The OpenSolaris Board May Kill Itself Next Month

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The OpenSolaris Board May Kill Itself Next Month

Oracle failed to deliver OpenSolaris 2010.1H and it's now been thirteen months since the last official update (when Sun Microsystems still was under its own control) of the OpenSolaris operating system. The next OpenSolaris update was supposed to come in February or March and then it kept getting pushed back with little to no communication from Oracle. OpenSolaris has been M.I.A. and many have been wondering what the heck is going on with Oracle. Well, the OpenSolaris Governing Board is even out of the loop and disturbed by this situation. The board is threatening to dissolve itself by the end of next month...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODQxMA

[philcostin]

So Solaris is now dead. Long live Linux and BSD! (insert some comment about Sun technologies such as ZFS & Zones here)

[d2kx]

So Solaris is now dead. Long live Linux and BSD! (insert some comment about Sun technologies such as ZFS & Zones here)

ZFS is dead. btrfs is (becoming) the new ZFS. Long live btrfs! (insert some comment about how btrfs' is broken by design here)

[quintesse]

insert some comment about how btrfs' is broken by design here

Is it? (just curious)

[d2kx]

Is it? (just curious)

Someone somewhere claimed it is (it was someone that generally knows what he's talking about though), but the btrfs developer(s) went into detail about how the mentioned problems can be solved.

[RealNC]

If Solaris dies, the world is going under. I mean, it's like the most important OS right now.

Sarcasm off.

[allquixotic]

If Solaris dies, the world is going under. I mean, it's like the most important OS right now.

Sarcasm off.

You'd be surprised. For desktops, it's a non-factor. There are a couple universities (such as the one I was at a few years ago) that run Solaris thin clients for engineering labs, but other than that, it's not even a drop in the bucket for desktops.

On the other hand, a lot of IT departments and more nimble one-man dedicated servers run on Solaris or OSOL. For a while, there was nothing else like ZFS, and it convinced quite a few people to run Solaris on serious servers doing big I/O.

I haven't seen any market stats that indicate Solaris is a major factor in the server space, but I'll reference this report: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/...g-systems/5408

If IDC says that in H2 2009, 4.3% of the server market runs UNIX, that means 4.3% runs either BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, or one of the SCO UNIX products. People have been jumping ship from SCO, HP-UX and AIX at a steady pace as support contracts expire (HP-UX) and big-wig CEOs make fools of themselves in court (SCO), so what's left? The BSD family and Solaris, basically.

BSD fans no doubt will say 90% of that 4.3% is BSD, but I think the early ZFS sell got a lot of people hooked on Solaris. I mean, for server usage, it's not bad -- it really works. And the flexibility of ZFS running natively on the operating system it was developed for is better than the alternatives. Maybe today BSD can run ZFS as well as OSOL can, but that wasn't true when some IT departments were OS shopping 3-4 years ago.

Of course, even a big firm like IDC has no way of knowing what sort of operating systems people run on their own private low-profile servers, either behind a NAT/LAN, or internet-facing servers whose Apache doesn't tell you what OS it's running on.

The numbers IDC posts are probably very conservative both for the percentage of Linux installed base, as well as for UNIX installed base. That inflated Windows figure definitely contravenes my own experience. Which means that Solaris may be installed more widely than we realize.

Thing is, Sun spent a ridiculous amount of engineering time having its engineers contribute Solaris compatibility patches to open source projects. So as long as you don't depend on any native Linux binaries, you're safe. And even then, if you only depend on one or two native Linux binaries, and they aren't resource-intensive, you can run them in VirtualBox or an `lx26' zone on OSOL. ZFS is worth it. So as long as 99% of your stuff (and the stuff that demands the highest performance) is open source, you're good to go.

I run an internet-facing, enterprise-class dedicated server for various purposes, surrounding my open source projects, file backup, internet radio, and hosting a game server. I was very close to migrating to OSOL and tracking the stable series of updates, until I caught wind of how Oracle is letting it die. I decided that it would be better to stick with ext4 and md-raid until either (a) btrfs improves to be production quality; (b) ZFS is fully ported to run on Linux and can be used as the boot volume; or (c) Oracle decides what to do with OSOL (assuming they decide in favor of maintaining it).

But don't even get me started on md-raid...

[yogi_berra]

Is Oracle actively attempting to kill OSOL or is it just the scuttlebutt du jour?

[kraftman]

Someone somewhere claimed it is (it was someone that generally knows what he's talking about though), but the btrfs developer(s) went into detail about how the mentioned problems can be solved.

This someone was afaik Red Hat employer. :> However, those things he was talking about are easy to fix, so it's not broken by design.

So Solaris is now dead. Long live Linux and BSD! (insert some comment about Sun technologies such as ZFS & Zones here)

@Philcostin

BSD is nearly dead too:

http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ideas/ideas.html

Do you know any other OS where the Google Summer of Code students hack the important parts of the kernel? Devs must be desperated (insert some part about BSD license is more free here).

[yotambien]

BSD is nearly dead too:

And Netcraft confirms it, BSD is still dying.