LWN: Comments on "Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released"

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

TRS-80 — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:58:07 +0000

Um, no. GCCfss has only been available for gcc 4.x, whereas the gcc 3.4.3 that ships with Solaris is pure gcc (albeit using the Solaris linker) and functions fine without Sun Studio installed. The Solaris linker source is available here and here.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

alex — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:42:16 +0000

It's not all CDDL, there are binary only bits in OpenSolaris.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

nix — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:51:32 +0000

It is indeed entirely unrelated to me, although I was tickled by the
name :)

It seems like the sort of thing I'd like to come up with if I was better
at functional languages, though :) A very nifty piece of work indeed.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

dtlin — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:05:58 +0000

Unlike LVM1, LVM2's snapshots are writable by default. It's very, very cool. With sbuild, I use r/w snapshots all the time: it can be set up to take a snapshot of a minimal base system, add minimal dependencies to run a package compile in this environment, and remove the snapshot when all is done.

The changes made to a snapshot go to the bit bucket when the snapshot is removed. There's patches which allow for merging a snapshot back into the origin device. They don't seem to be upstream yet, though.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

paulj — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:23:01 +0000

Can LVM snapshots be promoted to full, R/W devices?

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

Tuxie — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:03:41 +0000

If my home server didn't also double as a media center (XBMC and various emulators) I would probably run Nexenta on it because of ZFS. Or maybe the OpenSolaris Nvidia drivers support VDPAU and audio over HDMI now?

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

martinfick — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:44:53 +0000

I'm not sure how you interpretted my statement that way, but I do see that it was unclear. I will try to rexplain it better.

What I meant was, although an OS may currently support your current hardware, it would seem wise to think about whether this OS will support your hardware in the future before commiting to that OS. Two possible specific problematic scenarios I would consider are: "will this OS sustain enough development to support future currently non existing hardware that you might want to upgrade to?" and "will the OS developers care enough about my current hardware when it becomes old to not drop support for it in future versions of the OS?"

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

jasonjgw — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:02:39 +0000

To correct an ambiguity that caused confusion in this thread, I didn't attribute to RMS any claim about OpenSolaris; all that I attributed to him was his use of terminology. The original post isn't as clear as it should have been on that point, making it vulnerable to misinterpretation as happened in some of the follow-ups.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

clugstj — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:23:48 +0000

I would think it strange that you would be planning to use older hardware (than you are using now) in the future.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

hppnq — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:09:10 +0000

Indeed. Or check out the Nix package manager and NixOS!

(It seems to have nothing to do with nix of LWN fame. ;-)

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

dlang — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:32:17 +0000

you could do the same thing on linux with LVM snapshots and any filesystem you wanted to use.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

hppnq — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:28:46 +0000

If you're interested, here's a 2004 article about using rpm's rollback feature when doing system upgrades. Not so long ago it was removed, because it was considered to be unreliable: think of scripts changing the system irreversibly. To be honest, I can't immediately see how ZFS would solve that. But I am no expert.

However, this kind of transactional package management has been an AIX feature since last century. In most serious environments, having a full, pristine copy of your operating system is a requirement anyway, so then having separate inline snapshots is simply overhead -- and note the obvious risk of not being able, for whatever reason, to get your hands on the snapshots, before or after boot.

Really, a console is all you need. ;-)

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

martinfick — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:04:39 +0000

Unless, you make a habit of thinking of the future, and want to use a platform that you believe has a good chance of supporting that hardware you might use in the future.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

hppnq — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:52:43 +0000

The rant I was referring to was not RMS' statement, but the LWN comment. I thought that was obvious, but I guess it was not. Sorry!

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

drag — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:51:12 +0000

WTF.

The guy takes a RMS quote out of context and applies it to a question about Nexenta and all of a sudden your jumping up and down claming some sort of victory?

That does not make any sense at all.

Seriously, if your going to attack a guy do it for something they actually said or did, and do it in the context. Making up BS and then spouting silliness about 'misleading phrases not backed up by fact' and 'strawman' is just... well.. silly.

Talk about "Teapot calling the Kettle black".

The only quote about OpenSolaris that I can find on Google that came from Stallman was a interview a few months ago was:

> OpenSolaris is already free software, and I can endorse it as such. If Sun releases it under GPLv3, that will be even better; however, when choosing between free programs, the main factor is practical.
from
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/10/01/rms-rss-interview/

ffs

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

hppnq — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:31:44 +0000

Do tell -- when has it been possible to do something like this before?

AIX has had this for years. Solaris with Veritas as well, and I am sure there are more. The basic idea is the same as the ZFS one: you split a mirror or make a snapshot, keep one half untouched and upgrade the other one.

I think it is really cool that ZFS has made this available for home users, but it has existed for a long time in the proprietary Unix datacenter -- I used it. Technically, the possibility has or should have been there for years for Linux systems as well.

But I have never actually missed it. Especially with proprietary systems it is only *after* the reboot that you will find out whether an upgrade actually was successful (or rather, unsuccessful), because you are not upgrading a well-tested distribution, but a system typically consisting of a number of binary components not at all guaranteed to keep playing nicely together. It is mandatory that you have a way to actually go back to what worked before, and nothing else.

It's fine with me if you prefer reinstalling your operating system instead of having a transactional upgrade tool. But what does this have to do with proprietary vs. open source?

No problem, but that is not what I said. I prefer reinstalling the base system over making snapshots, if the very unlikely event of a completely screwed up upgrade occurs. Sorry if I was not clear, but all this has nothing to do with proprietary software, but with systems management.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

flewellyn — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:22:14 +0000

I wouldn't call it "disproving itself", so much as adding a note to the top to say "This isn't a problem anymore, but the issue is still something to watch out for, so we'll keep this here for historical reference".

Nothing wrong with that.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

rriggs — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:49:00 +0000

From what I can tell OpenSolaris still requires Sun's customized GCC version 3.4.3, which for SPARC includes their hacked/proprietary GCCfss. The gcc package they call out as being required still uses, on SPARC, the Sun compiler backend and Sun's proprietary linker and assembler.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

zooko — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:17:37 +0000

The fact that you do not have access to the system sorts of defeats the idea of being able to boot back into a working OS.

What? Oh, I see, yes without console access I can't check whether the new version actually boots and then if not reboot to the old version. I should really get remote console working... What I can do without console is observe whether the apt-get dist-upgrade completed without any errors before configuring it to boot into the new version on next boot.

Otherwise it is, of course, a cool feature, and one that existed long before anyone had heard of ZFS.

Do tell -- when has it been possible to do something like this before? I know that you can, for example, use grub to select among different kernels, and different /lib/modules, for example, but that's much less than letting you select among entire different operating systems -- an entire set of core packages that get installed by an apt-get dist-upgrade. It does so using ZFS's very cheap and convenient snapshot feature so that you don't have to do something crazy like make a separate copy of your operating system before upgrading. If anything like this has been possible before, I'd like to learn about it.

But I think it is really in the proprietary world, where you have to watch out for binary incompatibility and have limited test resources, that this kind of functionality is very nice to have. For most users, it is much better to cleanly separate the OS files from their personal stuff, and simply overwrite the OS image with a working one in case an upgrade fails. Console access is *always* mandatory for remote systems. ;-)

It's fine with me if you prefer reinstalling your operating system instead of having a transactional upgrade tool. But what does this have to do with proprietary vs. open source? As far as I know, proprietary operating systems such as Windows are typically fixed by reinstalling the OS or by manually patching it, and the only case of transactional operating system upgrade that I know of is Nexenta's apt-clone, which is open source. So it kind of sounds like to me that you got it backwards.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

hppnq — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:02:31 +0000

If the upgrade fails then apt-clone will have made a ZFS snapshot so that it doesn't actually boot to the new operating system.

The fact that you do not have access to the system sorts of defeats the idea of being able to boot back into a working OS. Otherwise it is, of course, a cool feature, and one that existed long before anyone had heard of ZFS. In any case, good luck, and let us know how it went. ;-)

But I think it is really in the proprietary world, where you have to watch out for binary incompatibility and have limited test resources, that this kind of functionality is very nice to have. For most users, it is much better to cleanly separate the OS files from their personal stuff, and simply overwrite the OS image with a working one in case an upgrade fails. Console access is *always* mandatory for remote systems. ;-)

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

clugstj — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:49:50 +0000

Unless they've done an amazing amount of work recently, it will not support anywhere near the variety of hardware that Linux does. Of course that only matters if you have unsupported hardware.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

regala — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:03:39 +0000

you saved and made my day. thanks a lot.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

zooko — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:58:33 +0000

I like it. I run an older release (NCP1) on my personal server (http://zooko.com ) and I plan to remotely apt-clone dist-upgrade to NCP2 soon. If the upgrade fails then apt-clone will have made a ZFS snapshot so that it doesn't actually boot to the new operating system. Only if the apt-get dist-upgrade succeeds will apt-clone set the boot loader to boot the new version. It's ACID for your apt-get! Whoo!

Except I haven't tried it yet, because my personal server is in a co-lo a couple of thousand miles away, so if something goes wrong it will be awfully inconvenient to get console access. :-)

Anyway, there are the normal sorts of surprises and weirdnesses that you should expect when using a different operating system. "df" and "ps" and so forth don't have all the same fields and formats that you've gotten used to over the last ten or fifteen years.

It does have a full GNU userland, but not everything you care about is userland. Also there are a bunch of features like zfs and dtrace and Zones and SMF that you don't have to use if you don't want to, but which are there as part of the standard toolset.

I mostly just use mine as a GNU/POSIX userland and leave the advanced stuff alone. :-)

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

hppnq — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:27:59 +0000

Please read this, that will stop the pain. It is not everyday that one gets to see a rant disproving itself so spectacularly, by the way. Congrats!

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

rjdymond — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:51:32 +0000

Yes. Well, maybe. Actually, no.

(Just summing up all the possible responses you could get. So are you going to download, install and try this OS now? :) )

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

regala — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:45:08 +0000

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/gcc/status/
this is 30 months ago. it builds with gcc.
as far as I know, RMS's "phrases" have to be backed up by facts, not just "someone told me but I cannot verify as I don't use the web". RMS doesn't take care of verifying what he is told and what he repeats all over the world. Maybe this is another "subversion is bad, karl fogel emacs author is bad" unjustified rant... and sadly, maybe should we not care anymore what this strawman wants us to believe.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

pranith — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:03:03 +0000

Is it worth the effort to download, install and try this OS?

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

robert_s — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:40:59 +0000

"I understand software licenced under the CDDL is still Free Software, even if incompatible with the GPL."

You're right. I often confuse the two.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

Zack — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:30:27 +0000

I understand software licenced under the CDDL is still Free Software, even if incompatible with the GPL.
I was expecting Sun to relicense (open)solaris to GPL3 to try and "one up" linux in due time, but now with the Oracle takeover, it's anybody's guess where Solaris (development) will end up.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

patrick_g — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:42:54 +0000

CDDL is not a free license ?

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

robert_s — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:37:23 +0000

"OpenSolaris and its derivatives were, to use Richard Stallman's phrase, "free, but shackled", as they could only be compiled by non-free tools"

Build system or no build system OpenSolaris is still nonfree because of its license. The development model is also very monolithic and cathedral-like.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

sanxiyn — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:05:03 +0000

OpenSolaris can be built with gcc. It has been so for a long time now.
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/gcc/

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

jasonjgw — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:09:00 +0000

Can it be built by free tools yet, or still only by Sun's proprietary
compiler/assembler?

Last time I looked at it, OpenSolaris and its derivatives were, to use Richard
Stallman's phrase, "free, but shackled", as they could only be compiled by
non-free tools - and there didn't appear to be a strong effort underway to fix
this.

The above may have changed by now, however. If it has, I might give it a try
on a machine.

Nexenta Core Platform 2 Released

pabs — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:51:08 +0000

There is also Debian GNU/kOpenSolaris:

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~dtbartle/opensolaris/

This uses the GNU C library like all the other Debian ports.