Dave: A pretty detailed document. Nice work.
To ponder the concept and conundrums learned from Linux - A) we must co-exist on the disk - hence it was imperative to develop filesystem support for as many filesystems out there. ZFS basically has problems because now the data cannot be shared across instances of OS. This has many implications to usability and choice. With Linux, I can do my work and share the files on static slices of the FS. If I need Win32, I boot it, and it has the same/similar access to files. ZFS as a default in Caiman is dictating to users that they must drink all the cool-aid, unless we provide Win32, BSD and Linux equivalents to ZFS modules. B) Drivers, Drivers, Drivers - The problem with solaris install is that it doesn't have the drivers it needs to install itself, let alone the network drivers for the network install. Chicken and egg problem. We need a quick way to at least enable users to add drivers legally and then to incorporate them into the miniroot. Otherwise, booting PXE might be fine, until the miniroot loads and boots and its game-over, or until we try to touch the SATA-RAID controller and we break again. Linux has an inate advantage here. It's the GPL. Viral in nature and quick to spread. Anyone can incorporated source and rebuild the modules needed. Solaris is encumbered by CDDL and it makes it hard to get that stuff quickly into the source base, let alone the installation image. We need to reduce the barrier to getting drivers into the installation, and that means off-line tools that manipulate the installation methods, whether it be ISO media, FLARs, PXE/nfs images, etc. C) We need to understand who and what Opensolaris customers are and not make the mistakes that Marketing and many Trade publications make. They [Marketing] still don't understand Linux or BSD users in many aspects, and what is still driving Linux development. Decisions and priorities should be driven by our prized users (i.e. the Higher IQ home/work/school hacker) and not the SMB except when their needs coincide. The SMB are unlikely to be early adopters until Open Solaris has established a stronger hold in the mainstream, but even then, SMB don't drive much of the core architecture of install. That said, catering an install to the SMB such as by providing a fancy GUI, is likely to divert attention to priorities (A) and (B). For example, the Anaconda installer still core dumps on quite a few graphics cards and so text install is safer and more robust on Redhat. That's a fact that many Marketing organizations that don't do their own Linux installs wouldn't know. -- This messages posted from opensolaris.org
