Solaris Archive

A recent vague announcement on osol-announce hints that something big is rumbling for OpenSolaris: "A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we're just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public." They have a website, and they're going to be hosting a conference call on August 3.

Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement "demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness," company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement.

This morning, at the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting, the following was proposed and unanimously resolved: "The OGB is keen to promote the uptake and open development of OpenSolaris and to work on behalf of the community with Oracle, as such the OGB needs Oracle to appoint a liaison by August 16, 2010, who has the the authority to talk about the future of OpenSolaris and its interaction with the OpenSolaris community otherwise the OGB will take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle."

Pavel Heimlich has announced the release of an updated version of Korona 4.4.3: "Korona is the live DVD adding KDE4 packages on top of OpenSolaris. It is intended to be the showcase of the current state of the kde-solaris project, definitely not a distribution for any serious use."

It appears that Oracle has lost interest in supporting the Solaris port for IBM SystemZ machines: "The SystemZ port of Solaris is dead. Oracle pulled all plugs and refused to further help the authors." In two years, the project has been downloaded only 1000 times.

"Hot on the heals of Oracle's revamp of Solaris support, the licensing agreement for free downloads of Solaris 10 have changed. Here is the bit in question: "...Please remember, your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contract for the downloaded Software". So far the OpenSolaris license has not changed, it's still CDDL."

Parallel NFS (pNFS) is a part of NFS 4.1 standard than allows NFS access in parallel. The Nexenta Project has released the very first distribution with pNFS support (integrated with the ZFS filesystem). Get the NCP-pNFS Experimental release here, and setup instructions here.

"There is a discussion at osnews.com about a simple question: "Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?". The answer is simple: No. I could stop now, as this answer is pretty obvious when you work a while with ZFS, but i want to explain my position. And i want to ask a different question at the end."

One of the advantages of ZFS is that it doesn't need a fsck. Replication, self-healing and scrubbing are a much better alternative. After a few years of ZFS life, can we say it was the correct decision? The reports in the mailing list are a good indicator of what happens in the real world, and it appears that once again, reality beats theory. The author of the article analyzes the implications of not having a fsck tool and tries to explain why he thinks Sun will add one at some point.

"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."

The StormOS developers have announced the first beta, codenamed "Hail", of their desktop-oriented Nexenta-based distribution. Building upon the Nexenta Core Platform, StormOS offers a polished XFCE desktop and a handful of lightweight desktop applications out of the box. This beta is available in both direct download and torrent links, you can find them here.

"The OpenSolaris Operating System has many features well suited for embedded systems now and in the future. The kernel is fully preemptable and multithreaded, it provides real-time capabilities, and the modular architecture is highly configurable. Because of these advanced capabilities, we feel there are interesting opportunities to extend OpenSolaris to new platforms, such as the ARM architecture. Therefore, we have created this project to configure the OS/Net (ON) consolidation to meet the requirements of embedded systems and to port OpenSolaris to the ARM platform." The first release of the ARM port of OpenSolaris is now available. Installation notes are available.

"The number and gee-whizness of features Sun Microsystems is putting into updates to both the Solaris 10 commercial operating system and the related OpenSolaris development release of Solaris are slowing. That's the best indication that Nevada - the code name for Solaris Next or Solaris 11 or whatever you want to call it - is getting closer to release. Closer doesn't mean close, however. According to sources speaking to The Reg, Sun is quietly telling customers that Solaris 11 is targeted for launch sometime around the middle of 2010."

Sun is rolling out the latest update to Solaris 10 with enhancements to Solaris Containers, tighter integration with IPSec and upgrades to its Logical Domains technology. The updated Solaris also includes the work Sun and Intel have done over the past two years to optimize the operating system to take advantage of the power, management and monitoring capabilities in Intel's new Xeon 5500 series processors, code-named Nehalem. The seventh update to Solaris 10 comes a year before the planned release of the next-generation Sun OS.