Solaris

There is a great list of all the new features of Opensolaris 2008.11 at the opensolaris.com website: What's New in OpenSolaris 2008.11?

The released version of Opensolaris 2008.11 is available at the usual locations for download. It contains several interesting new developments like the Time Slider, Fast Reboot and many many more new features ...

While preparing the next part for the configuration walkthrough of the Sun 7000 my mind was playing with an desire: I want this interface on an soho device. I played around with many NAS boxes but there wasn´t a single interface in the class of the Fishworks interface. Intel Atoms are cheap enough to build real soho NAS devices from it ...

This is a trend i´ve recognizing for a while now: Companies stopped to migrate to Linux for the migrations sake. I think it´s a combination of Solaris 10 (as i wrote several time: the tenth version rescued the Solaris franchise), the consequence of several burned fingers with Linux and some people that doesn´t take this "Linux is cheaper" meme for granted and use their own pencil and calculator.

The Computerworld writes about this tendency in Replacing high-end Unix with enterprise Linux? Not so fast:

As Qualcomm's director of IT, Matthew Clark was part of the team that reviewed the Linux option. The company's ratio of administrators to users is currently 500-to-1 (although he plans to lower that to about 450-to-1). "With Linux, it would have been 150- or 175-to-1. We would have had to hire three additional administrators for every administrator we have right now working on Unix," Clark says.

Another Solaris user states in the same article:

"We won't be as aggressive in replatforming to Linux as we initially thought," he says. But, he adds, "we feel that both platforms will have a place in our infrastructure."

A really interesting read.

I´ve thought about linking to all this people writing articles about "What Sun should do now?". But at the end most of this articles are written with no background knowledge or with an hidden agenda. So i simply decided not to link to this articles at all.

But there is an article i want to comment. Rich Sharples writes in What Sun Should Do:

#3 Solaris
See above. Linux has won. Whatever technical merit Solaris has today will be commoditized next year. The innovation around Linux is relentless.

Next year ... really? ZFS is available for years now. I don´t see it´s commoditization by any technology in Linux at the moment. Same thing for DTrace. No SSD support besides of simply using it as a faster disk.

And i know, all those Linux people will cry "Foul" but i do not really see innovation in the Linux kernel. Having many hardware drivers in the kernel isn´t an innovation. Commoditization and innovation are diametral concepts. Linux is good in commoditization, it´s the master in the field of good enough. But it fails in the field of innovating. And to get interesting technologies (besides of drivers) Linux need strong competitors. We don´t stand still. There are other interesting technologies in their creation that will gives us a good technological lead.

By the way. To understand Mr. Sharples standpoint you should know, that he is "Director, Product Management at Red Hat". What a strange luck that he suggests to drop products that could hurt his employer. I tend to say this is a kind of hidden agenda.

From my perspective, Sun has just to learn one thing: Learning to kick the butts of our competitors with their good enough products and learning to make more money from our innovations. But: You don´t make money by dropping them.

Für die Immersion Week habe ich meine Security-Präsentation ein wenig aufgewertet und erweitert. Hier ist die neue Version:

(click here for pdf)
Ich habe unter anderem mehr Erlaeuterungen und Neuentwicklungen eingebaut. An anderen stellen habe ich Glenn Brunettes Security Deep Dive fuer weitere Beispiele gepluendert. Glenns Präsentation ist wirklich gut (allerdings auf Englisch). Ich empfehle unbedingt die Lektüre.

Phoronix.com published a comparison of this three operating systems - Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD Benchmarks:

For some file-system/disk-centric testing we had used Bonnie++ with the sequential create, random read, and random delete modes. In all three of the tests, OpenSolaris 2008.11 was the champion and had trenched its competition.

and

If simply counting which operating system was in first place most frequently, it would be Ubuntu. Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 was in first place eight times, OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC2 was in first place seven times, and FreeBSD 7.1 Beta 2 AMD64 was in first just three tests. Depending upon your system usage, one operating system may appear more favorable, like OpenSolaris with the greater disk performance.

I would like some additional benchmarks about networking performance.

I´ve reported back in August that the case for iSCSI boot was approved by the ARC. The PSARC 2008/427 (iSCSI Boot) and PSARC 2008/640 (iSCSI With DHCP) cases had their flag day yesterday for the build 104 of Solaris.

Maybe you remember my RBAC/Privileges-Tutorial in the the LKSF series. In the third part i described how to take away some privileges from the apache processes. But this takes the concept a whole step farther. Nick Kew announced on the Apache developer mailinglist the availability of a module to make Apache privilege-aware - "Introducing mod_privileges for Apache HTTPD:

This is a platform-specific module for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, that makes the webserver privileges(5)-aware. This enables the server to be run with enhanced security, and with different settings per virtual host.

With the use of this module you can define user, group and privileges of a virtual host.

Unlike perchild, mod_privileges is not itself an MPM. It works within a processing model to set privileges and User/Group per request in a running process.

This is a really interesting development: With such a module you can contain every virtual hosts in it´s own user/group combination and more important you can use privileges to controll the possibilities of an virtual hosts at the operating system level. For example you can take away the privileges to execute subprocesses (for example tradtional CGI scripts) at all by a single line of configuration. Really neat ...

Roch wrote an really interesting article about usage of SSD and ZFS in storage systems: Using ZFS as a Network Attach Controller and the Value of Solid State Devices. Worth a read!

The download page has changed, so you can download it now at the usual locations at the sun website

The "What´s new in What's New in the Solaris 10 10/08 Release" document is online at docs.sun.com. Thus you can get an overview what you can expect from the next release of Solaris 10.

I will provide a list of the features for you in this article. For more informations please consult the linked article. As you see, there was a lot of development in the ZFS part of Solaris 10. Another really interesting feature is the update-on-attach for Zones. This solves some problems like the migration of zones from normal SPARC to a CMT SPARC system (sun4u versus sun4v).

Okay, in Solaris 10/08 aka Update 6 you will find:

• Installation Enhancements
• Solaris Installation for ZFS Root Pools
• System Administration Enhancements
• ZFS Command Improvements and Changes
• ZFS installation and boot support
• Rolling back a ZFS dataset without unmounting
• Enhancements to the zfs send command
• ZFS quotas and reservations for file system data only
• new ZFS storage pool properties
• ZFS command history enhancements
• support for upgrading ZFS filesystems
• ZFS delegated administration
• Setting up separate ZFS logging devices
• Creating intermediate ZFS datasets
• ZFS hot-plugging enhancements
• GZIP compression now available for ZFS
• Storing multiple copies of ZFS user data
• Solaris Installation Tool Support of ZFS File Systems
• Solaris interactive text installer to install a UFS or a ZFS root file system.
• Custom JumpStart features to set up a profile to create a ZFS storage pool and designate a bootable ZFS file system.
• Migrate a UFS root file system to a ZFS root file system by using the Solaris Live Upgrade feature.
• Set up a mirrored ZFS root pool by selecting two disks during the installation.
• Automatically create swap and dump devices on ZFS volumes in the ZFS root pool.
• SunVTS 7.0 Patch Set 3
• lockstat Provider for DTrace. DTrace lockstat probes that displayed the spin count (spins) now returns spin time in nanoseconds.
• System Resource Enhancements
• New Solaris Zones Features
• Update on Attach.
  If the new host has the same or later versions of the zone-dependent packages and their associated patches, using zoneadm attach with the -u option, updates those packages within the zone to match the new host.[...] This option also enables automatic migration between machine classes, such as from sun4u to sun4v.
• Ability to Set Default Router in Shared-IP Zone
• ZFS Zone Path Permitted
• x86: New GRUB findroot Command
• x64: Support for 256 Processors
• System Performance Enhancements
• SPARC: Solaris SPARC Boot Architecture Redesigned
• x86: Kernel Support for Intel SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, and AMD SSE4A
• Security Enhancementy
  • Separation of Duty Enforcement Through the Solaris Management Console
  • SHA256/SHA512 crypt(3C) Plug-in
  • pam_list Module
• Desktop Enhancements
• SPARC: Adobe Reader 8.1.2
• Flash Player 9.0.124.0
• Networking Enhancements
• Communication Protocol Parser Utilities
• SIP End-to-end Traffic Measurements and Logging
• Device Management Enhancements
• Faulty Device Retirement Feature
• MPxIO Support for Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage Series Arrays
• Driver Enhancements
• x86: NVIDIA ck804/mcp55 SATA Controller Driver
• x86: LSI MegaRAID SAS Controllers Driver
• ixgbe Driver. The ixgbe is a 10 Gigabit PCI Express Ethernet driver that supports Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller.
• SPARC: Support for aac Driver
• Additional Software Enhancements
• Perl Database Interface and Perl PostgreSQL Driver
• PostgreSQL 8.3
• Language Support Enhancements
• IIIMF Hangul Language Engine. The Hangul LE (Language Engine) is a new Korean input method.
• Freeware Enhancements
• C-URL - The C-URL Wrappers Library
• Libidn - Internationalized Domain Library
• LibGD - The Graphics Draw Library
• TIDY HTML Library
You will find Solaris 10/08 for download at the usual locations, but at the moment there is still the 05/08 release.

Okay,okay ... i know the headline is a little bit provoking. But when you think about some comments from Linux proponents you could think so. In the last few weeks i´ve heard one sentence quite often: "Why you you still develop Solaris? You should contribute to Linux!" from people administering Linux systems. And you could read at other places, that Solaris is irrelevant, that there is nothing worth of mentioning it or even for an integration to Linux. Just think about the Zemlin quotations! Or several other comments of proponents of Linux.

You are logged into your system and doing a little bit of house keeping (archiving of old logfiles, deleting the rubbish on you system like backup files) and suddenly you see a core file. Heck ... you wasn´t aware of the fact, that an application wrote such a file. How can you get some basic information about it? With Solaris you can use the mdb for this task.

Let´s assume you find a core file at / on the system master:

# uname -a
SunOS master 5.11 snv_97 i86pc i386 i86pc
# ls -l core
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     5073385 Oct 10 18:26 core

Now we can start the Modular Debugger mdb with the core file.

# mdb core
Loading modules: [ libc.so.1 ld.so.1 ]
>

After a short moment the mdb command will give you a prompt. Now just type in the ::status command

> ::status
debugging core file of sshd (32-bit) from master
file: /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
initial argv: /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
threading model: native threads
status: process core file generated with gcore(1)

Now you know, that you can savely ignore the file, as the system created it on your order while you was playing around with gcore.

Neil A. Wilson wrote an interesting article why he choosen Solaris as is favourite operating environment: "Why i like Solaris". It´s an article about some features of Solaris, but there is one paragraphy that summarizes an important reason of my choice for Solaris many years ago as well:

Linux feels like it was written. Solaris feels like it was designed.. While I think that Sun’s development processes can sometimes be a little heavyweight, and I think that Sun is trying to retain too much control over OpenSolaris, there is a lot to be said for having processes in place to guide development.

This is the basic difference. Linux is based on the concept "Okay, you can develop a feature and we will see if we integrate it into the mainline code." Opensolaris works differently in this area. The concept of PSARC may look as an heavyweight process for an opensource operating system, but it´s the reason for "Solaris feels like it was designed." as the documented review of the design and the analysis of the impact to the whole architecture is the beginning of all code in Solaris.