On 26 May 2012, at 23:42, Jim Klimov wrote: <snip> > 2012-05-27 1:05, DavidHalko wrote: >> Sparse zones were probably one of the most innovative features of Solaris >> 10, providing significant value, and one of out biggest issues with moving >> off of Solaris 10. > > To us - not so much, but they were convenient to use > when full-root zones were not required by application > software trying to get itself into /usr. Zones in > general - yes - were on our top list along with ZFS. > Even DTrace did not rank so high; SMF waged in-between ;)
The SmartOS approach to sparse zones is excellent and I'm interested in bringing something similar to OpenIndiana. The sparse zones would be non-IPS, but that's probably fine since if you wanted IPS in one you'd just go for a non-sparse zone anyway. But I might add that disks are only getting bigger, and dedupe, whilst awful at the multi-TB scale, seems to work reasonably well for system disks. Just make sure you put your data on a separate dataset that has dedupe off. >> If OpenIndiana supported SPARC with Sparse Zones, managed service providers >> would have a serious time trying to justify not moving to OpenIndiana. > > True, and that would be of benefit to the common illumos > cause - whether the support is provided as a separate > distro or makes its way into OpenIndiana itself (I'm not > sure how, though, with the GZ being IPS and not SVR4). You're out of your mind. No managed service provider with any sense would base their business around a dead legacy CPU architecture with a dead-end packaging technology. Where are they going to buy their SPARC kit? eBay? I mean, seriously? If you buy new SPARC kit, you're buying it from Oracle, and by that point you've bought a license for Solaris 10 or 11 so you'd be nuts not to use it. >> There are at least 2 distro's based on SVR4 packaging right now with at >> least 2 SVR4 package provider. The issue with all Illumos-based distro's is >> no distro is providing security patches and enough backwards compatibility >> with Solaris 10. "Solaris 10 compatibility" - you want Solaris 10? Run Solaris 10. Or run Solaris 10 branded zones on Solaris 11 or OI. Security patches will come. But to distribute security patches you need a network based package manager and a slick upgrade mechanism. Oh wow, that describes IPS! You have tooling based around SVR4? Make pkgsend the last step, which will send your SVR4 package into an IPS package server. Yes, it requires an effort on your part to learn a new technology. But you can't live in the past forever. The IPS package format /is/ better. .p5m manifests are clean, beautiful things and network package delivery is a dream to work with. Yes, IPS has a strict, slow dependency solver. But what you pay for with speed you regain in safety. <snip> > To be specific about migrations - recently I was trying > to migrate an SXCE sparse zone into oi_151a3, and so > far my attempts have failed: > 1) Copying over the zone data, adding /usr and other dirs > as lofs-mounts with OI binaries - that has at least > booted, but complained a lot and did not work well. > 2) Copying original /usr and other dirs from SXCE - > essentially making it identical to a full-root SXCE > zone - that did not even boot (core-dumped) in OI > 3) Naming the local zone a "solaris10" brand also failed > due to internal checks - SXCE is not sol10u8 indeed. > 4) zoneadm detach/attach - not yet tested... This is insane. Just create a new zone, install the software you need and copy the config files and data across. ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
