Solaris Next not OpenSolaris?

Many of us have patiently been awaiting the 2010.xx release of OpenSolaris frustrated by the lack of communication from Oracle. After some digging I realized that something quite interesting has been going on for a while. Oracle themselves are not building OpenSolaris anymore, not since build 135. They are building "Solaris Next Development", this is from /etc/release:

Solaris Next Development snv_140 X86
Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Assembled 29 April 2010

This kind of makes sense, since OpenSolaris always have been the development branch for the Solaris.next, but the distributions have been named OpenSolaris for a while. I also found some tags like "osol_2010.05u4" which seems to be related to build 140. So have there been a change in plan for OpenSolaris 2010.xx release or is this just something for the future, "Solaris 11". But since build 134[a|b] which once should have been the release build for the next release still has the old names in them there might sill be a "OpenSolaris" release.

This is also makes sense since Oracle is mostly talking about Solaris, not OpenSolaris, Solaris seems to be the way forward, time will tell (since Oracle doesn't) in which form. It looks like it will become more like a single distribution, Solaris, with some development releases, OpenSolaris had it's own life and even support side by side with Solaris while still being the bed for development.

New Sun volume servers from Oracle

Yesterday Oracle released an overhaul of their volume server (x86) line. The flagship X4800 looks looks really impressive for an x86 system, eight sockets, up to 1TB memory and hot swappable IO. Equipped with Xeon X7560 CPUs it will fully loaded have 64 cores and a total of 128 thread. All PCI boards and power supplies are hot-pluggable and the four CPU modules look fairly hot-pluggable. One can wounder if support for CPU hot-plug come later future since Intel 7500 was the aim for CPU and Memory hot-plug discussed here earlier.

Oracle’s Sun Fire X4800 Server Architecture
Sun Fire X4800 server Data Sheet

Zone enhancements

Recently a couple of enhancement for zones have been integrated into the OpenSolaris source.

PSARC/2010/132 Delegated Administration for Zones
This will make it possible to delegate administration of local zones to user with not-superuser privileges. This will add three new privileges: solaris.zone.clonefrom for cloning zones, solaris.zone.login for zlogin and solaris.zone.manage for zone management.

PSARC 2010/144 lofi(7D) in non global zones
Will make it possible to use lofi, the loopback file driver inside a local zone.

First hundred posts

This post is my hundredth entry in this blog, my first entry was in November 2007, but it was not until 2009 I begun to post more frequently. During this time I have also, almost exactly at the same time gotten a sector of 512 subscribers. I had hoped that this entry would be the announcement of 2010.1H, but still seems to be a few weeks or at least days off. If the are quick it will still be a binary number in my posting sequence.

And if you missed any of these the last week they are both worth a read, the first one is Brendan Greggs blog, he has recently had an article published about visualizing latency. The article is also available:
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/visualizing_system_latency

And this is a link to a presentation which includes, again the roadmap for Solaris and OpenSolaris, it mentions both 2010.1H and Solaris 10 update 9:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~bmiller/DE-OSUG/Oracle-Sun.pdf

Oracle Employee Frederic Pariente seems quite enthusiastic in his blog regarding a "Oracle Solaris Day" the 28th of June. We can only hope that it means that some more public information is supposed to be available by this date:

"Lots have been written about Solaris over the past few months. About its continued investment at Oracle, about OpenSolaris, about its licensing policy, about third-party support, etc. It is time you hear directly from the source the true state of Solaris at Oracle and its future. We would like to invite you to attend a half-day seminar on just Oracle Solaris. We will also cover your migration path, as a Sun Partner Advantage member, to Oracle Partner Network so you can continue to receive support from Oracle for your own investment and specialization in Solaris!"

Slower ZFS scrubs/resilver on the way!

A nice change have made it's way into ON, it fixes a few bugs regarding general user performance when scrubs or resilver are running in a pool. It will delay the scrub thread if there was a non-scrub I/O the last 50 ticks, resilver are considered more importand and are delayed only 2 ticks where scrubs are delayed 4 ticks. This should allow the scrubs/resilver to run at full speed when possible while limiting the impact to other I/O. This will as with many other ZFS features probably make its debut in an update to the S7000 series firmware. Previous to this fix a failed drive or a ordinary scrub could have quite negative impact on other I/O in the pool.

"* We keep track of time-sensitive I/Os so that the scan thread
* can quickly react to certain workloads. In particular, we care
* about non-scrubbing, top-level reads and writes with the following
* characteristics:
* - synchronous writes of user data to non-slog devices
* - any reads of user data
* When these conditions are met, adjust the timestamp of spa_last_io
* which allows the scan thread to adjust its workload accordingly."

hg.genunix.org/onnv-gate.hg/rev/b118bbd65be9
6743992 scrub/resilver causes systemic slowdown