Various ZFS news

Adam leventhal of the Fishwoks team have tested the DDRDrive X1 as a ZIL in the hybrid storage pool. It is 4GB of NV-RAM backed by flash, which is quite a good match for the ZIL requirements. You can read about his finding on his blog. For a good explanation on ZIL and synchronious writes go and read Constantin Gonzalez latest entry in his blog.

Mirrored root pools been available since the introduction of ZFS boot, but the step for writing the placing a boot block on the mirror to make it usable after a disk failure have remained a manual step, but the automatic fix for this have now mad it into on_145:

6668666 zpool command should put a bootblock on a disk added as a mirror of a root pool vdev.

Desktop updates for Solaris Next

Good things come to those who wait? I've seen some indication that the latest release of Gnome (2.30) have been integrated into the snv_140 build. It's tagged as OS-2010.06, but the OpenSolaris 2010.06 name seems to have been in use since April so that might not mean anything. Firefox also have been upgraded to 3.6.x in build 135 and onwards. Time slider have got an update which includes replication to external filesystems (PSARC/210/129). These updates are available in Solaris Next Development builds post snv_134 so they have not been released even in the development repository for OpenSolaris.

A desktop related thing that I've totally missed is that there are ongoing work for integrating Xorg 1.8.x. The source is available here.

It seems like Oracle still are aiming to reach developer and some desktop users with Solaris. I think this is good since people use what the know when comfortable and perhaps have seen the advantages they go on and use it on their servers. This is also good news for a future modern SunRay environment.

Thoughts on the future direction of Solaris

As a response in a discussion weather Oracle will invest more in Solaris 10 maybe to also use as base for Fishworks or what they doing I wrote something similiar to this in the opensolaris-discuss list:

Solaris 10 Update 9 will indeed contain some new features including a refresh of ZFS, but it will not replace the OpenSolaris kernel in Fishworks, backporting both the CIFS server and COMSTAR is far to much work.

I think Solaris 10 9/10 will be released at OpenWorld together with at least a preview of "Solaris Next", "Solaris 11" or whatever name it will get. Solaris 10 is too old to be doing major development work in, it is time to release a major version soon, some things can't be done without a new major release. This would look good for Oracle and their commitment to Solaris (not OpenSolaris), that they have a new major Solaris release where Sun just keep developing it for year after year (I'm not saying that was bad, but Oracle may put it like that, look at what Larry said about Rock).

What happens with OpenSolaris as a distribution is unclear, my opinion is that they should have released the second respin on 134 without support at least, now they just get bad will from the community, at least until something is released or they decide to spread some light on the situation.

Solaris next not OpenSolaris
Solaris 10 9/10 and second zfs refresh

Larry regarding Rock:
"At the start, ellison shut down one of schwartz’s pet projects -- development of the “rock” microprocessor for sun’s high-end sparc server line, a semiconductor that had struggled in development for five years as engineers sought to overcome a string of technical problems. “this processor had two incredible virtues: it was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy. it was so hot that they had to put about 12 inches of cooling fans on top of it to cool the processor,” said ellison. “it was just madness to continue that project.”

Solaris Next not OpenSolaris?

Many of us have patiently been awaiting the 2010.xx release of OpenSolaris frustrated by the lack of communication from Oracle. After some digging I realized that something quite interesting has been going on for a while. Oracle themselves are not building OpenSolaris anymore, not since build 135. They are building "Solaris Next Development", this is from /etc/release:

Solaris Next Development snv_140 X86
Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Assembled 29 April 2010

This kind of makes sense, since OpenSolaris always have been the development branch for the Solaris.next, but the distributions have been named OpenSolaris for a while. I also found some tags like "osol_2010.05u4" which seems to be related to build 140. So have there been a change in plan for OpenSolaris 2010.xx release or is this just something for the future, "Solaris 11". But since build 134[a|b] which once should have been the release build for the next release still has the old names in them there might sill be a "OpenSolaris" release.

This is also makes sense since Oracle is mostly talking about Solaris, not OpenSolaris, Solaris seems to be the way forward, time will tell (since Oracle doesn't) in which form. It looks like it will become more like a single distribution, Solaris, with some development releases, OpenSolaris had it's own life and even support side by side with Solaris while still being the bed for development.

New Sun volume servers from Oracle

Yesterday Oracle released an overhaul of their volume server (x86) line. The flagship X4800 looks looks really impressive for an x86 system, eight sockets, up to 1TB memory and hot swappable IO. Equipped with Xeon X7560 CPUs it will fully loaded have 64 cores and a total of 128 thread. All PCI boards and power supplies are hot-pluggable and the four CPU modules look fairly hot-pluggable. One can wounder if support for CPU hot-plug come later future since Intel 7500 was the aim for CPU and Memory hot-plug discussed here earlier.

Oracle’s Sun Fire X4800 Server Architecture
Sun Fire X4800 server Data Sheet

Zone enhancements

Recently a couple of enhancement for zones have been integrated into the OpenSolaris source.

PSARC/2010/132 Delegated Administration for Zones
This will make it possible to delegate administration of local zones to user with not-superuser privileges. This will add three new privileges: solaris.zone.clonefrom for cloning zones, solaris.zone.login for zlogin and solaris.zone.manage for zone management.

PSARC 2010/144 lofi(7D) in non global zones
Will make it possible to use lofi, the loopback file driver inside a local zone.

First hundred posts

This post is my hundredth entry in this blog, my first entry was in November 2007, but it was not until 2009 I begun to post more frequently. During this time I have also, almost exactly at the same time gotten a sector of 512 subscribers. I had hoped that this entry would be the announcement of 2010.1H, but still seems to be a few weeks or at least days off. If the are quick it will still be a binary number in my posting sequence.

And if you missed any of these the last week they are both worth a read, the first one is Brendan Greggs blog, he has recently had an article published about visualizing latency. The article is also available:
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/visualizing_system_latency

And this is a link to a presentation which includes, again the roadmap for Solaris and OpenSolaris, it mentions both 2010.1H and Solaris 10 update 9:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~bmiller/DE-OSUG/Oracle-Sun.pdf

Oracle Employee Frederic Pariente seems quite enthusiastic in his blog regarding a "Oracle Solaris Day" the 28th of June. We can only hope that it means that some more public information is supposed to be available by this date:

"Lots have been written about Solaris over the past few months. About its continued investment at Oracle, about OpenSolaris, about its licensing policy, about third-party support, etc. It is time you hear directly from the source the true state of Solaris at Oracle and its future. We would like to invite you to attend a half-day seminar on just Oracle Solaris. We will also cover your migration path, as a Sun Partner Advantage member, to Oracle Partner Network so you can continue to receive support from Oracle for your own investment and specialization in Solaris!"