Monday, February 21, 2011

FUSE in Solaris 11

It looks like the final version of Solaris 11 will get FUSE (PSARC 2010/456). It was previously under development for OpenSolaris but never integrated and the project has not been updated for at least year. It now seems like Oracle internally have resumed the FUSE development for Solaris 11 and plans to integrate it into the internal snv_163 build which opens in about a month.

"The FUSE project (PSARC/2010/456) introduces the UVFS file system so we need a uvfs.7fs to briefly describe this feature. Content will be provided by the
FUSE team.

Projected Nevada integration build is snv_163."


OpenSolaris FUSE project

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Future features of Solaris 11

There is not much available information on the ongoing development of Solaris 11. I have scanned the bug database and summarized the sparse information available. Much of the work remaining before a final Solaris 11 release is fixing bugs found in Solaris 11 Express and making the new packaging/install system fully production ready, but there will also be features added that are not available in the Express release. Here are a few of the more noticeable changes:
  • Zones should be able to be NFS servers
    Solaris 11 will be able to share NFS filsystems from within a local zone.
  • User names longer than 8 characters needed
    The Solaris kernel is already capable of user with names longer than 8 characters but userspace tools needs to be updated to support this.
  • EOF 32-bit x86 kernel support
    The final release of Solaris 11 will only support 64-bit x86 processors, this is already the case for SPARC since Solaris 10.
  • Xorg 1.9 integration
    The X Server will be updated from current 1.7 skipping version 1.8.

A list with bugid of other changes that have integrated or is about to become integrated including the above:
6981088 PSARC 2010/368 EOF 32-bit x86 kernel support
6983602 Xorg 1.9 integration [PSARC/2011/008]
6625651 Support flowadm from non global zone
7006556 need partitioning support for EFI system partition and BIOS boot partition
4109819 user names longer than 8 characters needed
6946425 reduced copy support to comstar iSCSI target
6982476 SCSI PassThrough in Solaris Local Zone
6714685 Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)
6802568 PCI-Express Framework support for SR-IOV
6944824 Intel e1000g NIC support for Leweisville (82579LM and 82579LF)
6828868 smbadm support to Display Server Service (SRVSVC)
6981644 Update bash to version 4.1
6394308 Multiple Connections / Session (MC/S) support for iscsi initiator
6946536 zvol support in non-global zones
6654408 Include FreeGLUT 2.4.0 in Nevada.
6957488 PSARC/2010/035 Support for GVRP (Dynamic VLAN)
6983112 Need a PAM module for mounting per user encrypted ZFS home directories
6516586 DMX support for Solaris x86 and SPARC [PSARC 2010/176]
6982811 64 bit Xvnc server and Tiger Vncviewer support
6940855 Zero-Copy for iSER

Samba 3.5.5 update for Solaris 10

Samba 3.5.5 is finally available for Solaris 10 in a supported way, SPARC patch 146363-01 and X86 patch 146364-01 updates the bundled Samba to version 3.5.5.

It should be available for download from support.oracle.com if you have a support contact. If you do not have that you could try out Solaris 11 Express which has the same version and also has native CIFS support in the kernel. A short summary of CIFS support in Solaris 8 through Solaris 11 Express presented at SNIA SDC 2010 can be viewed here: JiriSasek-CIFS_Map_Solaris.pdf.

Update: There is another patch available updating SAMBA to 3.5.8 with also fix at least one serious issue that prevents renaming of files on a ZFS filesystem. The new patch is 119757-20.

Solaris Samba update
Solaris 10 update 10 update

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Introduction to Virtual Networks

Project crossbow, the virtualized network stack is a gem of [Solaris11|Nexenta|OpenSolaris]. Jeff Victor has written a good three part introduction to the gains of virtual networks and examples on to how to use Crossbow together with zones, well worth a read:

Virtual networks part 1
Virtual networks part 2
Virtual networks part 3

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Oracle/Fujitsu expands SPARC partnership

Oracle and Fujitsu are expanding their partnership to help the development of the next generation of M-series servers. This will be done by increasing the joint engineering effort of the SPARC platform. Sale teams from both companies will also cooperate in selling SPARC Enterprise servers.

This gives credibility to why the roadmap had M-series represented even in 2014, it looks like we are going to see some large SPARC iron the next few years.

Fujitsu and Oracle Strengthen Decades-Long Relationship

Sunday, February 6, 2011

illumos news

There have been some news surrounding the illumos project, the community developed and maintained version of the OS/Net consolidation and future code base for Nexenta and OpenIndiana.

First Nexenta have hired three known developers from the OpenSolaris community. The development process have also been changed to become more scalable so that more developers can participate. This is done by having Advocates accepting and reviewing patches instead of giving commit access to all contributors:

"So now, rather than developers pushing changes directly to our mercurial tree, going forward Advocates will take patches from Contributors (either via hg export or patch file), verify that the content of the patch is what was reviewed, and will then be responsible for integrating those changes into our shared master."

It's encouraging to see that two of the three persons behind DTrace is active in the illumos project, Bryan Cantrill posted this to illumos-devel a few days ago:

"For whatever it's worth, I have some DTrace patches and some user-land SMF patches to send to whomever is most appropriate. (Both of these add new features, FWIW.)"

Welcome to new Nexentians
Change to illumos contribution process

Solaris 11 Express VBox images

If you want to try Solaris 11 Express without dedicating hardware or even spend time on an installation there are now VirtualBox images available for download from Oracle. The images have the VirtualBox guest additions pre-installed.

Instructions and download links are available at The Observatory