LDOM 2.2 released

A new relase of LDOM, currently known as Oracle VM for SPARC has been released. One of the major features of the new release is the ability to do live migration between SPARC T2,T3 and T4 processors. Enabling this features does however have some performance impact:

From ldm(1M):
"cpu-arch=generic|native

Specifies one of the following values:

generic uses common CPU hardware features to enable a guest domain to perform a CPU-type-independent migration.

native uses CPU-specific hardware features to enable a guest domain to migrate only between platforms that have the same CPU type. native is the default value.

Using the generic value might result in reduced performance compared to the native value. This occurs because the guest domain does not use some features that are only present in newer CPU types. By not using these features, the generic setting enables the flexibility of migrating the domain between systems that use newer and older CPU types."

Another major feature is SR-IOV support, which can enable bare metal I/O performance for logical domains, read more here: SR-IOV feature in OVM Server for SPARC 2.2

There a new set of patches available to update the system firmware to 8.2.0 which is needed for the new features.

Announcing Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2 Release

illumian available for download

A new illumos based distribution is available for download, illumian. illumian is the based on the APT packaging system and is a successor to Nexenta Core Platform (NCP) which was built by nexenta using the OpenSolaris source and APT packages.

The next version of NexentaStore (4.0) should also be built upon illumian, previous versions was built on NCP.

There is currently one image available for server text install on X86 hosts.

illumian.org

ZFS feaure flags and async destroy

The first features unique to the open ZFS implementation have been integrated into illumos. As discussed earlier it is feature flags and async destroy of datasets.

illumos gate
ZFS feature flags update

Solaris 11 / SPARC News

Here is a good summary of a recent online forum, "Solaris 11: What's new since launch?"

Solaris 11 Update 1 (late this year)

• Updated Virtual memory subsystem
This is probably what has been known as vm 2.0 earlier
•  Faster Solaris 11 updates with improved python performance 
•  Already running on the upcoming T5/M4 SPARC(R) chips
• VNIC configuration switch hosts with their zones

There are also hints on what future Solaris 11/hardware updates might bring

• Hotpatching similar to KSplice (Remember DUKS in Solaris 8?)
• Offloading of compression and Oracle arithmetics to CPU besides crypto
• Schedulers for DB or JVM workloads

Summary: What's new with Solaris 11 since the launch?

ZFS feature flags update

ZFS feature flags have been mentioned earlier and now the code is now available from Delphix so that it can be integrated into illumos. With this in place new ZFS features can be implemented in a clean and compatible way, first out seems to be async destroy of datasets (feature flag com.delphix:async_destroy).

Hopefully we will see other new feature soon after this is in in place.

ZFS Feature Flags Presentation (PDF)
Feature flags webrev