On 11/8/06, Sarah Jelinek <Sarah.Jelinek at sun.com> wrote: > > Margot Miller wrote: > > Hey Sarah, > > > > I have a few questions regarding not supporting > > "in place" upgrades. > > > > Do most other O/S'es offer "in place" upgrade? > > > Well.. Fedora Core 5 does. I believe Ubuntu does. I don't know about > MacOS. > > The issue with in place upgrades is that: > 1. It makes the system unusable for that period of time that the upgrade > is running. > 2. There is no rollback mechanism, short of a full restore, if something > gets broken. > > Our choice to use live upgrade means these things are no longer issues. > The one thing it does mean however, is that extra disk space is needed > for the alternate boot environment that is created to enable live upgrade.
I believe "in-place" upgrades are essential, and removing them is a colossal mistake. In fact, I expect in-place upgrades to be the most common upgrade path for many years. Space may be cheaper than it was in the past, but it's certainly not free. Besides, scrapping in-place upgrades means abandoning most of the installed base (including, I suspect, all machines using pre-installed configurations). I don't actually see why Live Upgrade is necessarily easier than an in-place upgrade. At least with a normal in-place upgrade you're booted off the new version in a known state, rather than an old version of Solaris in an unknown state. Going further, why isn't it possible to do an upgrade via some sort of patch mechanism? The argument that disks are now so large that it's no longer necessary to worry about space simply isn't true. Systems with 18G drives (or similar) are still commonplace and entirely viable. With the growth in virtualization, large drives will get chopped up into much smaller chunks for allocation to installed systems. And many Sun systems still get shipped with 73G drives. While this may seem excessive now, it's not going to look generous in 5 years time. Besides, Sun still sell reconditioned systems with 9G drives, and we mustn't completely ignore the hobbyist market where less generous configuarrions are common. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/install-discuss/attachments/20061112/845ba6e8/attachment.html>
