One thing I don't see on the requirements list is ZFS as the default file system.
This really needs to be there. It's one of the killer features of Solaris, and we should make sure we use it to maximum advantage. Of course, to take maximum advantage of ZFS, the entire system needs to be on ZFS, which means ZFS boot, which I assume is an installer task? Is this on the installer roadmap? What needs to be done here? (This also necessarily affects SPARC support, another requirement that doesn't seem to be listed, which I'll discuss in a separate thread..) Does putting the entire system on ZFS mean we can do away with slice level partitioning? I found the whole slice thing confusing, and I suspect I won't be the only one coming from Linux to be confused. I see you can put swap on ZFS, but [2] seems to indicate that ZFS can only boot from slices (though [1] says "[i]f you use a whole disk for a rootpool, you must use a slice notation (e.g. c0d0s0) so that it is labeled with an SMI label"--I'm too much of a noob to follow that). [1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/boot/zfsboot-manual/ [2] http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_bootable_datasets_happily_rumbling One big win if we can do everything in a ZFS pool is that we don't have to worry about partitioning. Big simplification there. Presumably, all "partitioning" becomes is resizing existing partitions to make room for the Solaris (ZFS) partition, and I see parted has been ported to Solaris, so we could presumably use libparted in the Solaris installer? Assuming the entire system is on ZFS, what neat things can we do with it? Let's brainstorm! We've already talked about using ZFS snapshots to implement rollbacks after package/system upgrades. How might this work? Tim Haley did a BFU with a ZFS clone ([3]). Automate this and replace bfu with apt-get install/upgrade or equivalent, and do we has a ZFS-based replacement for LiveUpgrade that doesn't require a whole lot of additional programming? [3] http://blogs.sun.com/timh/entry/friday_fun_with_bfu_and Tim Foster has done a really neat SMF-based automatic snapshot service [4]. I'd like to see this integrated and enabled with good defaults. For defaults, I'd snapshot at regular intervals, say every minute, every hour, every day, every week. Maybe keep around a handful of each (last 60 minutes, last 12 hours, last 7 days, last 4 weeks). The primary purpose of the snapshots are to enable online recovery without the need to go to the backup. Perhaps the daily and weekly snapshots are backed up remotely and rotated in the usual fashion (and wouldn't it be something if we could tie Network.com in here somewhere). [4] http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_automatic_snapshots_0_8 Tim Foster has also written a script to enable booting into ZFS snapshots ([5]). What role might this play in either of the ideas above? Do the snapshots/clones created by the package system automatically get added via this mechanism? How about booting directly into the snapshots to implement a system recovery mechanism again without a whole lot of additional programming? [5] http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/an_easy_way_to_manage Just a few thoughts from someone who admittedly doesn't know Solaris very well yet, so apologies if some of this comes across as basic and/or has been discussed elsewhere. However, these are all things that I as a Linux user would find extremely compelling if they were there out of the box and just worked, i.e., they're all _great_ answers to the "why switch?" question. Other thoughts? -ian -- Ian Murdock 650-331-9324 http://ianmurdock.com/ "Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
