Linked by John Finigan on Mon 21st Apr 2008 19:00 UTC
When it comes to dealing with storage, Solaris 10 provides admins with more choices than any other operating system. Right out of the box, it offers two filesystems, two volume managers, an iscsi target and initiator, and, naturally, an NFS server. Add a couple of Sun packages and you have volume replication, a cluster filesystem, and a hierarchical storage manager. Trust your data to the still-in-development features found in OpenSolaris, and you can have a fibre channel target and an in-kernel CIFS server, among other things. True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package. Editor's note: This is the first of our published submissions for the 2008 Article Contest.
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RE[5]: Comment by agrouf
by segedunum on Fri 25th Apr 2008 02:28
in reply to "RE[4]: Comment by agrouf"
Member since:2005-07-06
LVM, DM, and MD are crap when you are working with large filesystems. On one 64-bit Debian Lenny box, I can't create multiple LVM volume if their total size goes over 1.2 TB. On a separate 64-bit Debian Etch box, I can create a single LVM volume that spans 7 TB, but creating a second one of 10 GB (yes GB) on the same box fails. On a third 64-bit Debian Etch box, I had to manually stitch together a bunch....
Your personal anecdotes on experiences with Linux storage management tools in a narrow set of circumstances count for very little. "Oh, this happened to me with LVM once!" I've created an absolute ton of multi gigabyte and terabyte logical volumes, and if what you described was the case generally then I think we'd have all heard about it. The very fact that you've mentioned 'Debian Lenny' sees your credibility get shot through the head right there.
Just because LVM does this or doesn't do that on a certain distribution, that doesn't mean that that is the way it works generally for everyone else. I daresay ZFS will have a few bugs and quirks once it gets more widely used, and if Sun actually gets a clue you might have an outside chance of finding the problem on their web site ;-).
I'd much rather see something useful in the server room. LVM, MD, and DM have a long way to go before that happens.
Well, they're used on a very, very, very wide basis these days, and I don't see people breaking down the doors and throwing out all their Linux boxes just to run ZFS. Just isn't happening.
I'm very tempted to turn our VM boxes into nothing more than NFS servers so that I can run FreeBSD or OpenSolaris on them and get some useful volume/fs management tools.
You'll do a cost/benefit analysis of that, like everyone else, and find out that it just isn't worth it. I don't know what you'd gain running FreeBSD, and the less-then-perfect userland in Solaris alone is enough to turn people off.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.More News »
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2005-07-11
The biggest issue with all Linux tools are that they are not designed to work together, in that they don't harmonise the commandline options (or even the command names).
For instance, why is that you can't just use:
"mount -t <fs> -o <options> <device> <mount point>
to mount any filesystem? Some can be, if they have a mount.fs command installed, while others require running fsmnt commands.
Or, why can't one just use:
"mkfs -t <fs> <device>"
to format partitions with the filesystem of choice? Some have mkfs.fs command that work that way. Others don't and require you to run the separate command.
Or, why can't one use:
"fsck -t <fs> <device>
to check filesystems for errors.
Or, why can't one use:
"ifconfig <interface> <options>
to configure wired NICs, wireless NICs, vlans, bridges, and tunnels?
There are too many separate projects doing each little piece of the pie in their own corner of the world with very little regard for what the others are doing. This wouldn't be so bad ... if the layers between them were clearly defined, and the interfaces clearly defined, and didn't change at the drop of a hat.
You're going to have to qualify that one, because LVM and MD software RAID were stable and being used before ZFS was even a glint in Bonwick's eye. Indeed, ZFS has yet to be proven in the same way. "
LVM, DM, and MD are crap when you are working with large filesystems. On one 64-bit Debian Lenny box, I can't create multiple LVM volume if their total size goes over 1.2 TB. On a separate 64-bit Debian Etch box, I can create a single LVM volume that spans 7 TB, but creating a second one of 10 GB (yes GB) on the same box fails. On a third 64-bit Debian Etch box, I had to manually stitch together a bunch of 1.9 TB physical volumes into one large 10 TB volume group, but I can only partition it into smaller logical volumes if the total size of the volumes is less than 2 TB.
So much for trying to simplify things by using volume management for storage of backups and as storage for virtual machines.
You'll probably see one come about when it becomes a requirement to do storage management on running desktop systems and other appliances. "
I'd much rather see something useful in the server room. LVM, MD, and DM have a long way to go before that happens.
We're using hardware RAID, working with multiple TB storage arrays, and struggling with volume management, as the current crop of Linux tools really, really, really suck. I'm very tempted to turn our VM boxes into nothing more than NFS servers so that I can run FreeBSD or OpenSolaris on them and get some useful volume/fs management tools.