OpenSolaris Governing Board Dissolves Itself 198
mysidia writes "Last month, it was mentioned that the OpenSolaris governing board issued an ultimatum to Oracle. It turns out that Oracle continued to ignore requests to appoint a liaison after the governing board's demands. This morning, the board unanimously passed a resolution to dissolve itself. Source code changes are no longer available, and it would appear that OpenSolaris and community involvement in the development of Solaris have been killed as rumored. We recently discussed a 'Spork' of OpenSolaris called Illumos. Perhaps now, this will have a chance at becoming a true fork."
What momentum may that fork have? (Score:5, Insightful)
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A lot of core Solaris developers are already working on Illumos. This can become a great project, even better than Solaris itself. I expect to see many (Open) Solaris "users" move to support this project instead of supporting Oracle's one.
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They can probably attract curiosity seekers wondering what the living hell a "spork" is in a development context
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why can't we have a knife! I wanna knife! >sniff<
(One of the big benefits of OpenSolaris is that there's a hell of a lot of commercial software for Solaris that hasn't been - and may never be - ported to Linux. This would matter less if the ABI/IBCS module had been maintained, as Linux could then run Solaris binaries natively.)
But then again... (Score:2)
iBCS was not maintained because there was no real need for it anymore. 15 years ago, you often needed to run stuff that just would not exist on Linux, and today that's just not going to happen, except for very specific, very propietary stuff. And if you want propietary stuff, you will most likely pay for it. And the OS it runs on, becomes basically an afterthought.
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They don't allow knives, belts, or shoelaces when you're on suicide watch.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry if you missed it but many of the OpenSolaris "devs" were either directly employed by Sun or companies with close ties to SUN. There was never any real grassroots development of OpenSolaris, and despite all the hype about what "may" happen post Oracle any further development is going exactly where it went before, nowhere.
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I may be mistaken, but haven't many of those Sun/Solaris developers kicked off the Oracle train, moving to companies like Nexenta where they can continue working on The Next Big Thing?
I'm not sure on the numbers but I know at least several of the important ones have.
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The point is that they worked on OpenSolaris not because it was their passion, but because it was their job. They've moved on.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing, but if we always did the sensible thing we'd miss out on much of the good software that we have today, such as Linux. There was a time that when it offered very little. It happened to be in the right place at the right time and today we get to enjoy what came about because of it. In regards to OpenSolaris, honestly the whole thing makes me a little sad. I realize commercial Solaris is still around, but it seems like every year we have less choices. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like that's a good thing.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing, but if we always did the sensible thing we'd miss out on much of the good software that we have today, such as Linux. There was a time that when it offered very little.
Oh come on, that's revisionist history at best. When it was first released, it offered an alternative to Minix, and was one of the few protected-mode-capable Unix clones available for x86. As it progressed, it offered the first kernel (sorry Hurd) for a GNU-based OS.
Linux *always* had a niche to fill. I can't see how the same is true of OpenSolaris.
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If the parent's view is wrong (and maybe it is--I don't know), this is almost certainly not because of "revisionist history."
Revisionist history happens, legitimately, when historians review the best sources available and arrive at a conclusion about a story that does not entirely agree with how it has been told in the past. When history is "revised" in this way, it is because the old stories have been based on sources that are less reliable, incomplete, contradictory, or of lesser quality.
Something similar
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Technically, the phrase "revisionist history" could mean several different things. But as actually used, it doesn't.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I am quite aware of how the term is "commonly" used, which is precisely the precondition for my complaint. Otherwise, why complain at all? I'm not sure what your argument is.
If we distinguish "junk science" from actual "science," why not "junk revisionism" or "negationism" from legitimate "revisionist history?"
Since the vocabulary needed for talking about a worthwhile and valid way of reexamining history has been overloaded to mean the same thing as its false and invalid counterfeit, legitimate revisionism suffers.
The problem is compounded every time someone pulls out the fallacy, "That's revisionist history!"
Imagine if politically motivated rubbish and honest research required the equivocal term, "science". One of those disciplines, the one more difficult to justify to the layman, might suffer as a result. Whenever we wanted to debunk something, we'd just hurl the epithet, "science", at it.
That's what I'm complaining about. It's just a crazy, petty Stallman-esque neurosis I have.
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Linux *always* had a niche to fill. I can't see how the same is true of OpenSolaris.
ZFS.
And don't say BSD... the BSD port of ZFS is way behind OpenSolaris' feature and performance-wise.
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ZFS.
That's not a niche, that's a technology, and one easily co-opted (the BSD port will improve eventually) or superceded (btrfs).
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That's true for the moment - ZFS is the only reason I use OpenSolaris - but it won't last for long. As soon as the BTRFS folks develop a RAIDZ equivalent, I plan on switching back to linux.
Also, as has already been pointed out, ZFS is available on BSD. With OpenSolaris development effectively stopped I've seriously considered switching, but figured I might as well wait a while and see where BTRFS is in a year or so. However, if I needed to build a new ZFS based file server today, I'd definitely go with B
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:5, Insightful)
I kind of felt the same way in the late 90's when BeOS was dying and the MacOS's future looked bleak. Linux had extremely weak driver support, and OS/2 had finally given up the ghost. It looked like Windows might become the only survivor of the 90's. But today there is a new diaspora of OS distributions and platforms. These things ebb and flow. My advice is to not worry so much about choice in general and just try to find something you like and contribute to it.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's basically Windows, traditional Unix with X11 (with only Linux, *BSD and AIX left), and Unix + different UI (Mac OS X). Plus some embedded systems and some mainframe-like systems, but Unix is eating both.
We aren't exactly witnessing a Cambrian explosion.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:4, Interesting)
and iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, WebOS, ChromeOS, Playstation/XBox custom OSes, and a few others. And clumping all "Linux" into one (from Ubuntu to Red Hat's Enterprise) is a bit of over-generalization.
In short, if you like playing around with new and interesting programmable systems, it may not be a Cambrian explosion, but we've certainly come out of the temporary bottleneck of the late 90's.
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traditional Unix with X11 (with only Linux, *BSD and AIX left)
Oh, c'mon. Solaris isn't dead *yet*.
We've still got some work to do. ;-)
Queue "The Dead Parrot Sketch" or "Bring Out Your Dead" from Holy Grail.
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Don't forget iOS and Android as real platforms, and Chrome as a potential one. The phone boom has given us a splattering of new platforms, reminiscent of the server OS boom during the dot-com days.
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Symbian... Nokia are still (perhaps barely) alive and shipping.
There's an effort, "Wild Ducks" to port it to 'generic' (ARM) hardware, i.e. Beagleboard. It might make a nice tablet OS alternative to Android, for those who prefer writing software in Qt, if someone would port it to the touchbook.
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LMAO. "Perhaps barely alive". Uhh, okay, if [nokia.com] Q2 2010 profits of US$870M on sales of US$12.7B is barely alive, sure, I guess.
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yes i was being somewhat tongue in cheek, with the proviso that android and ios are flavors of the month. Still, i think the roadmap for symbian^4 looks promising as a complement to meego.
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iOS is Mac OS X with another different UI. Chrome is a browser and Android is Linux with another different UI.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say slim at this point. It doesn't help that all CDDL code is incompatiable with all GPL code so they got plenty wheels that need reinventing unless there's a BSD library for it. Yes, I know you can say the same about the GPL but there's not nearly as much that Linux would want. ZFS and DTrace would be two big ones though, but hopefully the concepts can be incorporated in Linux even if the code can not. Then again, if it'd been GPL then Linux would probably have scavenged all of it already, I guess that was the point of making it GPL-incompatible...
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This is exactly why I never even bothered downloading OpenSolaris. If they had put it under GPL I'd have been all over it.
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... there's not nearly as much that Linux would want. ZFS and DTrace would be two big ones though, ...
True. There's tons of Linux server admins who wouldn't mind having a proven ZFS implementation available to them.
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ZFS-stable? Seriously ZFS is one of the only points remaining besides the magnificent Fault Management Architecture, very good network stack, zones and dtrace.
Nexenta is doing a good job keeping the current Solaris distro's going but whenever Linux or BSD comes with a decent implementation of the most recent ZFS branch, there is probably going to be a massive conversion.
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Maybe. They might also take it as a good thing and use it in their "Oracle Unbreakable Linux".
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A open and free version of solaris. Oracle is going to delay the release of the source code to make their propietary distro more attractive, but at some time they will release it. Illumos will offer a free version of that, and many people (including oracle customers) will want to use that. It bet it will be popular in the "solaris community". Also, there are companies like Nexenta which can try to develop new features. It won't be as nice as opensolaris was, but it's not the end of the world either. If I us
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For open source operating systems, I found OpenSolaris codes that I looked at much easier to read and understand in many places that the terse and cryptic BSD and Linux ones.
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Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:5, Informative)
[quote]First, FreeBSD's ZFS may be "well underway", but it's showing no signs of being usable any time soon. Let it suffice to say that anyone paying attention or using FreeBSD ZFS for much more than one or two small servers is likely to agree that their implementation is not "enterprise ready" as they so arrogantly claim.[/quote]
Hmm, it's been usable for many of us for quite some time. Not to say there haven't been problems with it, but less the equivalent point in OpenSolaris history since FreeBSD is able to import well tested code and patches for issues the first gen ZFS had in OpenSolaris.
[quote]Second, I'm not so stupid as to fool myself into thinking ports on BSD is a sustainable administrative tool. Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.[/quote]
Again, many of us have used ports with great success for a long time. Personally, I find it easier than working with deb packages, and far easier than working with rpm's.
[quote]FreeBSD appears to be in decline as a project. I can't speak for developer activity, but I can say that their ability to actually ship code that works has become diminished since 7.1 or so. Entire subsystems have not worked for quite some time, yet they keep shipping it and saying "it'll be fixed in a couple years" (referring to USB and AHCI). Quite a few drivers have also had regressions.[/quote]
Wow this is like a broken record. The are no problems with either AHCI or USB for the vast majority of users. There were some changes to USB in 8.0, eg switched to being based off of libusb, device renaming, etc. AHCI and some the other related controller drivers were new in 8.0 as well, There were a few corner cases that didn't work well, but it's seen widespread usage with a great deal of success. The updates included in 8.1 address the corner cases and some further performance improvements. It's hard knowing what your issue is since you speak in generalities, but I assure you there are far more happy FreeBSD users than people like you.
[quote]In addition to ZFS, the Solaris kernel has dtrace, zones, and BrandZ.[/quote]
It's true OpenSolaris's zone are more advanced than FreeBSD jails, but for most uses the differences negligible. BSD Jails also integrate nicely with ZFS and FreeBSD's GEOM layer. OpenSolaris also has XEN dom0 support, I'm surprised you didn't take the opportunity to bag on FreeBSD's lack of it.
[quote]ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexenta is usable today. Not only does it "have" it, but you're able to trivially export an iSCSI device, use deduplication, and (not 100% sure on this one, just read about it having been added to Solaris in April) do differential filesystem snapshots. FreeBSD's implementation has none of this, giving it little more appeal than current btrfs on mdraid (and in some ways, less).[/quote]
It's trivial to export ZVOL on FreeBSD as iscsi targets. Granted it's not quite as nice as OpenSolaris since FreeBSD doesn't have an iscsi target in it's base system but there is a great one in ports and with a two minute wrapper script you have exactly the same functionality.
People talk of deduplication like it's some sort of magic bullet, but I think most of those people have no idea the overhead that imposes on the file system. Once they discover the resources necesscary to run it effectively, much of the enthusiasim fades away. It's a really a very select usage were deduplication would be economically feasible to implement.
Doesn't seem like you understand much about ZFS. Differential snapshot are integral to ZFS, you can't have ZFS with getting it so yes FreeBSD does have differential ZFS snapshots. Perhaps you're misidentifying this? http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2010/03/zfs-snapshot-differences.html [blogspot.com] Interesting, they have integrated diff into ZFS now. Trivial to do without the integration, if that's actually a make or break feature you need a new sys admin.
While you're getting some learning here, you s
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Well that's a load of bull if I ever heard one. Your entire post needs a giant [citation needed].
I use FreeBSD ZFS at $work and it works great. Combine it with HAST and CARP and you have a pair of redundant application servers with instant data replication and failover. All on FreeBSD, all very, very usable.
The FreeBSD ports system is awesome IMO, I never understood why some people gets all worked up over it. There are advantages and disadvantages in all package management systems, but I've found FreeBSD po
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Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.
Nexenta uses apt. Illumos as yet is packaging independent. It's chosen by downstream distributions.
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I've been a freebsd user since freebsd 4.x (heavily) and linux user since the 1.2 kernel days. started off using DEC unix and vax/vms. I'm no newcomer to unix and unix-like systems.
what the poster says seems right to me. freebsd had its day but its just not keeping up with linux and even stability is lacking (had my freebsd8.0 system lock up on me and that never happened with freebsd 6.x and 4.x; at least not mainline versions). bsd simply is less travelled and still supports less hardware than linux.
Uses for Opensolaris (Score:3, Informative)
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Why can't you use gcc-2.95.3 on Linux?
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And you can not get it to compile under a more modern version?
Nope but ewwwww.
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why not just use the old RedHat 7 or similar that ran that moldy ol' 2.95.3? if you're behind firewall shouldn't be problem as long as you're not too intimate with internet
NOPE (Score:2)
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Can't you get that through FreeBSD and anything with a Pkgsrc derived system that doesn't peg binaries to OS releases? (aka RPM Hell).
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Finding a compiler and build system ancient enough to deal with the no longer POSIX compliant unfrastructure for gcc 2.9x compilers is fraught with pain for inexperienced engineers. Rolling your build environments that far back is _awfully_ painful.
Meanwhile, in Redwood Shores... (Score:2, Funny)
The Open Solaris council will no longer be of any concern to us! I've just received word that Emperor Ellison has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of Sun have been swept away.
From now on, fear will keep potentially traitorous Solaris users in line. Fear of our software patents - and our new super death-ray powered ELAs!
bOrg (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe it could be Ellison-as-Hitler instead. Just go ahead and pre-bust the Godwin cherry on all the Oracle stories.
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I see, so Oracle, and Apple = BAD/EVIL
While MS = GOOD/TRUSTWORTHY
Arbitrary logic is arbitrary.
Oracle shooting his own foot. (Score:2, Insightful)
This move by Oracle reminds me yahoo in the .com era. Open Solaris was not a revenue source but it was important as the means to get developers interested in Solaris. I don't think there will be much development or support for solaris from the open source community from now on.
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Except that there is absolutely no evidence that it got any incremental developers "interested in Solaris". Thinking it would in the future is probably wishful thinking.
Feel good ranting amongst ourselves isn't evidence. Yes, we like Open Source, otherwise we wouldn't be /. regulars.
Developers could, and did, get interested in Solaris from Solaris Express before it was killed to make OpenSolaris the "one way forward".
I haven't been with Sun for some years, and was never with Oracle. But the people there did
Only a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is a good thing for everyone. Hear me out, I'm not an idiot, or at least I'm trying not to be!
Solaris, unlike the other big two open source operating systems - Linux & BSD - has always had the problem of the double edged sword because it always had to serve Sun, which in turn supported it. Now with Oracle punting Solaris to the curb, the community can really see what it's made of. Whether Solaris is an also-ran or if the community can really go full tilt and go in directions that it couldn't because of it's omnipresent master is entirely up to the people who support it. The future is bright for smaller form factors, as well as servers (again) so now it's time to see if they are big time players or another name to the pile of failed OSes.
I wish them well.
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It's worth noting that Oracle is not kicking Solaris to the curb, they are kicking OpenSolaris to the curb.
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"...has always had the problem of the double edged sword because it always had to serve Sun..."
Not exactly sure what you mean by "serve", and even so, not sure how that was a problem. Of course OpenSolaris needed to compatible with Sun products, it was a SUN effort, why shouldn't it run the Sun library of products? How exactly was that a problem? OpenSol suffered from a slight lack of interest, really. And I mean slight. Lots of folks liked the idea of an OSS Solaris, I'm just exactly sure there was a real need for it. Of course some are going to disagree with me, but honestly, for all the wonder and
So they took their toys and went home (Score:2, Interesting)
So what? OpenSolaris was a bad joke anyway.
In the true spirit of OSS, they packed up their bags, stuck out their tongues and said 'fuck it, we're done dealing with you guys, we're going home' ... and thats perfectly within their rights.
It should be noted however, since they were about the only ones using OpenSolaris, no one is really going to notice they are gone.
Using OpenSolaris is roughly the same as running Darwin instead of OS X. Roughly, not really the same, but both are pretty much pathetic bases o
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Actually, OpenSolaris was way ahead of Solaris 10 (as it was originally conceived as the development version of the yet-to-be-released Solaris 11). It has a more advanced version of ZFS, the COMSTAR storage framework, a package management framework, and other goodies not in Solaris 10.
Unfortunately, Oracle's corporate culture of radio silence was incompatible with Sun's open development model - and the very first thing they did when they took over was shut off the distro snapshots. I'm surprised it took the
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OpenDarwin was barely more than a kernel
OpenDarwin was a lot more than a kernel. Unfortunately, it was not a complete kernel. Some quite important parts, such as most of the sound subsystem, were not released.
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Sound subsystems oughta be easy to replace; haven't they developed eleventyhundred of them for Linux?
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Yes, but Sun deliberately chose a license that was incompatible with Linux. In their efforts to prevent Linux devs from "stealing" their precious ZFS, they cut themselves off from access to all those nice Linux drivers that might have actually made their system into a general purpose one.
Of course, as I understand it, Linux and the Solaris kernel are incompatible enough that porting drivers either way is going to be only slightly less complex than a full rewrite from scratch anyway. So maybe it's all for
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More or less, yes. There are two issues. One is that IOKit has a completely different (although, actually quite nice) design from any other *NIX kernel. This means that porting drivers is a bit of effort. The other is that the userland interfaces for sound on OS X are completely different, so if you port the subsystem from somewhere else you'll end up with something that doesn't look or behave like OS X from a developer perspective.
The same problem applies to the video interfaces. If you want 3D sup
Question here. (Score:2)
Re:Question here. (Score:4, Informative)
That's plenty of work but there are people willing and able to get it done and they have a bootable system to evolve. The real question is when someone will kick off a full distro around it (since Illumos is purely a kernel).
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Illumos is currently working on replacing the few parts of the kernel which are still "closed source"; I believe they're fairly trivial things, mainly, from what I recall reading. Trivial, at least, compared to the Important Parts, like dtrace and zfs.
And nobody cared.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle didn't care, because Oracle has said that they are no longer interested in having an open development model for Solaris. In fact, the fact that Oracle doesn't care is why they're dissolving in the first place. Solaris users don't care because, let's face it... does anybody actually use OpenSolaris? I work for a huge Solaris shop, and we use stock, Sun-supported Solaris. If we wanted an Open Source operating system, we'd use Linux. We use Solaris for huge database servers that are too big to run Linux (mostly Oracle DB.)
So, that leaves OpenSolaris developers. Look, this is the risk you take when you work on a project dominated by one company, especially when you have a license like the CDDL. I feel bad that you're in this position, but it was kind of predictable, and I really think you're missing the boat with Illumos. You're unlikely to get enough interest to ever make a go of it with Oracle being disinterested. Go work on making Linux better instead!
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Theoretically I understood RHEL Advanced Server was capable of an unlimited number of CPU's and memory ( http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/ [redhat.com] ).
Perhaps you're reaching some contention at high loads or with large numbers of CPU's / storage / etc?
Thanks for any info you can provide.
64-way DB Servers (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm retired now, but at my last job we had 20,000+ UNIX servers. My projects - I was a technical architect - had about 300 of those servers. Trying to compare the throughput for most x86 servers to a P590 or HP Superdome or Sun E25K just shows your ignorance of the larger UNIX system capabilities. From a compute standpoint, Intel CPUs are hard to beat, but when you need 10 fibre connections to storage and 20 10GigE connections and have 10,000 concurrent DB users, RH stuff ain't gonna cut it. Sorry, but those are the facts. These servers aren't for a website.
Then you have the issue of getting a vendor that only certifies their program on HP systems to bother with RedHat. The $3M that the DB server HW costs is nothing compared to the software costs for another platform to be supported by some vendors. The software ran on HP-UX - that's all. The software cost $25M for 2 prod instances and 5 non-prod instances (DR, Test1, Test2, pre-prod ... ) This is software you run your business on AND not very well designed. Bigger hardware is always the answer over system design changes. It is cheaper. Our prod DB servers were 64-way with 108GB of RAM. We had 4 of them - 2 production locations with 2 DB srvs each. An active/failover cluster model. We had 4 DR servers that were almost as large located in another data center that got data updates nightly. There were about 20 app servers inside data centers, about 40 app/GIS servers located in the same building as the users who were spread all over the USA for this project. Another 20 servers were used for the dev, test, pre-prod, test2, test3 environments. It was not possible to run all the software on the say system, at least 3 systems were required for each environment. Crap, I know. Back when I worked on it, VPARS were specifically not supported by the vendor, so we didn't use them - anywhere.
Just because RH claims to run on 20+ way systems, doesn't mean any of the software will. BTW, Oracle RAC was not supported by the sw vendor, so lots of small Oracle Nodes wasn't gonna work.
Anyway, you wanted some background on why anyone uses non-RH machines. Oh - we were seeing about 4k TPS on each production system during business hours. Transactions came from client tools, app servers, reporting tools, and ad hoc queries from blackberries and other portable devices.
We had an outage 1 day for about 6 hours around 2004 due to DB corruption - over 10,000 people couldn't do their jobs (half the users). It wasn't good. I'm glad only 1 production site was impacted.
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Against all odds, AC knows about the realities of life. When your production environment includes a dozen Superdomes, RH might not be the right solution for you. And on something like a bank or a big telco, you'll find said big systems all the time, not a very wide array if little machines.
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Re:64-way DB Servers (Score:5, Informative)
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AC here ... "vendor only certifies on HP-UX", so trying anything else was worthless. The server programs were written in C/C++, so we weren't gonna get binaries for any other platform anyway.
Also, Z-Systems are great for IO, not so much for raw MIPS. Yes, I've watched the 1,000 linux servers running apache on a single mainframe reports. Interesting, but not really useful. BTW, I was a mainframe dev for 5+ years - MVS, JCL, clists, TSO. None of that rocks. Ruby - rocks. Perl - rocks.
I LOVE IBM-POWER-systems
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That page looks like licensing info, not technical info (certain licenses allow unlimited CPUs). The Linux kernel has a limit on memory and processors. I think the memory limit is insanely high, the CPU one is less so. I've been trying to find info but all anyone seems to talk about is PAE.
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I was looking at kernel config options and here's what I found.
Max CPUs [cateee.net]:
- x86: 512
- x86_64: 256 (not sure why this is smaller)
- sparc64: 1024
- ia64: 4096
It also notes that these are the max, hardware limits may make it lower. These numbers seem much smaller than I expected.
There's no citation but this Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] says Linux can support up to 64 TB of memory on x86_64.
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Folks who do opensource NAS care, as ZFS on OpenSolaris is currently superior to anything else in the open sphere, and most if not all of the closed.
But as a Solaris admin, I would much prefer to see a more aggressive improvement of stock Solaris, particularly when it comes to package and patch management.. Nobody here ever did anything with OSol, but watched it to see what would be coming down the pike for Solaris 11..
That said, I'm sure Nexenta and Illumos will fully fork, and presumably if there are eno
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Oracle DB to large to run on Linux? The days of going out and purchasing (big hardware) a 64 way box to run oracle or any application on for that matter is over and has been for some time.
Somebody forgot to tell Oracle that. (Score:2)
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I guess, if I where totally ignoring the existance of RAC as you are I would come to the same conclusion.
It's happened before (Score:2, Insightful)
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Oracle had its own operating system before this?
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they had. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Enterprise_Linux [wikipedia.org]
well... not really "their own", more like they "borrowed" it :)
They are toying with powerful forces here. (Score:3, Funny)
If anyone asks for me ... (Score:3, Funny)
"...chance of becoming a true fork..." (Score:3, Funny)
(if it was a real knife, you could at least carve a spoon out of something)
Issued an ultimatum to Oracle. (Score:2)
Thanks, i needed a good laugh after a day like today.
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Dangerous. (Score:3, Interesting)
had a zfs scare, today (freebsd 8.0 to 8.1 hiccup) (Score:2, Troll)
this was kind of scary; and I think it was *my* last nail in the coffin for zfs. for me, that is (ymmv).
I had a freebsd 8.0 system up for quite a long time (over 100 days). I often keep the /usr/src area current via cvsup but had no reason to reboot until the system hung under heavy load. when it rebooted, I found I was 'half 8.1' and half 8.0, still. this threw zfs out of sync and the pool would not be mounted! what a scare, let me tell you (I had all my valuable stuff on that 6TB pool).
had to reboot
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
As someone who has tested out ZFS on both BSD and Solaris, and is familiar with the subject, I can tell you quite plainly: The Solaris implementation is good and generally, the BSD / FreeBSD implementation sucks, is buggy, missing features (or key features are buggy).
The OpenSolaris implementation is mature, well maintained, performs well, and is up to date. The FreeBSD implementation is immature, lags way behind OSol development, and seems to be unstable.
If you want a mission critical system runn
Re:Is it really dead? (Score:5, Funny)
CDDL != BSD (Score:2)
mod parent up (Score:2)
Re:Another instance of BSD vs. GPL licensing... (Score:5, Insightful)
True. But what's the reason for that?
Quoted from wikipedia, original source for the quote [debian.net].
IMO it's most likely that there was an explicit intention of being Linux incompatible as well (meaning, not just because it happens to be GPL licensed). After all, why would Sun give such a gift to its greatest competitor? I think that it doesn't really matter what Linux was licensed under, the license for ZFS would be guaranteed to be incompatible with it anyway.
That's kind of the point of it, yes. I'm not sure what you mean by "stricter" here though. Additional restrictions, like for instance non-commercial usage only would bring it closer to a proprietary license, which is entirely against the intent of it. If you mean things like the AGPL, it would be very difficult to figure out which additional restrictions would be allowable due to favouring what the GPL tries to accomplish, and which wouldn't due to going counter to it, and write some sort of rule that would allow the former but not the later.
Nope. The term for this is "hoist by Sun's very intentional decision to make it be that way".
After all, if Sun were all about complete freedom they would have went with a BSD license. It would have been very easy and they wouldn't have needed to spend time on making yet another license. There must be a reason why that wasn't suitable.
Re: (Score:2)
and yet... it's the same kind of thing the GPL does. As you said yourself
How many people here realize that while there are lots of GPL-compatible licenses, the GPL is compatible with no other licenses? Not even newer versions of itself unless you specifically grant it, which GNU strongly encourages. The LGPL is sli