The Blog of Ben Rockwood

xxxxSolaris?

01 Nov '09 - 04:51 by benr

Here's something in the category of "things that makes you go wha?!?": The OpenSolaris Security Summit has been renamed to simply "Solaris" Security Summit.

If we've been looking for the first shot fired at OpenSolaris this would seem to be it. The question is whats next? When you combine this with the recent resurrection of "Solaris Next" (aka: Solaris 10++) it starts suggesting something is in the works, undoubtedly Oracle orchestrated.

Now, at this point I'm not jumping to any conclusions, and I don't think you should either. Oracle's intentions seem fairly clear at the moment and entirely positive for the future of Solaris and SPARC; and we know that X86 is also a part of that vision. Turning some love away from the OpenSolaris distro towards Solaris will be a welcome change for large enterprise customers, and undoubtedly a motivating factor.

My advise is to watch and wait... the wheels are turning.

If folks from Oracle/Sun are reading this; do what you wish with the Solaris product roadmap, but the community and source for Solaris are a critical part of a successful future. Please feel free to reassure us that we won't lose that. I personally rely on access to the source for problem analysis and research on a daily basis and having access to Solaris developers, both badged and unbadged, is something I never want to be without again.

- - C O M M E N T S - -
And that’s why I mirror as many repositories of OpenSolaris (and other Sun projects) as I’m aware of (hg and svn).
It’s of not much use to debug Solaris, should Solaris and OpenSolaris diverge significantly at some point, but no-one at Sun/Oracle can pull the plug on the source easily.

Patrick (Email) - 01 November '09 - 08:30

Let’s hope that in Oracle they are smart enough not to kill open source development.

shmerl - 01 November '09 - 17:33

“Turning some love away from the OpenSolaris distro towards Solaris will be a welcome change for large enterprise customers, and undoubtedly a motivating factor.”

I hope OpenSolaris, the distribution, not the source code, gets a swift death from the Oracle head honcho.

Solaris doesn’t need to be like GNU/Linux; it just needs

a) more software!
b) more hardware support!
c) more bug fixes!

And nothing else. It should stay free and open source. But none of this making Solaris look feel and act like GNU. It’s not GNU; it’s System V release 4. And so, when in Rome, do as Romans do, or go back to Linux; no regrets, and no whining.

UX-admin (Email) - 01 November '09 - 20:06

@ux-admin

I don’t think that being SVR4 and “linux friendly” are mutually exclusive proposals althought it seems that folk on both sides of the argument disregard this fact. Please point out what it is that irks you about opensolaris in a constructive fashion, file bugs and be part of constructive conversations about how to improve things.

But true about your points A. B and C!

Che Kristo (URL) - 02 November '09 - 04:00

I though Dave Miner’s response in that blog summed it up okay?

Dave - 02 November '09 - 06:02

@Che Kristo, I’m not UX-Admin, but responding, as issues such as his drew me away from doing OpenSolaris stuff at all (except updating an SVr4 package every 3 months or so). But note, I don’t speak for UX-Admin.

The fallacy with “be part of constructive conversations about how to improve things” is that it assumes that “improvement” means small changes while moving forward.

Sometimes, changes are that bad, that moving backwards is a sensible idea, too – but that’s not regarded an “improvement”.

Add to this that some of the decisions were intransparent (to put it nicely), and “constructive conversations” look like a joke to some in the OpenSolaris environment.

No-one knew what IPS will end up like. But there was an early strategic decision to move to it. Now the server is crowded and unresponsive, there aren’t really mirrors out there, the tools are slow, and action scripts (which were supposed to be gone) went back through the backdoor (but mess up the SMF system now)

OpenSolaris uses HAL, following Linux’s lead. Will it switch to whatever Linux is moving to (udev, sysfs, some event system to wrap them together), too?

Seriously, stop the “constructive conversations” talk until there’s actually a way for the community to stop Sun (or Oracle or whoever controls OpenSolaris next) from pushing bad decisions into OpenSolaris.

Of course, it’s theirs – so they can do whatever they want with it. Requesting people to waste their time on conversations when the result is already set behind the scene, that’s what irks me.

Patrick - 02 November '09 - 08:42

I had something to say but your spam filter thinks I’m a spam-bot. Try getting a captcha system

Graham - 02 November '09 - 23:14

Ben, i really like “pkg image-update && reboot”. ;-)

Marcelo Leal (Email) (URL) - 02 November '09 - 23:18

Patrick, I have no idea why you think SVR4 was this land of perfect happiness; it wasn’t. Dim-sum patching contributed more to the frustration and hell of Solaris admins and Sun developers than most people ever want to admit.

I will take “image-update” and “reboot” over the old live upgrade system any day.

As for the HAL thing, HAL is going away.

As for why things had to be moved to HAL in the first place?

That’s simple, Sun doesn’t have the interest or resources to maintain a fork of the entire X11 platform and the various desktops (GNOME, etc.).

As long as GNU/Linux remains the dominant free desktop platform, Solaris will have to make concessions to follow them.

Shawn (Email) - 03 November '09 - 16:05

I agree with several of the other commenters: please stop turning Solaris into something like Linux. Please don’t worry about the desktop and such. It is just a waste of time as most people are just going to use Linux / Windows / Mac OS X for their desktop—there is no “value add” in a Solaris dekstop for most people outside of Sun.

Solaris is for servers

Chris (Email) - 03 November '09 - 17:53

“there is no “value add” in a Solaris dekstop for most people outside of Sun”

Those of us using Sun Ray (without the resources to deploy VDI) would like to respectfully disagree 100 percent with this statement. Solaris 10 is simply gross as a desktop computing environment – OSOL is not only better, it’s becoming a pleasure to use.

Dave - 03 November '09 - 20:42

So Solaris has to make concessions to following Linux. Unless one truly, absolutely, no-other-way-to-do-it needs Solaris specific features, Linux is a better choice then, given that Solaris always stays behind.

Good to know.

As for SVr4 Packages: Patches are a Sun extension, and a badly designed one. How about this: There are only packages. Updates to the system happen by dropping in new versions of installed packages.

To have patch functionality, create package bundles (with deltas vs. old version(s), maybe) that update packages (atomically). Not “package X of version 1, plus patches p1, p2, p3”, but “package X of version 4”.
Class scripts could be used to eliminate most custom package scripts.

No issues with slow servers, no issues with offline installation, no problem with two parallel package systems for transition.

But of course, it won’t be a more-or-less nice framework that can be reused for glassfish or openoffice on windows at some point.

Patrick - 03 November '09 - 21:05

> Solaris is for servers

I don’t agree with this. I like Solaris a lot and use it as a desktop OS too. I like the idea of

a) more software!
b) more hardware support!
c) more bug fixes!

OpenSolaris is not just for servers!-)

shmerl (URL) - 04 November '09 - 03:40

why do you see that as a shot fired at OpenSolaris? if opensolaris is going to be the next version of solaris, maybe they are just removing the redundant “open”

Justin - 05 November '09 - 02:19

I also don’t see this as a shot fired at OpenSolaris. Why removing the “Open” they simply included Solaris 10 to the Summit, instead of it being only about OpenSolaris.

I don’t see Sun or Oracle going away from OpenSolaris, it doesn’t make sense.

Phobos (Email) - 06 November '09 - 11:53

what an interesting shift. I one of the “old-school” – Solaris SPARC datacenter admins. I have been deeply involved/interested in Opensolaris for x86, still waiting for what it will look like on SPARC (give me a bootable CD, make it work with Jumpstart or go back to the drawing the board – the SPARC AI installer is a bunch of hooey).

Months ago, I tried to get the attention of opensolaris developers in regards to their assumptions about Live Upgrade and ZFS root, and to my shock I was met with open hostility when I said “this is how it worked in the past with vxfs and mirroring” I was told SOLARIS is SLOWARIS and DEAD. I began to prefer SXCE over OSOL from that moment on, and i was dismayed to hear SXCE was being EOL’d and it was “get on the OSOL train or get out of the way”.

I must admit I was expecting Oracle to begin the course-corrections. Enterprise customers come to the table with real money, I guess our needs got more clout than you think.

svrocket - 08 November '09 - 02:56

I must admit I was expecting Oracle to begin the course-corrections. Enterprise customers come to the table with real money, I guess our needs got more clout than you think.

dfo gold (Email) (URL) - 09 November '09 - 02:18

Hi Ben,

I believe the summit was renamed because it was thought Solaris was more appealing to Large Installation System Administrators than OpenSolaris was. No more, no less.

Regards,
Brian

Brian Leonard (Email) (URL) - 09 November '09 - 17:08

“I believe the summit was renamed because it was thought Solaris was more appealing to Large Installation System Administrators than OpenSolaris was. No more, no less.”

Sure is!

And the whole IPS / OpenSolaris company should be asking themselves: “WHY IS THAT?”

UX-admin (Email) - 09 November '09 - 21:31

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supra shoes (Email) (URL) - 11 November '09 - 09:12

Solaris desktops have a value add (or potential value add) in pretty much every computer science department in every university on the planet.

People say they want more Solaris software, but who’s going to write it? Where and how are those people going to learn how to use Solaris?

Having students using Solaris at university as a day-to-day operating system is certainly part of the answer. And they’re certainly not going to do that if we neglect the desktop.

Mulla (Email) - 17 November '09 - 13:48

“And the whole IPS / OpenSolaris company should be asking themselves: “WHY IS THAT?””

OpenSolaris has never been recommended for large scale production use, so why would anyone be surprised that people who adminster large scale production installations still use Solaris? (I’d bet half of them probably still use Solaris 8 or 9, as well.)

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