c0t0d0s0.org - Solaris

Making Apache privilege aware

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:25:30 +0100

Maybe you remember my RBAC/Privileges-Tutorial in the the LKSF series. In the third part i described how to take away some privileges from the apache processes. But this takes the concept a whole step farther. Nick Kew announced on the Apache developer mailinglist the availability of a module to make Apache privilege-aware - "Introducing mod_privileges for Apache HTTPD:

This is a platform-specific module for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, that makes the webserver privileges(5)-aware. This enables the server to be run with enhanced security, and with different settings per virtual host.

With the use of this module you can define user, group and privileges of a virtual host.

Unlike perchild, mod_privileges is not itself an MPM. It works within a processing model to set privileges and User/Group per request in a running process.

This is a really interesting development: With such a module you can contain every virtual hosts in it´s own user/group combination and more important you can use privileges to controll the possibilities of an virtual hosts at the operating system level. For example you can take away the privileges to execute subprocesses (for example tradtional CGI scripts) at all by a single line of configuration. Really neat ...

ZFS and SSD in storage systems

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:35:17 +0100

Roch wrote an really interesting article about usage of SSD and ZFS in storage systems: Using ZFS as a Network Attach Controller and the Value of Solid State Devices. Worth a read!

Solaris 10 10/08 - out now

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:51:53 +0100

The download page has changed, so you can download it now at the usual locations at the sun website

What´s new in Solaris 10 10/08 (also known as Update 6)

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:14:33 +0100

The "What´s new in What's New in the Solaris 10 10/08 Release" document is online at docs.sun.com. Thus you can get an overview what you can expect from the next release of Solaris 10.

I will provide a list of the features for you in this article. For more informations please consult the linked article. As you see, there was a lot of development in the ZFS part of Solaris 10. Another really interesting feature is the update-on-attach for Zones. This solves some problems like the migration of zones from normal SPARC to a CMT SPARC system (sun4u versus sun4v).

Okay, in Solaris 10/08 aka Update 6 you will find:

Installation Enhancements

Solaris Installation for ZFS Root Pools

System Administration Enhancements

ZFS Command Improvements and Changes

ZFS installation and boot support
Rolling back a ZFS dataset without unmounting
Enhancements to the zfs send command
ZFS quotas and reservations for file system data only
new ZFS storage pool properties
ZFS command history enhancements
support for upgrading ZFS filesystems
ZFS delegated administration
Setting up separate ZFS logging devices
Creating intermediate ZFS datasets
ZFS hot-plugging enhancements
GZIP compression now available for ZFS
Storing multiple copies of ZFS user data

Solaris Installation Tool Support of ZFS File Systems

Solaris interactive text installer to install a UFS or a ZFS root file system.
Custom JumpStart features to set up a profile to create a ZFS storage pool and designate a bootable ZFS file system.
Migrate a UFS root file system to a ZFS root file system by using the Solaris Live Upgrade feature.
Set up a mirrored ZFS root pool by selecting two disks during the installation.
Automatically create swap and dump devices on ZFS volumes in the ZFS root pool.

SunVTS 7.0 Patch Set 3
lockstat Provider for DTrace. DTrace lockstat probes that displayed the spin count (spins) now returns spin time in nanoseconds.

System Resource Enhancements

New Solaris Zones Features

Update on Attach.
If the new host has the same or later versions of the zone-dependent packages and their associated patches, using zoneadm attach with the -u option, updates those packages within the zone to match the new host.[...] This option also enables automatic migration between machine classes, such as from sun4u to sun4v.
Ability to Set Default Router in Shared-IP Zone
ZFS Zone Path Permitted

x86: New GRUB findroot Command
x64: Support for 256 Processors

System Performance Enhancements

SPARC: Solaris SPARC Boot Architecture Redesigned
x86: Kernel Support for Intel SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, and AMD SSE4A

Security Enhancementy
- Separation of Duty Enforcement Through the Solaris Management Console
- SHA256/SHA512 crypt(3C) Plug-in
- pam_list Module
Desktop Enhancements

SPARC: Adobe Reader 8.1.2
Flash Player 9.0.124.0

Networking Enhancements

Communication Protocol Parser Utilities
SIP End-to-end Traffic Measurements and Logging

Device Management Enhancements

Faulty Device Retirement Feature
MPxIO Support for Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage Series Arrays

Driver Enhancements

x86: NVIDIA ck804/mcp55 SATA Controller Driver
x86: LSI MegaRAID SAS Controllers Driver
ixgbe Driver. The ixgbe is a 10 Gigabit PCI Express Ethernet driver that supports Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller.
SPARC: Support for aac Driver

Additional Software Enhancements

Perl Database Interface and Perl PostgreSQL Driver
PostgreSQL 8.3

Language Support Enhancements

IIIMF Hangul Language Engine. The Hangul LE (Language Engine) is a new Korean input method.

Freeware Enhancements

C-URL - The C-URL Wrappers Library
Libidn - Internationalized Domain Library
LibGD - The Graphics Draw Library
TIDY HTML Library

Solaris 10/08

Is the Linux community afraid of Opensolaris?

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:31:05 +0200

Okay,okay ... i know the headline is a little bit provoking. But when you think about some comments from Linux proponents you could think so. In the last few weeks i´ve heard one sentence quite often: "Why you you still develop Solaris? You should contribute to Linux!" from people administering Linux systems. And you could read at other places, that Solaris is irrelevant, that there is nothing worth of mentioning it or even for an integration to Linux. Just think about the Zemlin quotations! Or several other comments of proponents of Linux.
Continue reading "Is the Linux community afraid of Opensolaris?"

Less known Solaris features: About crashes and cores - Appendix B: ::status

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:30:38 +0200

You are logged into your system and doing a little bit of house keeping (archiving of old logfiles, deleting the rubbish on you system like backup files) and suddenly you see a core file. Heck ... you wasn´t aware of the fact, that an application wrote such a file. How can you get some basic information about it? With Solaris you can use the mdb for this task.

Let´s assume you find a core file at / on the system master:

# uname -a
SunOS master 5.11 snv_97 i86pc i386 i86pc
# ls -l core
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     5073385 Oct 10 18:26 core

Now we can start the Modular Debugger mdb with the core file.

# mdb core
Loading modules: [ libc.so.1 ld.so.1 ]
>

After a short moment the mdb command will give you a prompt. Now just type in the ::status command

> ::status
debugging core file of sshd (32-bit) from master
file: /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
initial argv: /usr/lib/ssh/sshd
threading model: native threads
status: process core file generated with gcore(1)

Now you know, that you can savely ignore the file, as the system created it on your order while you was playing around with gcore.

"Linux feels like it was written. Solaris feels like it was designed."

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 11:46:00 +0200

Neil A. Wilson wrote an interesting article why he choosen Solaris as is favourite operating environment: "Why i like Solaris". It´s an article about some features of Solaris, but there is one paragraphy that summarizes an important reason of my choice for Solaris many years ago as well:

Linux feels like it was written. Solaris feels like it was designed.. While I think that Suns development processes can sometimes be a little heavyweight, and I think that Sun is trying to retain too much control over OpenSolaris, there is a lot to be said for having processes in place to guide development.

This is the basic difference. Linux is based on the concept "Okay, you can develop a feature and we will see if we integrate it into the mainline code." Opensolaris works differently in this area. The concept of PSARC may look as an heavyweight process for an opensource operating system, but it´s the reason for "Solaris feels like it was designed." as the documented review of the design and the analysis of the impact to the whole architecture is the beginning of all code in Solaris.

Project Sirius

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:08:19 +0200

At last: The IBM mainframes will get a decent operating system. Project Sirius is at least one to two years away from prime time but at least it´s a silver lining on the horizon.

A kind of Time Machine

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:58:43 +0200

The Time Machine in Mac OS 10.5 saved my butt a few times in the last few months. Getting back an older version of a presentation when you´ve saved a short version of you presentation in the same file as the long version a few days earlier is quite handy. Solaris is now capable to do a similar thing (albeit the implementation is vastly different): Time Slider is based on periodic ZFS snapshots and presents them in a nice way:

Time slider is one of the new feature that will be available in OpenSolaris 2008.11.Time slider provides an automatic way to backup your data on the same disc using one of Sun's ZFS filesystem unique features, snapshots. With time slider you can browse and recover files from snapshot backups using the GNOME file manager.

When you click on the life buoy in the File Brower you get a slider to step back in time based on this snapshhhhhh ... wait ... just look at the screenshots at Erwann Chénedé's weblog. A picture substitutes 1000 words and this feature is outright incredible. Excellent work!

My first article has gone live on SDN

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:07:45 +0200

With a huge amount of help from Marina Sum the first article from the LKSF book made it to the Sun Developer Network: Introducing pfexec, a Convenient Utility in the OpenSolaris OS.

L2ARC on ramdisks?

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:47:36 +0200

I thought a little bit about the idea of transforming server into solid state disks. The idea in the mail of Chris Greer on zfs-discuss was to use mirrored iSCSI shared ramdisks as a storage for the seperated ZILs. But i think you could use the concept as well for L2ARC as well - e.g. for large databases. One of the sizing rules of databases: More main memory never hurts. Nothing helps the performance of a database more than even more memory. The rule of "main memory never hurts" is based on the fact, that a hard disk has only a few IOPS compared with the main memory and hard drive access massively hurts the performance of your database.

But obviously the size of memory is limited, albeit the this limit is quite high with systems with memory sizes in the range of 512 GB on 4 rack units. But how can you get more memory into your database system, when all DIMM slots are filled with the biggest available DIMMS.

I had an idea while cooking tea this evening while i thought about a discussion with a colleague: Let´s assume an architecture based on a X4600 as a head in front of four X4600 each fully maxed to 512GB. All the nodes are connected with Infiniband. The first X4600 is your normal database server (for example mysql or LarryBase). You put your data into an ZFS storage pool. This storage pool is augumented with L2ARC devices. But now comes the plot twist. Let´s use the 512GB X4600 as huge ramdisks (yes, i know, every engineers heart will crying now) speaking via iSER (no TCP/IP, just RDMA) at 20 GBit/s to the central database node. This would give you a cache in the size of almost 2 TB plus the cache on the database server itself.. By using L2ARC you could use the memory as database caches of other systems without using a database doing a combination of the memory resources by other means, for example the CacheFusion stuff of Oracle. You don´t have to fuse the caches of other databases servers. The other servers are caches. You don´t have to partition the databases.

It would be interesting how such an system would perform in comparision to a Oracle RAC or other memory implementations. Anybody out there willing to test this ... my Infiniband switches are in the laundry at the moment

Anatomy of an attack

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:07:25 +0200

Paul Murphy wrote an excellent article about the anti-Solaris article that even found it´s syndication at the NYT. Paul writes in Anatomy of an attack: The New York Times on Solaris:

The piece itself illustrates the standard recipe for attack journalism: use a title sure to attract the attention of editors sympathetic to your cause; pretend to balance in the article but actually use strong negatives and weak positives; find one or two third parties to attribute the really nasty stuff to; and, strip any facts you need of their real context while leveraging reader assumptions to add an emotional patina of your own.

Thus using Sun Solaris in the title instead instead of just Solaris or OpenSolaris invokes one of the not so secret handshakes characteristic of the anti-Sun community to grab the attention of any editor with a Microsoft or IBM agenda.

It´s an really interesting analysis of the article. I really thing that we will see more attacks in the future as Opensolaris get a more and more viable alternative to Linux in many "linux-only" shops. Paul ask at the end of it´s article. "Qui bono". I don´t know ... wait ... of course i know it, but i can´t pinpoint the exact source. But i´m sure of more attacks of this kind. There is a market share to loose.

Opensolaris at Smugmug

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 10:09:45 +0200

Don MacAskill (the CEO of SmugMug - yeah CEO and geekdom isn´t mutually exclusive) did an interesting experiment - he used an Opensolaris system for one of his database replicas. And his experiences were really positive (besides of the usual pet peeve we already working on ):

Im a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMugs datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and its been awful for at least 8 years. As a result, weve put our first OpenSolaris box into production at SmugMug and Ive been pleasantly surprised with the performance

The configuration has a really interesting speciality. He used compression.

Lo and behold, it worked! Were getting a 2.12X compression ratio on our DB, and performance is keeping up just fine. I ran some quick performance tests on large linear reads/writes and we were measuring 45.6MB/s sustained uncompression and 39MB/s sustained compression on a single-threaded app on an Opteron CPU.

Separated ZIL on ramdisk.

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:28:12 +0200

I used ramdisks today in a live presentation of ZFS, L2ARC and sZIL (you can´t use files for sZIL and L2ARC testing, you need a device). One of the customers asked me if there is a real use case for this configuration. My answer was: Not really. But this question haunted me the whole day while sitting in the train.
Continue reading "Separated ZIL on ramdisk."

MSI Wind PC and Opensolaris

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:53:45 +0200

I just bought a MSI Wind PC . This is a device in the so-called "Nettop" range. 1.6 GHz Atom, 1 GB RAM, 320 GB harddisk and 30 Watts of power consumption in a small case. I bought it as the foundation of my new home storage server. I just put a first Opensolaris test installation on the system. I did a test installation of Opensolaris Build 99. It detected the network card, i was able to ping my router, the GNOME desktop was configured with the correct resolution (1440*900). I was really pleased by this experience, as the RealTek 8111C NIC was known for making problems with older releases of Opensolaris.

Over the next days day i will transform this into a storage server with ZFS,SamFS et al. The internal disks will be the cache for SamFS, the external USB disks will be the archive storage for this system. I hope to put the archive harddisks to sleep at most of the time by this configuration due to activated power management.

Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t - revisited

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:36:34 +0200

Eigentlich wollte ich das Thema "ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t" mit dem letzte Artikel abschliessen, aber meine Anmerkungen haben doch so viele Reaktionen zur Folge gehabt, das ich mich dazu entschlossen habe, mit einem Artikel darauf zu reagieren, um noch mal einige Dinge zu erlaeutern.
Continue reading "Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t - revisited"

Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:08:26 +0200

Die c´t schreibt im Artikel ueber ZFS:

Aber auch ein RAID-Z kann richtig kaputtgehen: Als wir im laufenden Betrieb aus einem RAID-Z1-Verbund mit drei Platten zwei entfernten und mit zpool status den Status des Speicherpools erfragen wollten, hing der zpool befehl bei maximaler Plattenaktivität - und das stundenlang. Auch andere Befehle wie df oder fs, die Informationen des Dateisystem erfragen, blieben hängen. Selbst ein Shutdown gelang nicht mehr, erst nach einem harten Reset ließ sich der defekte Speicherpool retten.

Okay, dieses Verhalten von ZFS ist ein erwuenschtes Verhalten. Das RAID-Z ist in diesem Moment nicht mal kaputt. Nein ... das ist kein Schönreden eines ZFS fanboys. Ich will das mal im folgenden Text erlaeutern.

Continue reading "Anmerkungen zum ZFS-Tutorial in der c´t"

ZFS in der c´t

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:23:51 +0200

In der aktuellen Ausgabe der c´t (21/2008 vom 29.9.2008) kann der geneigte Leser auf den Seiten 194 bis 199 ein gutes Tutorial zum Thema ZFS finden. Positiv geschrieben. Leider hat die c´t eine Chance ausgelassen. Zwar ist in der Zeitschrift auch ein Bericht auch ueber Solid State Disks, aber im ZFS-Bericht fehlt der Hinweis auf die Konfiguration von sZIL und L2ARC (zugegebenermassen erwaehnt der Autor es im letzten Absatz). Hätte vielleicht auch zu grosse Begeisterungsstuerme in der Leserschaft pro ZFS ausloesen koennen

Open Storage Summit Keynote

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:43:52 +0200

Ben Rockwood gave a really interesting keynote at the first Open Storage Summit about "Storage in the Cloud". When you are interested in storage with Opensolaris it´s definitly worth a look.

Virtual Consoles with Opensolaris

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:09:59 +0200

One of the features missed by Linux Admins on Solaris is the absence of virtual consoles. Opensolaris Build 100 will bring this functionality to Solaris 10. There is even a nice feature called "Secure Switch":

Secure switch is enabled by default which means you need to enter the login user's password if switching to a login-ed session.

The Register about Ikkaku

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:16:59 +0200

TPM wrote a article about an Sun/Fujitsu server at the bottom end of the APL M-class product line: Fujitsu and Sun arm juttejutsu server with quad-core processor. I won´t comment on the details, but the explanation of the codename is ... hmmm ... interesting ... especially when you know that you just have to type in "+ikkaku +sun" to get the official explanation . It has nothing to do with swords, at least not with ones made of steel:

Ikkaku is a Japanese name for "Narwhal", an Arctic cetacean/whale, about 20 feet long; the male has a single twisted pointed canine tooth or tusk projecting forward like a horn. The Japanese word literally mean "single horn".

SUNW,UltraSPARC-AT10

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:33:27 +0200

Yet another interesting integration to Solaris this week. The PSARC/2007/003 Solaris Support for the Rock Processor found it´s way in the build 100 of Opensolaris.

Ben Rockwood about the Linux Foundation marketing stunt

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:49:46 +0200

I don´t want to blog any further article about the comments about the comments of the Linux salesman Mr. Zemlin. And as Ben Rockwood of Cuddletech.com wrote a really nice article with "Jim Zemlin Lives in a Cave; or Linux Zealots Should Get Out More" i don´t have to. Ben brings some of my thoughts to the point in his article and adds several other valid ones. The training problem was for example the very reason for starting LKSF.

FAA uses Opensolaris

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:11:00 +0200

Sometimes you find Opensolaris at places where you won´t expect it: How the FAA Is Bringing Its Air Traffic Systems into the 21st Century. It´s an interesting article about the upcoming flight plan distribution system of the FAA.

Sun's open-source OpenSolaris/ZFS/SunFire server/Thumper storage infrastructurewhich features built-in, state-of-the-art virtualization capabilitywas a key building block on which the FAA IT evaluation group settled. Some of the new software is already being used in the air traffic system; ZFS (Sun's open-source Zettabyte File System) is being used in the FAA's air traffic data center.

Surpassing it all ...

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:43:22 +0200

I already wrote about that weird article about Solaris in Infoworld. But Computerworld easly surpassed this performance in terms of embarrassment: They reprinted the one and a half pages of marketing on behalf of the Linux Foundation word by word and even dared to call it "Analysis". I´m really frustrated about such an impertinence.

Transcontinental iSCSI for databases

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:38:35 +0200

I talked about the advantages of the separated ZIL and the L2ARC even on rotating rust in my article "iSCSI for I/O intensive tasks" in March 2008. I didn´t found the time to write down the findings of my tests as i started LKSF not much later. But Jignesh Shah did some tests with postgres and wrote down his results. He even took the concept a step farther:

Unfortunately the storage that's available is in Colorado while my PostgreSQL server is located in Massachusetts.

He tested an database with local sZIL and L2ARC and a remote iSCSI pool and got excellent results:

Not bad. Cutting the latency of writes of something that would have taken in excess of 8-10 minutes is atleast recorded within 4 seconds on nonvolatile cache/log combination and allowing ZFS to sync it up to the actual storage.

The whole concept of an ZFS augmented iSCSI shows promise even for latency-dependend applications.

Interesting fact about the Opensolaris development cycle - revisited

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:32:17 +0200

Alan Burlison wrote in a comment to the Opensolaris development cycle article:

Just to be clear, all the opensolaris.org servers run opensolaris, it's just that build 45 is the oldest build we run, we are running a number of newer releases as well. And we are making use of Solaris features such as ZFS, Zones and Live Upgrade as well - plus we are just starting to move over to ZFS root.

Just too good to hide it in the comment sections.

Interesting fact about the Opensolaris development cycle

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:46:41 +0200

Opensolaris has the reputation of being the unstable tree of Solaris. Nowhere near of production quality. Like the development builds of Linux. But the reality is: There is nothing like a experimental tree in Solaris. When you want to do development you essentially branch the code, doing development in your own branch, offering BFU packages for early testing and only after testing you put new code into the mainline code by updating your branch to the actual state of the mainline, working through all correction nescessary by changes in the mainline code and then put the whole stuff back to the mainline.

The development follows an important dogma: FCS quality all the time. FCS stands for First Customer Shipment - the first non-beta version of a product. The idea behind this dogma is, that you don´t integrate code into the mainline with known gaps, errors and problems. It must be possible to take Nevada, doing quality control on it and make Solaris 11 FCS out of it.

The article "FCS Quality all the time" written by Barbara Corwin shows a nice consequence of thid dogma. As a part of "eat your own dogfood" some of the opensolaris.org production servers ran at OpenSolaris 45 for almost 8 months:

And it's worked. From August 2006 until around March of this year, we ran Build 45 on the infrastructure machines (note that the current build in progress is Build 100). We finally hit some system problems this Spring that were fixed in later ON builds, so we started upgrading. And in general, we want to set up a regular rolling upgrade plan to keep more recent builds on these machines.

Asking the wrong person ...

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:22:56 +0200

Let´s assume, you want know more about the new BMW X6. Would you ask a Mercedes sales guy standing in front of a M-class SUV? Obviously you wouldn´t to it.

Out of this reason,i have some problems with articles like this one: Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?. Just one and a half pages uninformed, biased marketing material from the Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. What a nonsense. When you want to talk about the future of something, you don´t ask the competitor. It´s better to ask an unpartisan observer.

BTW: I really believe the Linux Foundation (as the commercial part of the Linux Community) is afraid of Solaris. When you look at Linux Foundations member you will find dozens of companies. The Platinum Member (aka the ones investing most into the foundation) are the ones economically interested in prospering Linux. Such fear would explain some paradox comments like "ZFS and DTrace is irrelevant" just to talk about "Sun should put ZFS and DTrace under the GPL" a few lines later.

At the end one comment to "And the Linux community is working on rival technology, Zemlin adds.". Yes ... there are rival technolgies. Kind of. There is no filesystem in the Linux market that´s even near of ZFS. We started to develop it in 2001. Why does the Linux Community think, they can do it faster. Multipathing ... yes, there is something like Multipathing ... but it´s nowhere near of MPXIO in Solaris, it´s a major pain in the a.. to configure it. SystemTap ... obvious example of the NIH syndrome in Linux, just yet another kernel developer tool. The NFSv4 implementation is really substandard. And the behaviour under high load (really high load on Enterprise systems, not what the average linux admin perceives as "high load") is at least strange in Linux land. The list is endless. Many features of Solaris are available in Linux ... somehow ... in a kind. And there is only one feature in Linux, that´s not in Solaris ... drivers for almost every strange brand of soundcards ...

Dear Inforworld: Just write "Advertisment" above the article next time you give the Linux Foundation two pages for pure marketing.

Yet another interesting FlagDay: PSARC/2008/376 - PowerTOP for OpenSolaris

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:48:48 +0200

Another interesting feature found it´s way to Opensolaris. It had its flag-day yesterday evening:

PowerTOP is an observability tool that shows you how well the system is taking advantage of the CPU's power management features and reports on the activity that is causing the system to wake up and go to higher energy consumption levels. [...] The tool uses DTrace sdt probes integrated into snv_82, so it requiressnv_82 or higher. Because it uses DTrace, a user must have DTrace privileges (dtrace_user, dtrace_proc, dtrace_kernel) in order to run PowerTOP.

You can find additional information on the website of the project.