A Visual Preview of Oracle Solaris 11 Express

[ninez]

if Oracle fixes those, it has two choices - either it surrenders Solaris entirely, or it can choose to take on Linux (not just in the enterprise, but even at the desktop). That is, I suspect, the open-source community's greatest fear.

really?!?!

i don't think gnu/Linux or the open source community has anything to fear from Solaris, at all. I think that is about as likely as LibreOffice fearing OpenOffice.

it is unlikely that the community would adopt Solaris at all, given that Oracle is running the project. ZFS is great, but if the licensing was changed (to an open license) people would just port it to Linux. there would be little to no reason to switch to Solaris, there just isn't enough of a user-base, development or developers targeting the platform.

i also couldn't see myslef using it at work either. enterprise linux works fine - where there is also a bigger, much more mature community. which in turn means better support, more software, etc.

Oracle isn't going to be able to do much with Solaris, they may find a target audience / continue supporting current customers, but i highly doubt it will be anything beyond that.

[Aeldra]

Hey, anyone recall what was the relation of Oracle Solaris with Linux developer and Linux problems.

[TheOrqwithVagrant]

Meh ZFS is pretty good but as soon as Btrfs picks up it'll be substantially better. If it can get clustering..then it can and will be the next Louis Armstrong FS.

ZFS is a lot more than "pretty good"; it's a good contender for "king of filesystems" at the moment. BTRFS is promising, but it remains to be seen whether the current problems it has are merely implementation issues. If it turns out there are core design flaws - always a possibility - then the outlook may be less rosy.

[NoEffex]

Meh ZFS is pretty good but as soon as Btrfs picks up it'll be substantially better. If it can get clustering..then it can and will be the next Louis Armstrong FS.

[PGHammer]

If you believe this to be the reason why Kebabbert is being treated with scorn, you are likely unaware of his posting history on multiple forums. Also, seeing the words "not toeing the Party Line" in association with Kebabbert is downright funny; he's adhered to the SUN Party Line stronger than SUN themselves. And now that Oracle has acquired SUN, the trend continues.



You're reading far too much into the comment. Kebabbert is Swedish, and so am I. "Som fan laser bibeln" (like the devil reads the bible) is a common idiom in Swedish. Since the discussion is in English, I translated. The "biblical" origin of the idiom has little to no meaning anymore - Sweden is probably the most secular nation on earth. The idiom is used when someone is interpreting/quoting something very selectively, deliberately taking something out of context and twisting the meaning. Kebabbert does this a lot to "prove" Linux's inferiority to Solaris. My comment really had very little to do with the particular topic at hand, and was more in response to Kebabbert's incredibly flawed approach to arguing his points across a huge number of thread topics on multiple forums over several years.
So yes - my "attack" was certainly subjective, but it was strictly an attack on Kebbabert's methods of argument, and almost entirely unrelated to the particular thread it appeared in.

I was saying a subjective attack has no place in this particular forum, as it adds not to the debate (subjective attacks, or attacks on anything other htan the subject) generally don't add to the debate; that you have no *objective* criticism of his attacks also speaks volumes. Sun's (and now Oracle's) position on ZFS is not news (it is also, in point of fact, Red Hat's (RHI) position, which is why they want to add it). Kebabbert's position does, in fact mirror it (to an extent, I actually share that position) - in my case, it is strictly due to the merits of ZFS over competing filesystems available on other operating systems (not just Linux, but the BSDs, Windows, and MacOS as well). Because, for now, Solaris is the only way to actually get ZFS, Oracle has a window of opportunity going forward (one that Sun also had, but chose not to take advantage of). Sun *could* have chosen to use Solaris Express (if not OpenSolaris) as a back-door into general-purpose computing - the reason why they didn't was twofold - they were concerned about cannibalizing their hardware business (which was in trouble already, for different reasons), and they didn't want to hork off the open-source community (which Sun always has had a strained relationship with). Oracle has an even worse relationship with the open-source community than Sun ever did (and it's almost entirely driven by Larry Ellison) - their purchase of Sun was basically rubbing salt into those wounds. the open-source community (and RHI in particular, their biggest player in the enterprise space), sees, in ZFS, a wedge into greater acceptance in the enterprise; it's not news to anyone that ZFS has remained the best filesystem in terms of security and scalability. While ext4 and even btrfs/reiserfs have improved, none have ZFS' track record in the enterprise (NTFS doesn't have it, either). The big obstacle has been licensing issues (if not of ZFS, then of Solaris Express or OpenSolaris). HYowever, if Oracle fixes those, it has two choices - either it surrenders Solaris entirely, or it can choose to take on Linux (not just in the enterprise, but even at the desktop). That is, I suspect, the open-source community's greatest fear.

[TheOrqwithVagrant]

Irregardless of why he's doing it, he's being treated with scorn for what appears to me as being subjective reasons - basically because he's not toeing the Party Line (Oracle Is Evil).

If you believe this to be the reason why Kebabbert is being treated with scorn, you are likely unaware of his posting history on multiple forums. Also, seeing the words "not toeing the Party Line" in association with Kebabbert is downright funny; he's adhered to the SUN Party Line stronger than SUN themselves. And now that Oracle has acquired SUN, the trend continues.

Why do I get that impression that the hate is subjective? Simple; you brought one of the more subjective of comments into the debate - the Bible itself. The very reason the Bible (as a book) came into being has been (and will remain) a subject for heavy subjective debate because the original authors and publishers are beyond our ability to put to the question. I'm an agnostic - however, I won't debate the Bible because any debate on it would be subjective.

You're reading far too much into the comment. Kebabbert is Swedish, and so am I. "Som fan laser bibeln" (like the devil reads the bible) is a common idiom in Swedish. Since the discussion is in English, I translated. The "biblical" origin of the idiom has little to no meaning anymore - Sweden is probably the most secular nation on earth. The idiom is used when someone is interpreting/quoting something very selectively, deliberately taking something out of context and twisting the meaning. Kebabbert does this a lot to "prove" Linux's inferiority to Solaris. My comment really had very little to do with the particular topic at hand, and was more in response to Kebabbert's incredibly flawed approach to arguing his points across a huge number of thread topics on multiple forums over several years.
So yes - my "attack" was certainly subjective, but it was strictly an attack on Kebbabert's methods of argument, and almost entirely unrelated to the particular thread it appeared in.

[PGHammer]

You're Right...However...

No, ZFS deduplication does not hang your machine if you have to little RAM. It only takes a long time. Because it starts to swap RAM in and out.

Basically, you need 1GB RAM for every TB disk you want to duplicate. If you deduplicate 20TB disk, with 8GB RAM - it will take a very long time because RAM will start to swap in and out.




PGHammer,
No, it is not about subjectivity. I provide lots of credible links that shows that Linux do have problems. I provide links and benchmarks that shows that Solaris scales better than Linux, for instance. It is not about opinions, Linux DO scales bad. Do you want to see them links?

On the other hand, no one can show links that Solaris scales bad. There are no such links.

Kebabble, your points are indeed valid. However, I wasn't criticizing you, but *defending* you.

If they are going to attack your points, attack them over their validity (or invalidity), instead of getting into name-calling and other immature tactical spewing.

In a further march on the Phoronix Visual Review of Oracle's recently-released Solaris Express 11, I've gone further and done a bare-metal install (I already have a VM of Solaris Express running in a Windows 7-based install of VirtualBox, also from Oracle) - in this case, directly replacing Ubuntu (a pre-alpha of Ubuntu 11.04 was the victim being replaced).

Now, other than the CPU and hard drive, a lot of my hardware is notorious for being Solaris-unfriendly (in particular, the GPU and network hardware) - however, either Sun, just prior to their acquisition by Oracle, or Oracle itself, has done some whipping up into shape, as my AMD HD5450 is now running at a native 1920x1080 via DVI (in VESA mode, it would run at but 1280x1024, so it's certainly not using the VESA driver). Secondly, Flash is now part and parcel of a Solaris desktop installation (this was never the case with a Sun OpenSolaris install; Flash support had to be installed separately). I mentioned the network hardware (in this case, a RealTek RTL8169 gigabit Ethernet adapter) - surprise, surprise; Solaris 11 Express picked it up on the fly. Result - a fully-usable Solaris desktop right from the beginning. (As much as I hate Larry Ellison himself, this is a definite improvement over the last pre-Oracle release of OpenSolaris, which I have the live CD of to compare it with. Advantage: Oracle.)

[kebabbert]

But no mention of the the other reasons why osol did emerge in the spring.

There were some serious bugs that would lead to loosing data or even total destruction of pools.
Are these fixed?
If I recall correctly one of the things was, with a full pool and not copious memory deleting a zfs would basically hang your machine forever if de-duplication was on.

No, ZFS deduplication does not hang your machine if you have to little RAM. It only takes a long time. Because it starts to swap RAM in and out.

Basically, you need 1GB RAM for every TB disk you want to duplicate. If you deduplicate 20TB disk, with 8GB RAM - it will take a very long time because RAM will start to swap in and out.




PGHammer,
No, it is not about subjectivity. I provide lots of credible links that shows that Linux do have problems. I provide links and benchmarks that shows that Solaris scales better than Linux, for instance. It is not about opinions, Linux DO scales bad. Do you want to see them links?

On the other hand, no one can show links that Solaris scales bad. There are no such links.

[PGHammer]

Objectivism vs. Subjectivism

Is it your goal in life to make "like kebabbert quotes linux developers" the 21st century replacement for "like the devil reads the bible"?

Irregardless of why he's doing it, he's being treated with scorn for what appears to me as being subjective reasons - basically because he's not toeing the Party Line (Oracle Is Evil).

I'm no fan of Larry Ellison (because his attitude is, quite bluntly, extremely off-putting); however, I'm not going to put Oracle as a company into the "Evil Larry Ellison" basket because Oracle is a public company, and condemning them for things their CEO has done outside of his position with Oracle would be stupid of *me* (not to mention hypocritical).

I don't like Steve Jobs, either - however, I refuse to extend my hate for Jobs to Apple as a company (I hate certain Apple products; however, that is due to the products themselves, and has nothing to do with Jobs).

Why do I get that impression that the hate is subjective? Simple; you brought one of the more subjective of comments into the debate - the Bible itself. The very reason the Bible (as a book) came into being has been (and will remain) a subject for heavy subjective debate because the original authors and publishers are beyond our ability to put to the question. I'm an agnostic - however, I won't debate the Bible because any debate on it would be subjective.

I will like (or not like) a company (or company's products) based on merit (or lack thereof) - my feelings for the company's officers won't matter.

[TheOrqwithVagrant]

Maybe you are correct. Maybe the link I posted, is lying? Maybe Andrew Morton also lied when he said that the code quality is bad?

Is it your goal in life to make "like kebabbert quotes linux developers" the 21st century replacement for "like the devil reads the bible"?