Backporting

Last night i spend a few hours backporting recent changes from the ON gate to my own gate that is based on ONNV_134. I wanted to get a build that is as close to OpenSolaris b134 as possible while pulling fixes and a few enhancements for ZFS, COMSTAR, SATA and NFS. I went quite easy, the main problem was that i did want to get as close to the latest ZFS bits without including the changes that removed the iSCSI daemon (not because I will use it but it was part of 134). With a few modifications to the patches i now have a ONNV_134 build with a much more current ZFS. My plan is to test this for a while and then use it for my ZFS storage nodes at home, where of course ZFS is the most important part. There have been quite a few fixes for ZFS since February when build 134 closed.

This is obviously only something I will be playing with until Oracle decides to release a Solaris version based on a more current snapshot of the OpenSolaris source. Private builds and independent distributions can be both fun and useful but does not go trough the amount of testing as the "official" releases does, that kind of fragmentation decreases the testing for all distribution.

In the case of ZFS i like to use OpenSolaris and preferably a more current one. It is the growing ground of Fishworks, the software part of the S7000 series which I use for some production environments. The ZFS code in those should go trough a fair amount of testing both by Oracle and all of the thousands of enterprise deployments.

All this said, times goes by and with no binary release in sight a community effort to build and deliver binaries for the community for testing, preparation for the next release and recruit new users might be needed. But it would be sad if we ended up divided between an Oracle paid distribution and a community one with no involvement by Oracle other than providing almost all of the source and new features of the ON code, which they could decide to stop delivering or only deliver parts of it. But all this is in the hands of Oracle.