illumos news

There have been some news surrounding the illumos project, the community developed and maintained version of the OS/Net consolidation and future code base for Nexenta and OpenIndiana.

First Nexenta have hired three known developers from the OpenSolaris community. The development process have also been changed to become more scalable so that more developers can participate. This is done by having Advocates accepting and reviewing patches instead of giving commit access to all contributors:

"So now, rather than developers pushing changes directly to our mercurial tree, going forward Advocates will take patches from Contributors (either via hg export or patch file), verify that the content of the patch is what was reviewed, and will then be responsible for integrating those changes into our shared master."

It's encouraging to see that two of the three persons behind DTrace is active in the illumos project, Bryan Cantrill posted this to illumos-devel a few days ago:

"For whatever it's worth, I have some DTrace patches and some user-land SMF patches to send to whomever is most appropriate. (Both of these add new features, FWIW.)"

Welcome to new Nexentians
Change to illumos contribution process

Solaris 11 Express VBox images

If you want to try Solaris 11 Express without dedicating hardware or even spend time on an installation there are now VirtualBox images available for download from Oracle. The images have the VirtualBox guest additions pre-installed.

Instructions and download links are available at The Observatory

Second OpenIndiana release

With the upcoming christmas and new year I had totally missed that OpenIndiana have had their second release, oi_148 which is based on the last publicly available OpenSolaris source. The OpenIndiana project is part of the illumos foundation and will use the illumos ON source in a later release.

Here are the release notes and download the images here.

Solaris 10 update 10 ZFS refresh

The internal builds of Solaris 10 8/11 (update 10) have had another refresh of the ZFS code. It is now be synced with snv_153 which is a even later build than Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 is based on. Also related to storage this update will support the LSI SAS 2308 HBA and the LSI SSS 6200 Solid State Storage.

Enable cases for s10u10 tech refresh 2

Solaris 10 update 10 update

In the year 2010

Another year have passed with lots of changes for Solaris users, some of them good but others quite bad. Most of them are of course related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun which completed January 2010.

The not so good things:

• OpenSolaris is dead
• We no longer have insight into the development of Solaris.next
• We no longer have access to the latest ON source.
• Oracle have lost many brilliant and well known engineers from Sun

Oracle is clearly focusing on Solaris but not in the open kind of way that we go used to with OpenSolaris. As I have written before, this will probably make lots of money for Oracle in the short run, but how can it grow the the Solaris customer base as the OpenSolaris model could?

On the bright side:

• Solaris 11 Express 2010.11, the pre-release of Solaris 11 due next year
• illumos, the community driven ON source gate
• Oracle begun to share some Solaris/SPARC roadmaps this fall
• SPARC T3, 16 cores with great throughput but with limited single thread performance

Solaris 11 Express is in reality a rebranded OpenSolaris 2011.11 release and has a huge amount of new features and enhancements compared to the last OpenSolaris release. The SPARC T3 is a good processor for highly threaded applications and we have seen roadmaps with a T4 coming next summer with three times faster single thread performance.

In 2010 the sparcv9 blog have had over 40 000 visitors counted as "unique" by statcounter. Happy new year everyone!

Solaris 11 Express support repo

If you have a valid support contract with Oracle it is now possible to generate certificates for the Solaris 11 Express support repository.

It's the same process as with OpenSolaris extra and support repositories but the location differs. Login using your My Oracle Account and generate certificates here:

https://pkg-register.oracle.com

VirtualBox 4 Beta on Solaris

Several beta releases of VirtualBox have been released in the last weeks. I had problems with the first two but beta 3 and later works nicely for me on Solaris 11 Express.

New features in 4.0

• New settings/disk file layout for VM portability; see the manual for more information.
• Open Virtualization Format Archive (OVA) support; see the manual for more information.
• VMM: support more than 1.5/2 GB guest RAM on 32-bit hosts
• Language bindings: uniform Java bindings for both local (COM/XPCOM) and remote (SOAP) invocation APIs
• Chipset: added support for the Intel ICH9 chipset with 3 PCI buses, PCI express and Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI)
• Audio: Intel HD Audio is now available as guest hardware, for better support with modern guest operating systems (e.g. 64-bit Windows; bug #2785).
• GUI: redesigned user interface with guest window preview
• GUI: new display mode with downscaled guest display
• Resource control: added support for limiting a VM's CPU time and IO bandwidth.
• Storage: support asynchronous I/O for iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels images
• Storage: support for resizing VDI and VHD images
• Windows Additions: support for automatically updating the Guest Additions (requires installed Windows Guest Additions 4.0 or later)
• Guest Additions: support for copying files into the guest file system

Update: Whats seems to be the release images are now available:
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.0.0