They used vanialla kernel [LWN.net]

They used vanialla kernel

Posted Mar 4, 2011 21:38 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Commitment to Open (Red Hat News) by ESRI
Parent article: Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

Actually they explained what they did. They are rolling out their own kernel, but use userspace from RHEL - and of course they cherry-picked few changes needed to do that. Essentially they want to fix the "Solaris problem" by piggybacking on RHEL: Solaris had great kernel but poor userspace so it was really painfull to use so Oracle think they can avoid this problem by concentrating on kernel and enterprise (where the money are) and leaving userspace (where the support costs are) to RedHat. RedHat does not want this. It basically says: no problem, roll out your own kernel, if you wish, but then, please, support your userspace too.

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They used vanialla kernel

Posted Mar 4, 2011 21:51 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> RedHat does not want this. It basically says: no problem, roll out your own kernel, if you wish, but then, please, support your userspace too.

But wait...RedHat is going to do that by making it hard for Oracle to steal RedHat's kernel changes? Which Oracle wasn't doing anyways...Errrrrrr, what?

PS: what's up with Oracle's kernel, anyways? Their git tree doesn't seem to have been updated in ages:
http://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=linux-2.6-unbreakable.git;a=...

They used vanialla kernel

Posted Mar 4, 2011 22:23 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

>PS: what's up with Oracle's kernel, anyways? Their git tree doesn't seem to have been updated in ages:

Are you surprised? Ever since the acquisition thing, everything has practically come to a halt. Last entry of onnv (below) is just about the same timeframe unbreakable.git stopped being updated.

changeset: 13149:b23a4dab3d50
tag: tip
date: Wed Aug 18 15:52:48 2010 -0600
summary: 6973228 Cannot download firmware 2.103.x.x on Emulex FCoE HBAs

They used vanialla kernel

Posted Mar 4, 2011 22:11 UTC (Fri) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

So why not just buy Nexenta? If you're right, it's much closer to what they're trying to do.

They used vanialla kernel

Posted Mar 4, 2011 23:23 UTC (Fri) by ESRI (guest, #52806) [Link]

This is what we're doing. Costs for running NexentaStor (not Nexenta) on non-Oracle hardware are compareable to what Oracle charges now.

The risk is whether or not Nexenta and the Illumos folks have the resources to support development of drivers for newer hardware going forward... and whether or not they can count on Oracle doing Solaris source code dumps periodically to either re-base or cherry pick...