On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 01:42:48AM +0200, Rainer Duffner wrote:
Am 31.03.2009 um 01:12 schrieb Ross Walker:
I would love something like Nexenta, but with a CentOS userland.
What exactly are you missing from Solaris userland that does exist in Linux, BTW? Maybe except for all the horrible cat some_arcane_value > /proc/foo or /sys/baz to coax the kernel into doing something. But I'm not missing that.
And I'm not missing Nexenta. Last time I looked, the "free" version did almost nothing compared to the commercial version. Which is no surprise, really, and brings us back to square one....
Imagine an unencumbered kernel with the stability of CentOS userland tools.
You get ZFS/ARC, dtrace, smf, fma, plus the Solaris IP stack which is quite robust, with all the command line tools you are use to.
Think SELinux could be ported to the Solaris kernel?
Hm. Seems like this is happening, more or less: http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/04/09/red-hat-welcomes-opensolaris-and-ubun...
I'm sometimes amused how people want "this" with "that", though.
Don't you people sometimes think that Linux is the way it is exactly because of too many people thinking that way and actually getting what they wanted? Linux is everything and the kitchen sink (in terms of features), but few are completely implemented or actually wrapped into an API/ userland tools. Everything is constantly in flux, most stuff get's thrown over every other year (except for the places that would really need it, seemingly) and hardly anybody documents (try to find a man- page for a hw-driver...) Now, they're chasing ZFS with this butter-fs crap. Hello? How about allowing growing partitions without using LVM first? Sure, btrfs will solve all the problems, really - but while it matures, it will introduce lot's of others that you only get to know about once you want to use it...
Don't get me wrong - some things in Linux actually work quite well and it's quick to get up- and running (once you run a cobbler server) - but I know its limits and I don't try to push it beyond those. I use Solaris or FreeBSD when they fit the bill (which is also not always the case). But I don't think a system that does all and everything these three do individually would actually be better or a joy to use...
"Less is more"
Hey, I for one am glad for the competition ZFS' entrance to the market has provided. btrfs is a ways off from being a serious competitor, but it *will* get there.
The whole "do it all" with the filesystem for me is.. meh. I don't mind using LVM in tandem with it. Whichever way they decide to go will be fine with me.
I really like a lot of things about Solaris. I dislike a lot of things about it too.. namely, automated installs are annoying (even with JumpStart), and rpm+yum is far superior from a user standpoint than Sun's package -> patchid + 8000 different patch management tools. pca is the closest thing out there to a simple way to see what should be applied to your system, but just not quite the same.
Ray