Thank you, Oracle engineers

After 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun, most of us, who followed OpenSolaris, were depressed. In one year one of the most advantageous operating systems was closed under steel curtain. Luckily, due to enormous efforts of community, of companies, dependent on OpenSolaris, the system survived. Currently we have several more or less successful illumos distributions, targeting different users. But nowadays there's a (of course, deserved) common negative feeling towards Oracle in illumos community. But let's speak from another point of view. Let's look at things, which illumos community (and in particular, OpenIndiana) got directly or indirectly from Oracle in recent years.

• Our userland build system, which constantly evolves, however, in different directions, under Oracle control and in our distribution. But still a lot of components can be easily migrated between build systems.
• A lot of software build receipts and patches, as result, were borrowed with small modifications, from Oracle userland-gate. The process is still going on.
• We still borrow patches from Solaris pkg-gate. Also differences in underlying kernels are currently rather significant, a lot of changesets from pkg-gate can be ported to OpenIndiana pkg5 repository.
• Of course, I can not avoid thanking Alan for his constant help in supporting Xorg subsystem and GUI parts of our distribution. He was always helpful to me and Aurélien.
• Evidently, recent KMS work, integrated into OpenIndiana, wouldn't be possible without Oracle's open drm port, which was ported from Solaris to illumos by Martin Bochnig, and later independently ported and enhanced by Gordon Ross.

- And of course, I cannot count patches, which were suggested to upstream projects by Oracle engineers. Just today when I tried to solve two issues related with IPS and apache 2.4 interaction, I've found two patches by Petr Sumbera, fixing Apache issues on Solaris. So, I want to use the chance and thank all Oracle Solaris engineers for their work on open source projects. I doubt that without them illumos could survive in large scale. Perhaps, we could be an excellent playground for ZFS development, but not an universal operating system...

elfdump -a in Solaris

Solaris userland is rather specific... A lot of utilities misses convenient options from GNU/BSD analogs. E.g., we don't have "elfdump -a" here... As always, a bit of scripting solves this problem:

elfdump -c /bin/ls |grep Header |awk ' { print $4; }'  |xargs -n 1 -I '{}' elfdump -N '{}' /bin/ls 

Illumian is here...

Today I've tried the first Illumian version. This is illumos-based Nexenta OS. Just a few remarks.
What I liked:
1) VTs finally work in illumos installer, it's good to have a possibility of going to text console and checking installer's log.
2) It seems, the installer can install system on mirror pool. C'est beau.
3) APT... I finally shouldn't learn one more package system and apt is IMHO faster then IPS.
4) It's still Solaris: you have DTrace, ZFS, projects, fair share scheduler...
5) git change number in place of OS version looks cool :)

# uname -a 
SunOS oi-test 5.11 4cece89cac3e i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris

What I disliked:
1) Zones don't work:

root@oi-test:~# zoneadm -z  myzone install
sh[1]: exec: /usr/lib/brand/ipkg/pkgcreatezone: not found

And Solaris without zones is a very strange thing...
2) /usr/gnu/bin in front of path... How can you use GNU chmod with ZFS ACL?
3) Soft, soft, soft... Where are you?

root@oi-test:~# apt-cache pkgnames |grep postgres

4) apt-clone doesn't work

This is just a first glance on this OS. It is very raw and is still in development. I doubt that calling this release 1.0 was a good idea. It seems, we will have a production-ready OS not sooner then in half of year, but still... I wonder, what Illumos-based OS will be first to reach production quality: OI or Illumian? It seems OI is in better form nowadays, but the fact is that OI team has failed to create a stable release in about 1.5 years.

OpenIndiana oi_147

Today we finally got the first release of OpenIndiana - new Illumos distribution, comparable to OpenSolaris binary distribution. I've just set it up and looked throw. Some interesting new things after my migration to FreeBSD (at times of OpenSolaris dev build 134) - interesting thing in zfs:
zfs diff:

#  zfs diff -F  rpool/ROOT/openindiana@install rpool/ROOT/openindiana
M       /       /
M       /       /var/pkg
M       /       /var/cache/cups
M       /       /var/cache/cups/rss
M       /       /var/adm
M       /       /dev
M       /       /etc
M       /       /var/cache/gdm
M       /       /var/svc/log
M       /       /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults
M       /       /var/tmp
M       /       /etc/rc2.d

It's quite convinient, however it would be really cool to make zfs diff on particular files :) Other things include DTrace udp and tcp probes and quite sensible improvements in NWAM. At least, it is usable now...

RIP, Solaris...

What are you doing when you want to promote some product? You say to you friends, colleagues and acquaintances: use it, it's great! And they understand, that it maybe not great, but at least useful. And they use it. Sun understood it. And we had OpenSolaris. I worked as Sun Campus Ambassador and promoted it. And (Open)Solaris was a great OS: it had ZFS, DTrace, Zones, Projects and quite understandable RBAC system. And it was cool to use this OS. I wanted to find and report some bugs to make it better. I wished to port some soft to make Solaris pleasant OS. And what do we have now? Solaris 11 Express and end of OpenSolaris.
Blame on Oracle. They are going to spoil everything they touch. I didn't believe that they were able to shoot themselves in the leg. But they are talented enough to do it. With OpenSolaris Sun Solaris began new life. Without such high priority project it is doomed. Other OS are coming. Of course, one of them will be Linux (it's not ideal, but free and have a lot of features that Solaris will never have: support for almost all hardware you can imagine and all soft you may ever need), I hope one of them will be FreeBSD (at least we'll have ZFS and DTrace here, jails are good replacement for zones, especially after completion of new jail resources control project), Windows Server will be alive and prosperous. But AIX, HP/UX and Solaris will be dead. Because they were already dead. One of this great systems was near its resurrection. But its owner decided to bury it alive.
It's not good news, but expected one. Oracle was quite stupid to make other irrelevant steps. So, I think the next time I'll see Solaris 10 will be in museum. It will be among OS/2, Amiga OS and SCO Unix. Without new blood every project is doomed. OpenSolaris gave this giant new blood. But this is just a part of history now. Blame on Oracle.

Long live, Illumos...

It sounds great - a developers' community inspired by Garrett D'Amore is going to create "Fully Open" ON... When they have open codebase, it seems there will be a few parties glad to create there own binary distro based on this code. It's really necessary project, but I doubt - isn't it too late? This project would give a breathe of fresh air to OpenSolaris 3-5 years ago. But just for now they have a lot of work to do - replace and test internalization bits in libc, replace a lot of binary drivers and some parts of cryptographic system. Even if they are supported by several companies (including Nexenta), it will take significant time. I wish good luck to this project. I will closely look at it. But I have some doubts in its future...

Illumos Project

It seems, that community OpenSolaris distro is coming... There is no much clarity yet. All details will be available in 2 days: http://www.illumos.org/projects/site/wiki/Announcement . It may be good news...
However, my former OpenSolaris desktop nowadays submits BSD stats (www.bsdstats.org) :)
As always, there are own advantages and disadvantages in FreeBSD, but at least I'm confident in its future.
About advantages: a great heap of FOSS (e.g, now I can read djvu, have working fbreader and even watch youtube in konqueror). About disadvantages: wine malfunctions, system doesn't want to boot from second drive in ZFS mirror with first drive detached (It boots with healthy pool or with second drive detached. OpenSolaris-b134 didn't want to boot with any drive detached). And I haven't tried anything Oracle-related yet...

Moving data to FreeBSD

Now I decided to move from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD.
Just for now I emulate this procedure in VirtualBox, later I'll do it on real hardware...
1) Installed OpenSolaris 09.06 and updated it to b134, updated zfs pool to version 19, added mirror disk to pool. So, I have configuration identical to my workstation.
2) Splitted pool (used zpool split for this task), destroyed second pool (which appeared as result of split) and filled first sectors of disk with zeroes (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/) to erase all signs of zfs pool.
3) Booted from FreeBSD dvd (i386) and made everything similar to http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/ZFSBootPartition. Some caveats: I didn't manage to get zpool.cache from first time, had to import/export pool to get it. At the end of the procedure I got zfs pool consisting from /dev/ad1s1.
4) After some time I managed to boot from my pool (made several errors during install, e.g. forgot about zpool.cache and accidentally wrote wrong rc.conf).
5) Booted in OpenSolaris and imported my pool under alternative /fbsd root. Create on the FreeBSD zfs pool filesystem /old and zfs send all data from OpenSolaris /export fs there.
6) Rebooted. Couldn't boot FreeBSD. So I booted from FreeBSD DVD, imported ZFS pool and moved /boot/zfs/zpool.cache to zpool's /boot/zfs/zpool.cache
7) Now I have running ZFS FreeBSD installation
TODO:
a) add second mirror drive (old OpenSolaris drive) to new ZFS pool and put boot code and loader there.
b) tune i386 FreeBSD for ZFS usage...

After completing these tasks I'm going to make this procedure on physical system... (Certainly, after creating backup...)

Leaving sinking ship

We could be very optimistic, but bad things really happen. So, after waiting for half a year after Sun end, I decided to migrate my home workstation from OpenSolaris to some other solid OS.
The choice is not evident. Solaris is good in several things:
- It supports commercial soft. And I need Adobe Flash, Oracle DBMS, recent Java version.
- It supports zones. Experiments with OS is very easy. Being a system administrator, I appreciate this.
- It has ZFS. Yes, I like using ZFS mirror on my desktop PC.
- It has DTrace and truss, which help me to answer questions "What does my OS do?".

I see several alternatives: Solaris 10, FreeBSD 8.1 and Debian. I use Ubuntu on my notebook and it proved to be quite unstable.
At first glance, best choice is Solaris 10 - you shouldn't change your habits a lot. But it's a trap. I don't believe Oracle any more after 2010.H1 has come to end :)
Solaris 10 also has quite old software and awful IIIMD, and package management from 90's.... So, it's not my way. I wouldn't consider using it even for server (because it is illegal now).

Debian is good choice. It's stable. Oracle and Flash work there. And JDK has native support. But migration would look like:
1) split ZFS mirror
2) install Debian on one part of mirror
3) move data there using zfs-fuse
4) create several md-devices from other part of mirror
5) move data there
6) add first disk to md-device
7) update fstab
8) update mbr...
9) forget about snapshots, dtrace and easy ways to monitor disk pool.

So, I'd like to try hard way - FreeBSD/x86.
- Using x86 system will allow me to use wine without tambourines.
- Adobe Flash will work by means of nspluginwrapper.
- I'll migrate my data by splitting ZFS pool, creating new one with lower Zpool version from half of pool (e.g. 14 version), importing data there by means of zfs send/receive and mounting it in FreeBSD LiveCD.
- OpenJDK in FreeBSD is quite fresh, I can migrate all my projects to it (already successfully tried).
- I really like this system and have a lot of experience in it, so let's try this scenario,
- One big question is Oracle. I know that Oracle XE works perfectly in FreeBSD. Trying to install Oracle 10g - is a challenging exercise :)

Just for now I'm going to emulate all this actions in VirtualBox. After finishing this work, I'm going to share my experience.