systems at around 20,000 maximum mounts, and even at a few thousand mounts you won't have any physical RAM left to do anything useful anyway.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 11:53 UTC (Wed) by zzxtty (subscriber, #45175) [Link]
A quick check of our LDAP directory indicates we've got about 500 accounts, a good portion wont be particularly active, however some users have two partitions. The partitions are unequally divided between 4 servers, and vary in size from a few GB to about 1TB. For this ZFS seems to work fine, although I would love to improve throughput NFS + 1G ethernet results in awful lockups every now and again, and we only have about 16 NFS clients.
I don't envy you with 30k+ users! I hope there is more than one of you, I have to make sure I check both ways when crossing one way streets and my boss grumbles whenever I mention the word "holiday".
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 18:39 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] One filesystem per user is not the same as quotas...
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 7:45 UTC (Thu) by evad (subscriber, #60553) [Link]
No, but until Update 8 there was no alternative on Solaris 10 ;-)
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 20, 2010 21:48 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Bah... Solaris 2 (or some such) had disk quotas. That's where I learned about them, in fact.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 22, 2010 21:02 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quotas and rquotad for quotas over NFS on the inevitable giant uni NIS/NFS/automounted network.
Those were the days...
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 10:37 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
From what I see, ZFS is actually developing faster than Btrfs - the latter still has problems with even most basic functionality (see recent mail from a guy from Red Hat about pathological case of filesystem aging), while ZFS is getting more and more features all the time.
Also, why not ask the question the other way around - why people still use Linux? What does Linux do better, apart from hardware support and nicely packaged distributions?
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 10:48 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Also, why not ask the question the other way around - why people still use Linux? What does Linux do better, apart from hardware support and nicely packaged distributions? Have you ever used Solaris or is this just another opportunity to take a pop at stuff you don't like? The answer to your question is written all over the various efforts to make OpenSolaris more relevant to a wider audience, like shipping decent versions of common tools (not some limited variants in a bunch of oddly-named directories) and doing package/dependency management. Oh, and choosing licensing and promoting a community structure that doesn't make it look like everyone is working for some corporate parent might have something to do with it, in case the emphasis of the original article passed you by.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 16:38 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
I already mentioned "nicely packaged up distributions", didn't I? One thing I missed is cheaper workforce - more people know Linux, so it's easier to find a sysadmin. However, in technical aspects, from filesystems to things as basic as synchronisation (Linux still uses anachronic spinlocks), Solaris is years ahead. Thus my question.
As for the license and company parents - same thing in Linux, except that GPL is more restrictive (according to Stallman's interpretation it's viral) and you have several corporations instead of one; not much of a difference, I think.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 17:07 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] I already mentioned "nicely packaged up distributions", didn't I? Yes, but you make it sound like gloss when, in fact, decent package and dependency management is essential, as various other people have already pointed out. It was also a major priority of Project Indiana: you know, the thing where the Debian guy was brought in to add things that people found indispensable in Linux. One thing I missed is cheaper workforce - more people know Linux, so it's easier to find a sysadmin. You know, a load of people prided themselves on knowing Solaris and SunOS before it, especially amongst adopters of Linux, so Linux didn't exactly start off with any numerical advantage in this respect. However, in technical aspects, from filesystems to things as basic as synchronisation (Linux still uses anachronic spinlocks), Solaris is years ahead. Thus my question. Well, the "years ahead" Solaris isn't seeing that much action in, say, supercomputers, so it doesn't hold all the good cards by any means. Why Linux is used so widely isn't just down to specific technology. As for the license and company parents - same thing in Linux, except that GPL is more restrictive (according to Stallman's interpretation it's viral) and you have several corporations instead of one; not much of a difference, I think. You cannot be serious! Firstly, the CDDL is a copyleft licence, but one that isn't compatible with the GPL, which says more about Sun not wanting to relinquish control of their software than it does about the GPL. Secondly, there are corporations developing Linux but they influence the direction of the project mostly on technical merit, not on having a bunch of puppet bureaucracies set up by a single corporation, which have obviously worked out so well for all of Sun's other open source projects, too. So, apart from various technical essentials that were neglected in Solaris for about a decade or so, plus various community and licensing considerations, what else would make people switch to Linux? Isn't this like asking what the Romans have done for us? Maybe more than you're willing to accept.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 18:54 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] However, in technical aspects, from filesystems to things as basic as synchronisation (Linux still uses anachronic spinlocks), Solaris is years ahead. Thus my question. Exactly the opposite... on our aging SPARC IPX machines at the time Solaris barely crawled, Red Hat ran just fine, and gave that iron a few extra years of useful life (Solaris wasn't updated on them anymore). Linux was fast and lean, Solaris was bloat at its worst. BTW, what is "anachronic" about spinlocks? They do work, and have low overhead. Sure, it looks like the in-kernel synchronization primitives for Solaris are less (and simpler to use); but if the cost is that the system runs much slower, no thanks. Filesystems? Like the in-kernel MS-DOS filessytem they had, that was so incredibly awfully slow (I seem to remember minutes copying a few smallish files) that the very first thing we did on any Sun machine here was to install mtools to get bearable floppies? Like all the filesystems Linux handles today (I believe almost all important disk partitioning schemes are supported, as are most filesystems, even very obscure ones), and which Solaris doesn't understand at all?
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 21:01 UTC (Wed) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] AIUI, the Solaris equivalent of a spinlock is a complex thing called an "adaptive mutex"; it's a spinlock if held for a short time period, becoming a sleeping lock if held for a long time period. And they don't have RCU, so many things that are RCU-protected in Linux are mutex protected in Solaris - whereas their Linux equivalents went from sleeping locks to spinlocks to RCU to get scalability up without paying a huge price on small machines. Spinlocks are probably the fastest primitive for SMP locking - they directly exploit cache coherency protocols for their inter-CPU messaging, so pay less overhead than any sleeping lock type. The only downside is that you lose out if you wait on a spinlock for long periods; this is ameliorated by two things in kernel design:
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 14:44 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
Actually, you missed a small detail, and got the conclusions wrong. The small detail is that because spinlock cannot block, it's often neccessary to disable interrupts (the whole irqsave/irqrestore stuff). In Solaris (same as in FreeBSD or OSX), it's not neccessary, due to use of interrupt threads. Second problem with spinlocks is that they waste CPU time when contention happens - real mutexes just switch to other thread instead (not immediately, though, you mentioned adaptive spinlocks already). In the end, spinlocks are slower then mutexes in other systems (fast path in mutex is pretty much same thing as in spinlock, minus the interrupt stuff) , and they become even slower under load, due to inability to deal with contention.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 16:03 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] And the thing you are completely ignoring is that the cost of a thread switch outweighs the cost of disabling interrupts for short periods on any CPU you might run Solaris on; any argument against spinlocks that goes "we use threads to avoid needing to disable interrupts" is an instant loser - go measure the difference on (say) a Niagra system, or an UltraSPARC II yourself. Measurements of spinlocks versus mutexes have shown time and time again that spinlocks are faster than mutexes when the lock hold time is small, regardless of the amount of contention; the whole reason Solaris now has adaptive mutexes (which are spinlocks until you've held them for a while) is that it is now too late for Solaris to go back and change the design decisions that led to mutexes everywhere, even when the lock hold time is small, and thus they need their mutexes to be spinlocks when the lock hold time is small, and proper mutexes when the lock hold time is long. In contrast, Linux uses mutexes when the lock hold time could reasonably be long, and spinlocks when the protected work is guaranteed to be small; this reduces overhead compared to Solaris, as it doesn't bother spinning if it's unlikely to make progress, instead going straight to sleep. Further, Linux uses RCU and related techniques to avoid taking locks (and thus facing inter-CPU synchronisation issues) where Solaris uses locks.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 11:08 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
That's not how it works. When held for a short time, mutex (todays mutexes are always adaptive, at least in Solaris and FreeBSD) doesn't switch threads - it spins, just like spinlock. Thus, the whole "thread switch outweighs the cost of disabling interrupts" argument is invalid - it's not "linux spins, other systems switch"; it's "linux has to disable interrupts while spinning, and other systems don't".
I'm not sure about what measurements you're talking about. I guess you mean some Linux implementation - but then, if they were slower, that just proves that they were badly implemented. Let me repeat: fast path in a mutex (in operating system other than Linux) is pretty much the same as fast path of spinlock in Linux, minus messing with interrupts.
There is one more thing you missed - results. I've already mentioned that IBM doesn't publish high end server workloads benchmarks (Oracle, SAP etc) under Linux if they can use AIX instead. What they do publish for Linux is stuff that doesn't spend much time in the kernel by definition (i.e. HPC), and is thus not so demanding when it comes to scalability - because it doesn't matter if kernel needs to waste twice as much CPU time, if the total kernel time is 1% and the rest is userland.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 22:37 UTC (Fri) by joib (guest, #8541) [Link]
In Linux spinlocks are meant for situations were the lock is held for a very short time. This means that code which holds a spinlock may not block, and secondly, by disabling interrupts it ensures that the processor does not go off to do something else with the spinlock held, such as servicing interrupts, or switching to some other thread.
Or to put it another way, since the lock is held for a very short time, and the thread holding the lock can't be bumped off the cpu, a lightweight spinlock is the correct locking primitive.
One way to see the performance impact of mutexes vs. spinlocks is to benchmark with the hard realtime patches (PREEMPT_RT). These patches replace most of the spinlocks with (IIRC priority inheriting) mutexes, since spinlocks cannot guarantee that the highest priority process will always get the lock. Due to this, and some other reasons, the PREEMPT_RT kernel is a bit slower as well as scales much worse than the vanilla kernel.
As an aside, this has nothing to do with threaded interrupt handlers (which FWIW are also available in Linux, although so far not widely used) vs. the traditional bottom/top half+workqueue/whatever interrupt handlers.
As another aside, AFAIK disabling and re-enabling interrupts takes relatively little time; I doubt you can actually measure the performance hit due to this.
As yet another side, Linux also has adaptive mutexes. E.g. the BTRFS file system uses them, although I believe they are otherwise relatively rare.
The argument that fast paths are equally fast in spinlocks as in mutexes, well, duh. Of course. Most locking mechanisms have pretty fast paths. The reason why there are many of them is that we're interested in different behavior under contention. In some cases the appropriate behavior is to spin, in other cases sleeping is better, and in yet other cases some lockless mechanism such as RCU is appropriate.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 18, 2010 8:56 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> Thus, the whole "thread switch outweighs the cost of disabling interrupts"
> argument is invalid - it's not "linux spins, other systems switch"; it's > "linux has to disable interrupts while spinning, and other systems don't".
How useful is a spinlock that doesn't disable interrupts on a uniprocessor system? Think about it carefully.
Another two questions: have you ever written code that used spinlocks, RCU, or seqlocks? Have you ever been the system administrator for a Solaris system?
A simple yes or no will do.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 18, 2010 9:55 UTC (Sun) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]
Err, a spinlock that doesn't need to disable interrupts, say because it is not used from interrupt context will degrade to a no-op on UP systems. Questioning the usefulness of such lock is quite pointless since the UP machine cannot be preempted in that spot by code design.
And something that the start of this thread failed to mention is that Linux doesn't actually always disable interrupts for spinlocks. Only those that are also used from interrupt context need to disable interrupts. The others still make sense on SMP systems. It's why there's spin_lock_irqsave/spin_lock_bh/spin_lock.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 18, 2010 20:04 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
You're right-- not all spinlocks do disable interrupts. I was just replying to trasz's accusation that disabling interrupts in spinlocks was a crazy, Linux-only idea. I guess I was kind of feeding the troll, sigh.
Traditionally in Linux you used spin_lock_irqsave when you needed to modify the same variable in an interrupt handler as in some other kernel code.
I know that lately there's been a move towards threaded IRQ handlers and less use of CLI / STI. The PREEMPT_RT patchset, which I've used previously at work, replaces most spinlocks with mutexes in order to get better maximum latency performance. It would be interesting to see a comparison between Linux + PREEMPT_RT and Solaris's architecture. As far as I know, the selling point for these architectural changes is reduced latency rather than greater throughput-- which, again, is contrary to what trasz is saying.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Aug 6, 2010 9:29 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
I never said disabling interrupts in spinlocks was crazy - I said systems using interrupt threads and fully functional mutexes don't need to disable interrupts, because there is nothing wrong with interrupt thread blocking on mutex.
As for the speed comparisons - take a look at FreeBSD. It has spinlocks - which disable interrupts - but their use is discouraged, because they _are_ slower. If threaded interrupts handlers in Linux result in worse performance, this might be caused by poor implementation.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Aug 6, 2010 9:20 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
Spinlocks - yes, RCU - no; seqlocks seem to look like a reader/writer locks, so probably yes. Solaris - yes, but for nothing important (i.e. paid).
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 14:59 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
WRT the IPX - it's old problem of overhead vs. scalability. Linux always had smaller overhead. So, if you have hardware manufactured in 1994, it's much better choice, I agree. :->
For the spinlocks, see below. In short: they are slow and they don't scale.
As for filesystems - Linux doesn't have anything comparable to ZFS, and this is a huge drawback - snapshots, clones (great for upgrading), fast incremental backups, checksums, not having to size your filesystems by hand and generally fsck with LVM, to mention a few I'm using. But yeah, for handling PC floppies Solaris probably sucked.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 23:59 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
It must burn you up that no matter how highly you regard ZFS it's not stopping Linux from burying Solaris.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 11:18 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
It must burn you up that no matter how highly you regard Linux it's not stopping pretty much everyone from ignoring it on desktop ;->
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 20, 2010 14:01 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
While Solaris on the desktop is just *everywhere*, yeah.
(perhaps in a better world...)
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 19:16 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] I am bemused by your apparent belief that having contributions from multiple more-or-less directly competing corporations is "not much different" to pretty much only existing at all in order to sell a single manufacturer's hardware.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:17 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Also, why not ask the question the other way around - why people still use Linux? "Still use" doesn't make sense when applied to Linux, because Solaris isn't growing at Linux's expense.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 16:47 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
Do you have any stats showing that Linux is still growing at Solaris expense? I know this was happening, but it's not quite sure it continues, especially given that Oracle might try to start doing what IBM started a while ago, i.e. again try to push its own unix instead.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 17:10 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Given what Oracle have just done to Solaris support costs, I'm quite sure it's continuing. I would not be remotely surprised if it were to speed up.
filtering test case? Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:27 UTC (Wed) by sbishop (guest, #33061) [Link]
I have often times wondered if you're Corbet cooking up test cases for the new comment-filtering functionality. I am going to try it out...
filtering test case? Posted Jul 14, 2010 12:49 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
No, but feel free to test them! :)
I was genuinely interested and I really have not expected such a big flamewar.
filtering test case? Posted Jul 14, 2010 17:30 UTC (Wed) by sbishop (guest, #33061) [Link]
Just to be clear, I thought your question was reasonable. My comment was directed toward trasz. And so far the filtering is working great! :)
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 15:27 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Reasonable hardware support, timely software updates, and a ever growing list of competently packaged software was the reason to move away from Solaris... and was for many other shops around me. No high-end shops, mind you; but Linux is slowly taking over that space too as legacy Solaris boxes retire.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 16:25 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 16:39 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
Except that HPC stuff is very different from high end server workloads. Never wondered why IBM always benchmarks its POWER systems under AIX instead of Linux? ;->
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 20:45 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
"Never wondered"? How about "never bothered to check your facts":
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/reports/syst...
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 21:11 UTC (Wed) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] For those wishing to go directly to the Linux benchmarks, I've looked at the twp May 2010 PDFs from clump's link to IBM: page 19 onwards of the High Performance Computing Performance Report and page 27 onwards of the Systems Performance Report cover Linux performance.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 14:52 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
Yeah, nice try. I guess you didn't notice that while there are application benchmarks for Oracle, SAP, Sybase, SAP, Java, DB2 and couple others I don't recognize, it's all under AIX - the only "benchmarks" published for Linux are synthetic ones like SPECcpu, which don't say anything about operating system scalability and performance. See for yourself, it's in the PDF you pasted.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 23:44 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
It might help if you read your own comment, clicked the link to IBM's page, then conveniently clicked the link for the PDF under "IBM Power Systems High Performance Computing Performance Report".
Spoiler alert: you're still wrong.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 10:47 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
I've already mentioned three comments above that HPC stuff is very different from high end server workloads. IBM doesn't benchmark high end server workloads under Linux on machines supported by AIX, as demonstrated in your PDFs. (Is this thread really so hard to follow?)
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 10:51 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Now to my mind, the natural response is "Of course they don't. That might undermine AIX sales."
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 11:16 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
I don't think IBM makes big money on AIX licenses. They're selling hardware. If they wanted to sell AIX, they wouldn't publish Linux benchmarks for HPC and instead they would push AIX there as well.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 19:03 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I don't think IBM makes big money on AIX licenses. They're selling hardware. I'm pretty sure you're right about that. If IBM could get Linux to do everything on IBM's hardware that AIX can (in IBM's opinion), IBM would be happy to dump the AIX development cost and leech off others' Linux development.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 20:33 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] It's not as if IBM isn't taking part in Linux (kernel) development. See, e.g., Jon's stats in last week's issue. As companies go they are fairly high up on the list – not anywhere near Red Hat, to be sure, but certainly ahead of most of the others. If that is »leeching off others' Linux development« then pretty much everybody is doing it (and their dog, too). Even Red Hat, the leader by a wide margin, has contributed only not quite 12% of the changesets in 2.6.35. There's no point in bashing only IBM about this.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 21:12 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] It's not as if IBM isn't taking part in Linux (kernel) development. Right, but I didn't say anything related to IBM's current relationship with Linux. I posed a hypothetical situation where IBM is able to sell its hardware with Linux as developed by others, in order to make a point about whether IBM makes a profit on AIX. Of course, the hypothetical still works if others do 95% of the development of Linux, which is how it is today.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 17, 2010 0:34 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
what amount of contribution to linux changes a company from being a 'leech'
if 88% of the development is done by other companies, is that company a leech? if so Redhat is a leech. If that's the line where they are no longer a leech, then only 8 companies in the world can not be a leech.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 17, 2010 1:55 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] what amount of contribution to linux changes a company from being a 'leech' If you mean "leech" in a morally negative sense, then I have no opinion on that. I don't much care about morality of business and I didn't mean to say anything about IBM's hypothetical morality if it hypothetically decided to start using Linux instead of AIX to sell its hardware. I was only talking about A taking advantage of work that B did for some purpose other than to serve A. And I do think that's an honorable way to increase the wealth of the world.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 17, 2010 4:55 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you are the first person I have ever seen use the term leech and mean it to be a positive thing :-)
every other time I've seen it used (in most cases with almost the exact same statement you made), it's being used to say that it's not fair that IBM would bet getting so much benefit and they should be punished (if only by preferring the work of some other company that isn't a leech)
the term 'leech' strongly implies (if not outright states) that you are taking something away from the host that it can't use anymore for your own benefit.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Aug 6, 2010 9:12 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]
That was the plan few years ago - when you look at IBM's position on Linux shortly after they got involved (2000, IIRC?), the plan was to phase out AIX. They changed their mind few years ago.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 17:14 UTC (Wed) by captrb (subscriber, #2291) [Link]
I was pushed into administering Solaris seven years ago, largely because "the powers that be" were more comfortable with it. It was and is awful to administer (install, patch, compile, repair), but once it is running, it runs for years at a time. During these years, we migrated from Solaris 9 to newer and newer versions of Solaris 10 and even started buying Sun's Intel gear.
We could have switched off Solaris to Linux in the last two years, but didn't. For better or worse, I doubled down on Solaris for Zones, ZFS, & DTrace and I use the hell out of them. None have a Linux equivalent that is as powerful. No really. Seriously fanboy, shut up. I wish it were not the case, because I'd be off Solaris in a heartbeat. Perhaps a BSD would be attractive, but we use Java extensively and my understanding is the BSD is a redheaded stepchild in the Java world. I'm a redheaded step-child in the real world and that is plenty, thanks.
Understandably, we are dismayed by the Oracle takeover. Immediately they raised support costs (which we actually started paying for just a year ago), locked down access to patches, and started being all Oracle-ly about things. "Software, Hardware, Complete"? No thanks, I want to be an "all Oracle Shop" about as bad as I want to be an "all Microsoft Shop".
What will we do? This is what I'm considering moving to, slowly but surely:
* Keep Solaris+ZFS for databases, fileservers,
P.S. The funny thing about Sun/Oracle virtualization: VirtualBox runs like crap on Solaris. Kernel lockups and other instabilities are rampant, particularly with multiple CPU's. So they could potentially keep me as a customer if this was an Solaris+VBox+Linux was a better option.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 23:09 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Linux Containers or Virtuozzo are as powerful as Zones. I haven't worked with Solaris much, but I did use Zones and DTrace a lot. They are nice, but Linux had caught up with them.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 17:45 UTC (Thu) by captrb (subscriber, #2291) [Link]
I have not tried Linux Containers that I recall.
I have not tried Virtuozzo, but I think that I tried OpenVZ and it didn't offer the networking functionality that I needed.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 19:05 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
LXC is a subset of OpenVZ designed to bring namespace isolation to the vanilla Linux kernel.
It's designed to be somewhat generic so it's functionality can be used by a number of different virtualization solutions.
Resource management is done through Linux control groups and you can delegate control of the LXC containers to users based on 'POSIX' file system-based capabilities.
Namespace isolation can be used to create a full container or it can be used to 'sandbox' applications by using namespace isolation selectively. Such as providing a unique directory tree for my browser so it cannot read or write to my home directory.
When combined with MAC policy solutions like SMACK or SELinux you can use it with LXC to provide high levels of security.
-----------------------------------
LXC is still relatively immature. It works and is stable from what I can tell, but it's not been around long enough.
Redhat will include LXC (along with BTRFS) with Redhat ES 6 as a sort of 'technology preview' type thing. (that is turned off by default) I expect they plan to add default support for BTRFS and LXC in future ES 6 revisions and thus they can maintain forward and backwards compatibility.
-----------------------------------
I never had problems with LXC networking that you talked about with OpenVZ. I don't think that this is a limitation to OpenVZ then. It may be a lack of documentation issue. I don't know.
This is a significant problem with most Linux stuff.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 23:52 UTC (Wed) by jello (subscriber, #6083) [Link]
Have you tried OpenVZ on linux for virtualization? I use it extensively and like it, but I haven't had any contact with Zones, so I'm not sure what the feature disparity is.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 17:31 UTC (Thu) by captrb (subscriber, #2291) [Link]
I could be mistaken, but I believe that when I tried OpenVZ, I couldn't use a dedicated network card for the zones and had a great deal of trouble (at least without serious iptables magic) getting independent networking between the containers.
On Solaris, I can have dedicated nics for each zone, so they can reside on physically separate LAN's. This is a huge coup, since the machine can be (pretty) safely shared on two sides of a firewall.
With OpenSolaris and Crossbow, I think you can even share a physical NIC, but have distinct IP-stacks per-Zone, so that each can have it's own host-level firewall and VLAN configuration. Pretty awesome.
If I remember, I was quite dismayed. I was trying to use it in a test environment because I thought it would be much easier than installing Solaris (I really hate administering Solaris, I just like what is done once it is all up and running ;-). I wasted a day of work trying to do what I needed, then eventually resorted back to Zones.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 16, 2010 13:04 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
You can give each OpenVZ machine its own network card (they are named veth1, veth2, ...). You can bridge them with your existing card, build vlans or route them using iptables etc.
AFAIR, you can also give full control over a hardware card to an OpenVZ container, but I hadn't tried that.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 17, 2010 0:42 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the bridging solution doesn't actually work if you have multiple virtual machines on the same network.
or more precisely, it works in that it gets packets from one virtual machine to another, but it doesn't work in terms of making that traffic go through the interface that you bridge to. the host kernel will short-circuit the communication between virtual servers and not send the packets out over the wire, just deliver them to the destination if it's on the same box.
for most people this is the best thing to do, but there are cases where there are requirements for monitoring/controlling the traffic between virtual servers where you really do want to force the traffic out over the wire.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 17, 2010 14:31 UTC (Sat) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
How is this different to a normal Ethernet switch then? Nowadays, Ethernet switches also avoid sending traffic to where it is not needed. The bridge is just a virtual Ethernet switch, acting like a physical one.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 17, 2010 21:22 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
this is exactly like a normal switch, but if all you want is a normal switch you won't be asking how to dedicate a physical ethernet port to a particular virtual machine, you would just connect all the virtual machines to your virtual switch and have an 'uplink interface' out of your machine.
when you want to dedicate an ethernet port to a particular virtual machine you don't want the host OS to short-circuit traffic between mirtual machines, you want the traffic between virtual machines to go out over the wire.
switching for virt envs Posted Jul 18, 2010 13:16 UTC (Sun) by mcmanus (subscriber, #4569) [Link]
I understand that VEPA is the likely candidate to deal with some of the shared uplink issues of virtualization.. it basically moves all the switching functionality, including hairpin routing, back onto the switch..
impt for the sr-iov hardware too.
http://lwn.net/Articles/337547/
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 18, 2010 6:58 UTC (Sun) by fredi@lwn (guest, #65912) [Link]
Features (in short)
IPMP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPMP) MPXIO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Multiplexed_I/O) GFS (sorry, no quick link here but in short it's a cluster block device) Zones that work out of the box with separate network stack (paravirtualisation, at least on vanilla linux kernles it's nearly impossible to do it) Clustering that works out of the box (just few nodes though, max 16 but it's HA) Hardware fault tolerance. Dtrace/ZFS/ co, but others pointed that
It is a slow but damn stable system.
As about graphics, it sucks, but i dont think that was the target for them.
disclaimer: I've worked a lot with solaris but i have linux on my laptop from ~ 2001.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 18, 2010 7:04 UTC (Sun) by fredi@lwn (guest, #65912) [Link]
I forgot, but well, is not related to solaris exactly, it's more about sparc. OBP (http://www.softpanorama.org/Solaris/Startup_and_shutdown/...)
It's a life saviour when you are far from the machine's room.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 18, 2010 9:21 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
Many higher-end x86 servers have similar capabilities. Sadly relatively few of them are supported by coreboot or anything similar, and you're stuck with a slow and bloated proprietary BIOS.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 20, 2010 14:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Also, OpenPROM always works. Intel IPMI BMPs lock up all the damn time: more often than not, it's locked up when you want to use it, and to fix it you have to *pull the power cord out*.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 19, 2010 5:27 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
linux has clustering, several different variations so that you can pick which one applies to your problem best.
as for it working 'out of the box', that depends on how you define that phrase.
I believe that Linux also has support for GFS
hardware redundancy is not an operating system feature, it's a hardware feature. Put the question another way, why should someone use Solaris instead of Linux on commodity hardware?>
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 0:20 UTC (Wed) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
I'm using OpenSolaris because I like learning new things and having tools with exciting new bugs and limitations instead of the same old familiar bugs and limitations.
Also I don't like a lot of things about the way that Linux is developed. Insert aphorism about sausage making. There isn't a nice magazine like LWN to keep me informed of how OpenSolaris is developed, so I don't know what goes on in there.
Except for the overall crushing despair such as this article, of course.
(I'm hoping for a feral fork in which a bunch of former Sun engineers start sharing their patches for OpenSolaris without assigning copyright to Oracle or using the trademarks like "OpenSolaris". :-) Nexenta might turn out to be a good rallying point for them. I'm also hoping that a real Debian+Solaris project will take root. The last time I installed Nexenta I was happy to see the logo on the install screen says "Debian/OpenSolaris". :-))
I'm enjoying trying to figure out how to use Zones and ZFS to make reproducible, rewindable virtual machines for my buildbot buildslaves.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 14, 2010 1:44 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Based on some of the mails on the new debian-derivatives list, it feels like Nexenta folks are aiming for inclusion in Debian as an official port. They are also sponsoring and will be present at the imminent DebConf10 in NYC.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 15, 2010 21:39 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
The problem with any Solaris fork is that Sun Microsystems never attracted the development community that Linux currently enjoys.
There are a few developers, but by and large it was all admins and 'enthusiasts' that like how Unix works, but do not like Linux.
Even when external developers did try to contribute to OpenSolaris proper they were by and large ignored or otherwise minimized.
With FreeBSD incorporating the attractive features of Solaris (ZFS and Dtrace) the interest for people that do not like Linux, but like Unix, is going to be focused on that OS from now on.
That is the fundamental problem when it comes to OpenSolaris (or forks). Without the engineers from Sun/Oracle backing it up they really do not have much.
OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution (The H) Posted Jul 18, 2010 3:47 UTC (Sun) by dwkunkel (guest, #5999) [Link]
Ten years ago our large data centers where 80% Solaris. They are now 70% Linux and the remaining Solaris servers are being phased out. Windows servers account for most of the remaining hosts.
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