VMUNIX Blues

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Chris Adams 05.11.06 / 9am

I cannot agree more strongly - this one of the reasons why I’ve been following the Nexenta project. The Solaris 10 kernel has some very nifty ideas (dtrace, zfs, zones) but the feature-poor userland, bizarre filesystem layout and incredibly inadequate package management (I played around with the Solaris 10 install shipped on our last V20z - just attempting to install security updates brought back a powerful feeling of nostalgia for the Slackware 2.0 days) are a deal-killer.

So far Nexenta has been making great progress at delivering Solaris with a Debian/Ubuntu userland - even the liveCD has an environment which is embarrassingly better than Sun’s shipping S10 install. If Sun has any ambition at recapturing mindshare from Linux they need to put the current Solaris userland on legacy-support and either hire the Nexenta guys or put a full team on producing a modern userland rather than patching the existing one; otherwise they’re just going to stay in the increasingly small niche of shops which have already invested the time automating the Solaris warts away.
binarycrusader 05.11.06 / 4pm

I really don’t buy the “outdated” complaints.

If you look at almost any of the recent Enterprise Offerings from vendors such as RedHat, SuSE, etc. you’ll find that their libraries are just as outdated.

Case in point, RHEL3 which is still a supported and shipping version of RedHat Enterprise Linux ships with a *broken for three years now* version of XML::DOM. In addition, many of the perl libraries it ships with are also a few years out of date.

Enterprise level systems will always be somewhat behind the bleeding edge distributions. They take a significant amount of time to test before they are even launched, and that means things will be outdated by the time it ships.

Personally, I don’t care about outdated libraries, I care about *stable* libraries. If I really need the newest “whoop-tee-do” library I’ll package it myself and install it under an alternate tree. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again if the need arises (which so far, has only been the case with libraries that didn’t already exist).
David Comay 06.20.06 / 4pm

Mark,

Your and Peter’s point about outdated libraries is
definitely something that we’re aware of and working on
addressing. In the upcoming Solaris Express release
based on build 42 of OpenSolaris, a whole lot of things have
been upgraded including the libraries associated with GNOME 2.14
and libxml 2.6.23 (yes, I’m aware there are newer versions
beyond this but this is a big improvement).

Longer term, we’re working on how to push these out more
quickly but at the same time maintaining stability when its
appropriate. If there are other libraries of interest that you think
are in need of more regular updates, please let us know.