Hello, David et al,
Renaming the thread and moving to another mailing list,
because it is no longer about printers, and possibly of
small interest and big distraction to actual developers,
and seemingly not about the OpenIndiana distro - as the
discussed matters are between orthogonal and contrary
to objectives and resources of the OI project.
2012-06-09 9:31, DavidHalko wrote:
On Jun 8, 2012, at 12:19 AM, Darren Reed <[email protected]> wrote:
On 8/06/2012 10:10 AM, Jim Klimov wrote:
...
“There’s a huge installed base of Sun hardware out there in datacenters around
the world, billions of dollars worth of equipment, and Oracle has basically
given it the finger.” – Garrett D’Amore
“Oracle has removed sun4u from Solaris 11. So there is no sun4u support in
Solaris 11, which means that there is this huge amount of hardware, this
installed base (anything earlier than a year or two ago) that can’t run, will
not run Solaris 11 at all. And that’s a huge Illumos opportunity.” – Bryan
Cantrill and Adam Leventhal
Whilst Garrett is right, I think that Bryan/Adam misunderstand the future. I
think that you'll find that the huge Illumos opportunity will turn into a huge
Dell/IBM/HP opportunity. At least that is what I hear is happening in the
marketplace today.
The SPARC software will not run on Intel. The last revs of Solaris 10 is almost
here? There are no Solaris 8/9 branded zones on Solaris 11. Legacy software
meeting business and telco requirements (sometimes worth millions of dollars)
are stranded.
> If millions in software work, performance does not matter.
As, likely, power drain does not matter there either? ;)
Even 1000$/mo in power is dust in comparison to these systems'
"value" for their owners. And, likely, a negligible speck in
their budget as well.
Adding observability (DTrace) and other numerous goodies of
OpenIndiana to those old systems may be invaluable (i.e. why
not leave things running under Solaris 8/9/10 as long as they
work?)...
As long as there is no reason to run Illumos in the data center, it will never
appear there. This makes Illumos an huge embedded OS with no future.
If Illumos can absorb, with branded zones, all legacy systems - it gets into a
datacenter as a real platform, because it meets business requirements - it runs
business critical software.
With an OS infrastructure similar to legacy systems and features similar to
Solaris 11 - it could be the best of all worlds in a hard economy. Certainly
can be justified on a 3 year business plan.
ISV's looking to hawk software developed on existing systems get another half
decade of life of software support to charge to their customers, if no changes
required.
With a centralized standard SVR4 package repository, commercial vendors can
have a new marketplace they did not have access to, with existing packages,
encouraging future support of Illumos by those ISV's.
That is a nice pitch, I think (and hope).
But you do talk about two distinct projects of different
difficulty and engineering expertise - SPARC support
(including older CPUs and likely drivers for old Sun
hardware of different scale), and SVR4 distro support
(likely with LU or a similar mechanism).
Things like JumpStart for installation of such new OS
from scratch might not be primary objectives, for example...
or should they be, indeed?
Somewhat separately, to my understanding, stands the problem
(and desire) of sparse-root zones. I.e. they are not used in
branded zones (for direct import of s8-s9-s10 systems into
zones, and s10/osol zones into zones). They might have some
use for the described ISVs if we support upgrading such
systems into SVR4 zones with current software, but it is
unlikely that expensive mission-critical legacy software
will be taking this route (upgrade maybe, sparse unlikely).
Regarding SVR4, it is questionable whether new installations
should be allowed, or just a mechanism for import/upgrade of
existing ones (Sol 8/9/10 and OSol SXCE) would suffice? Even
so, a new distro could be made like today as a LiveCD which
installs an SVR4 package-based pre-made image, and that can
then be upgraded like any other supported image...
This does not preclude use of beadm for subsequent systems
lifecycle maintenance, and LiveUpgrade in SXCE also had
support of ZFS-based BEs.
It does sound like an interesting project, especially if,
in keeping the best of all worlds, you can keep compatibility
with OI. I mean it would be beneficial to have the new project
just a differently-packaged set of the same binaries, as well
as have the new project support ipkg-based zones. Ideally,
all needed code changes would be pushed up into illumos and
OI as appropriate, and making of the new distro would be
just a use of another make target to get a LiveCD.
That would generate SVR4 packages equivalent-to-OI based on
the same source repo; and in terms of going forward - it is
likely better to adopt the transformation of pre/post-scripts
into SMF methods (as long as old SVR4 packages seemingly went
this way already to become IPS packages - that should not be
undone).
Some good examples on auto-configuration of packages via SMF
(replacing postinstall scripts) can be found in Tim Foster's
blog posts about "IPS self-assembly":
https://timsfoster.wordpress.com/category/opensolaris/
Finally, I hope that you'd find interested ISVs and ISPs
and other parties who would support this project so as to
make it more interesting to illumos/OI developers to work
on such changes.
Do you have a plan? Perhaps, a draft page on the illumos
Wiki? What are you trying to achieve and what are you not
trying to achieve, and what would you prefer to avoid in
this project? Perhaps, in phases or milestones?
Thanks, and good luck,
//Jim Klimov
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