10 ms·

OpenSolaris fork imminent?

54 points by dman 16y ago

zemanel 16y ago
i like OS but the desktop UX is where linux was years ago
- rbanffy 16y ago
  It may not be as flashy in some respects, but things like the time slider are killer http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs It they aren't done already, I suppose integrating these parts to newer versions of Gnome is, at least, in the pipeline for *BSD folks (and, once ported to current Gnome, they would be rather easy to adapt it to BtrFS, which is to be fully supported by canned linux distros by the end of the year). Just now, OpenSolaris is a very cool server OS with a slightly old Gnome desktop on top of it.
- mapleoin 16y ago
  It's approximately where RHEL5 (and maybe other enterprisey distros) is right now, which is an old version of gnome. I don't think that's a big problem to solve, provided they actually get more man-power.
  - nailer 16y ago
    Please. The version of GNOME you'll find in Sol 10 is way behind RHEL 5, the desktop / kernel integration is poor, and the amount of apps that actually make use of the desktop is minimal.
    - mapleoin 16y ago
      We were discussing OpenSolaris, not Solaris 10. I looked it up and it looks like they have gnome 2.30 since their 2009.06 release[1] which is actually the latest version. [1] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=opensolaris http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=opensolaris
      - rythie 16y ago
        There are also some screenshots in there: http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php?linux_distribution_sm=OpenSolaris%202008.11 http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/...
      - nailer 16y ago
        Then the better comparison is Fedora - while support contracts exist for OpenSolaris (whose last version was actually supposed to be 2010.03, but which was cancelled), very few people use them and Sun/Oracle will encourage you to use, and train for, Sol 10.
- barrkel 16y ago
  I'd distinguish between OpenSolaris the distribution and Solaris the kernel; and my interest in this lies in the server side of things, not UI. I'm currently using Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel with a server-oriented Debian userland. The things Solaris brings along, ZFS, dtrace, SMF etc. are not hugely relevant to the desktop.
  - danieldk 16y ago
    Debian/Solaris is where things should be heading IMO. It gives the package management and up-to-date userland of Debian, while bringing most of Solaris' assets. And it seems that Nexenta developers would like to make Debian/Solaris a reality: http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2010/06/msg00022.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2010/06/msg00022.... Very promising!
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > The things Solaris brings along, ZFS (...) are not hugely relevant to the desktop Have you ever accidentally deleted your MP3 collection? ;-)
    - barrkel 16y ago
      Indeed I have not, in fact I usually disable file deletion confirmation prompts and also delayed deletion mechanisms like Windows' Recycle Bin. ZFS snapshots are more useful to me as a kind of system-wide version control; I don't use them often. The few times I have deleted things accidentally - perhaps 3 times in the past 5 years - I've recovered in a few moments from backups. I've lost more data to hard drive failures with somewhat stale backups than accidental deletion. The redundancy of ZFS raidz / raidz2 / mirroring etc. is useful to reduce the risk disk failure, but of course offsite backup is the gold standard.
wrighty 16y ago
I guess it's a case of waiting for the announcement before passing comment - but if this is a new OpenSolaris distribution what does it matter when Oracle/Sun still employ 99% of all active developers?
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Will 99% of osol developers stay with Oracle for long? Sun looked like the ultimate geek-cool environment to work. Oracle is pretty much the ultimate uncool company to work for as a developer.
  - wmf 16y ago
    People who quit Oracle are going to work for other proprietary software companies where they'll be working on something other than Solaris. I don't see any business model to pay people to work on an OpenSolaris fork.
    - dman 16y ago
      Quite a few financial companies have mission critical apps running on solaris. If a large bunch of developers emerges who carry the solaris torch forward I think funding will not be a problem.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        The CDDL may be a problem for a new Red Hat or Canonical that decide to take OpenSolaris/Illumos forward.
        hakl 16y ago
        It's not GPL-compatible, but it's an FSF- and OSI-approved license.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        One of the incentives to use GPL-like licenses is that your competitors cannot take your contributions and run with them and, at the same time, have to make their contributions available to you. This is the model that made Red Hat possible. It would not happen on top of BSD.
c00p3r 16y ago
Why not FreeBSD? Just to run Oracle? But it is much easier to run it on Linux nowadays. btw, who will write and debug all the new device drivers?
- nailer 16y ago
  I've modded you back up as I have the same question, albeit I think some explanation would help: FreeBSD has the good bits of the Solaris kernel - ZFS and DTrace - and the common Solaris 10 userspace - toolchain, packaging, etc. - aren't particularly up to date.
  - adbge 16y ago
    FreeBSD supports ZFS v14, which lacks some of the features of ZFS on OpenSolaris, namely data deduplication. However, it is my understanding that porting later versions of ZFS to FreeBSD would require non trivial changes to the FreeBSD kernel, making it unlikely.
    - shin_lao 16y ago
      I'm sorry but could you elaborate on "porting later versions of ZFS to FreeBSD would require non trivial changes to the FreeBSD kernel"?
      - lol 16y ago
        He's wrong. There's already work going on to port newer ZFS (w/deduplication) to FreeBSD. The biggest outlying question is if it will only be in 9, or if it might make it into 8.x.
  - c00p3r 16y ago
    Add to this an idiotic attempt to replace SystemV startup scripts with some insanely non-obvious java-based (of course!) crap, badly ported in a great hurry outdated 32-bit userland (when at the same time x86_64 version of Fedora or FreeBSD-ports were several years old), some in-house designed and quite alien packaging system (pkg) and so on. It is dead. As dead as Irix or Tru64 or even OpenVMS.
Corrado 16y ago
Perhaps this is a inane question, but why should we care about Solaris? What does it bring to the table over BSD or Linux? If it died tomorrow would your shop close up and everyone go home? I know some of its features (DTrace and ZFS) are quite impressive but they are not really deal breakers. A kernel is great but it doesn't do much on its own. You still need applications and drivers to have a complete system.
- vegai 16y ago
  Pretty much no reason. The deal breakers you mention have also been ported to FreeBSD and are said to be rather stable already.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Lack of proper package management (you can't compare ports to yum or apt) is a dealbreaker for me. Ports is minimal and you can, conceivably, grow a real package management system out of it, but it's not one.
    - ssmoot 16y ago
      That's just silly. Having used pkg, pkgutil, pkg-get, apt-get, and ports near daily for awhile ports hands down beats anything on the *solaris platforms. For one, you can find the libraries you want and they actually work. Postgres 8.4 on FreeBSD? No problem. With plperl? No problem. OpenSolaris? Well, if you want to run 32bit Postgres on a system with 48GB of RAM sure. No 64bit for you though. And Oracle shutdown the Postgres build farm servers they were hosting. Just because FreeBSD stores it's package information in makefiles and pkg stores it in a catalog doesn't change the end result. Ports are as easy to use (if you bother to read the very simple README), and offer far more robust support and packages than any flavor of Solaris I'm familiar with. There was a time I'd have agreed about Ports, but 30 minutes later I had read the README and realized I was just being lazy. ;-)
  - jcsalterego 16y ago
    As adbge mentions elsewhere, the latest ZFS package in FreeBSD is lagging OpenSolaris's. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 (or scroll down)
barnaby 16y ago
Will the fork still be licensed under CDDL or is there a way to switch it to GPL?
superjared 16y ago
hg clone http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/ http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/
- wrighty 16y ago
  Looks like they're replacing the proprietary Sun libc with one from Nexenta / FreeBSD. http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/rev/c8da1d642945 http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/rev/c8da1d642945

54 points by dman 16y ago

zemanel 16y ago

i like OS but the desktop UX is where linux was years ago

rbanffy 16y ago
It may not be as flashy in some respects, but things like the time slider are killer http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs It they aren't done already, I suppose integrating these parts to newer versions of Gnome is, at least, in the pipeline for *BSD folks (and, once ported to current Gnome, they would be rather easy to adapt it to BtrFS, which is to be fully supported by canned linux distros by the end of the year). Just now, OpenSolaris is a very cool server OS with a slightly old Gnome desktop on top of it.
mapleoin 16y ago
It's approximately where RHEL5 (and maybe other enterprisey distros) is right now, which is an old version of gnome. I don't think that's a big problem to solve, provided they actually get more man-power.
- nailer 16y ago
  Please. The version of GNOME you'll find in Sol 10 is way behind RHEL 5, the desktop / kernel integration is poor, and the amount of apps that actually make use of the desktop is minimal.
  - mapleoin 16y ago
    We were discussing OpenSolaris, not Solaris 10. I looked it up and it looks like they have gnome 2.30 since their 2009.06 release[1] which is actually the latest version. [1] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=opensolaris http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=opensolaris
    - rythie 16y ago
      There are also some screenshots in there: http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php?linux_distribution_sm=OpenSolaris%202008.11 http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/...
    - nailer 16y ago
      Then the better comparison is Fedora - while support contracts exist for OpenSolaris (whose last version was actually supposed to be 2010.03, but which was cancelled), very few people use them and Sun/Oracle will encourage you to use, and train for, Sol 10.
barrkel 16y ago
I'd distinguish between OpenSolaris the distribution and Solaris the kernel; and my interest in this lies in the server side of things, not UI. I'm currently using Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel with a server-oriented Debian userland. The things Solaris brings along, ZFS, dtrace, SMF etc. are not hugely relevant to the desktop.
- danieldk 16y ago
  Debian/Solaris is where things should be heading IMO. It gives the package management and up-to-date userland of Debian, while bringing most of Solaris' assets. And it seems that Nexenta developers would like to make Debian/Solaris a reality: http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2010/06/msg00022.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2010/06/msg00022.... Very promising!
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > The things Solaris brings along, ZFS (...) are not hugely relevant to the desktop Have you ever accidentally deleted your MP3 collection? ;-)
  - barrkel 16y ago
    Indeed I have not, in fact I usually disable file deletion confirmation prompts and also delayed deletion mechanisms like Windows' Recycle Bin. ZFS snapshots are more useful to me as a kind of system-wide version control; I don't use them often. The few times I have deleted things accidentally - perhaps 3 times in the past 5 years - I've recovered in a few moments from backups. I've lost more data to hard drive failures with somewhat stale backups than accidental deletion. The redundancy of ZFS raidz / raidz2 / mirroring etc. is useful to reduce the risk disk failure, but of course offsite backup is the gold standard.

wrighty 16y ago

I guess it's a case of waiting for the announcement before passing comment - but if this is a new OpenSolaris distribution what does it matter when Oracle/Sun still employ 99% of all active developers?

rbanffy 16y ago
Will 99% of osol developers stay with Oracle for long? Sun looked like the ultimate geek-cool environment to work. Oracle is pretty much the ultimate uncool company to work for as a developer.
- wmf 16y ago
  People who quit Oracle are going to work for other proprietary software companies where they'll be working on something other than Solaris. I don't see any business model to pay people to work on an OpenSolaris fork.
  - dman 16y ago
    Quite a few financial companies have mission critical apps running on solaris. If a large bunch of developers emerges who carry the solaris torch forward I think funding will not be a problem.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      The CDDL may be a problem for a new Red Hat or Canonical that decide to take OpenSolaris/Illumos forward.
      - hakl 16y ago
        It's not GPL-compatible, but it's an FSF- and OSI-approved license.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        One of the incentives to use GPL-like licenses is that your competitors cannot take your contributions and run with them and, at the same time, have to make their contributions available to you. This is the model that made Red Hat possible. It would not happen on top of BSD.

c00p3r 16y ago

Why not FreeBSD? Just to run Oracle? But it is much easier to run it on Linux nowadays. btw, who will write and debug all the new device drivers?

nailer 16y ago
I've modded you back up as I have the same question, albeit I think some explanation would help: FreeBSD has the good bits of the Solaris kernel - ZFS and DTrace - and the common Solaris 10 userspace - toolchain, packaging, etc. - aren't particularly up to date.
- adbge 16y ago
  FreeBSD supports ZFS v14, which lacks some of the features of ZFS on OpenSolaris, namely data deduplication. However, it is my understanding that porting later versions of ZFS to FreeBSD would require non trivial changes to the FreeBSD kernel, making it unlikely.
  - shin_lao 16y ago
    I'm sorry but could you elaborate on "porting later versions of ZFS to FreeBSD would require non trivial changes to the FreeBSD kernel"?
    - lol 16y ago
      He's wrong. There's already work going on to port newer ZFS (w/deduplication) to FreeBSD. The biggest outlying question is if it will only be in 9, or if it might make it into 8.x.
- c00p3r 16y ago
  Add to this an idiotic attempt to replace SystemV startup scripts with some insanely non-obvious java-based (of course!) crap, badly ported in a great hurry outdated 32-bit userland (when at the same time x86_64 version of Fedora or FreeBSD-ports were several years old), some in-house designed and quite alien packaging system (pkg) and so on. It is dead. As dead as Irix or Tru64 or even OpenVMS.

Corrado 16y ago

Perhaps this is a inane question, but why should we care about Solaris? What does it bring to the table over BSD or Linux? If it died tomorrow would your shop close up and everyone go home? I know some of its features (DTrace and ZFS) are quite impressive but they are not really deal breakers. A kernel is great but it doesn't do much on its own. You still need applications and drivers to have a complete system.

vegai 16y ago
Pretty much no reason. The deal breakers you mention have also been ported to FreeBSD and are said to be rather stable already.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Lack of proper package management (you can't compare ports to yum or apt) is a dealbreaker for me. Ports is minimal and you can, conceivably, grow a real package management system out of it, but it's not one.
  - ssmoot 16y ago
    That's just silly. Having used pkg, pkgutil, pkg-get, apt-get, and ports near daily for awhile ports hands down beats anything on the *solaris platforms. For one, you can find the libraries you want and they actually work. Postgres 8.4 on FreeBSD? No problem. With plperl? No problem. OpenSolaris? Well, if you want to run 32bit Postgres on a system with 48GB of RAM sure. No 64bit for you though. And Oracle shutdown the Postgres build farm servers they were hosting. Just because FreeBSD stores it's package information in makefiles and pkg stores it in a catalog doesn't change the end result. Ports are as easy to use (if you bother to read the very simple README), and offer far more robust support and packages than any flavor of Solaris I'm familiar with. There was a time I'd have agreed about Ports, but 30 minutes later I had read the README and realized I was just being lazy. ;-)
- jcsalterego 16y ago
  As adbge mentions elsewhere, the latest ZFS package in FreeBSD is lagging OpenSolaris's. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1567463 (or scroll down)

barnaby 16y ago

Will the fork still be licensed under CDDL or is there a way to switch it to GPL?

superjared 16y ago

hg clone http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/ http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/

wrighty 16y ago
Looks like they're replacing the proprietary Sun libc with one from Nexenta / FreeBSD. http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/rev/c8da1d642945 http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/rev/c8da1d642945