"Sun Microsystems announced the Solaris 10 10/09 Operating System. The Solaris 10 OS has been extended with new performance and power efficiency enhancements, more streamlined management of system installations, updates and fixes, new updates for Solaris ZFS and advancements to further leverage the functionality of the latest SPARC and x86 based systems. Solaris 10 10/09 provides new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install manner, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications, including Oracle database and application software."
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Member since:2009-03-17
Member since:2007-07-27
I do love how OpenSolaris handles upgrades and patches. I doubt Debian or any other OS handles it better.
If I do a patch or upgrade, then a snapshot will automatically be created - called Boot Environment, BE. In GRUB, all BE will be listed so I can choose which BE I want to boot into. If the patch breaks something, I just reboot into an earlier BE.
This is due to ZFS. Snapshots writes all new data on a new place on the hard drive, and all old data are still left intact. No changes occurs on the old data, they are only read from. This makes it possible for a fail safe rollback. You can destroy the BE and the system will look exactly as before the BE. Every single bit will be the same.
This allows you to have several different branches. One stable branch with lots of different BE. Another unstable branch where you try different things. If you delete the kernel by accident, you just boot into an earlier BE in GRUB. True versioning of the entire system, on bit level.
It has happened that a upgrade to a new build of OpenSolaris has broke something. What do you do, if you make a large upgrade on Linux and something breaks? How do you rollback? Reinstall everything? I just boot into the earlier BE and destroy the new failed BE, and I am exactly in the same state as before the upgrade.
It is fail safe to upgrade and patch with OpenSolaris. Therefore, I doubt that Debian or any other OS has better ways of handling things than IPS.
And this works very fast and quick too. Sometimes you read about a tech, that sounds good but in practice it is too cumbersome to be used. Not so with BE. Once you try BE you never want to go back.
Member since:2005-12-25
Member since:
2005-11-18
That's great, but it misses many scientific packages, I like APT far more than IPS, and I like the Debian way of handling things better. What's wrong with having the familiar Debian environment with a Solaris kernel? And if you like that environment, why switch to something very different? I have no interest in OpenSolaris, but having the OpenSolaris kernel on Debian would be nice for e.g. DTrace.
Mix and match!
Edited 2009-10-10 13:57 UTC