What’s Going on with OpenSolaris? - UPDATED, AGAIN
by Michael Hay on August 1, 2010
Of late there has been a lot of news about this multi-year project instigated by SUN prior to their purchase by Oracle. Here is a smattering that I’m aware of:
Of course I should not forget the patent infringement lawsuit between NetApp and Oracle (Sun) over ZFS. Further I’m sure that just by doing a search like this one on Google you can find plenty good and bad news about Open Solaris — I’ll leave you to your own devices for that exercise.
With the exodus of people, reinvigorated lawsuits, and the potential for the demise of the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris users’ group if I were a user or a packager of OpenSolaris technology I would be spending some serious time considering a Plan B. One potential Plan B would be to take ZFS off of OpenSolaris and run it on a platform like say FreeBSD — which would still be somewhat risky due to the NetApp lawsuit. Well Phoronix did just that and found out that Linux still maintains a performance edge with both ext4 and the “alpha version” of btrfs. (Below is the verbatim summary quote about ZFS on BSD versus ext4 and btrfs on Linux.)
While ZFS has long been looked upon highly as being an advanced file-system — it does offer a really great feature-set — and something that various stakeholders have wanted on Linux within the kernel if the license was changed (right now the closest solution is running ZFS as a FUSE file-system on Linux since the CDDL license is incompatible with the kernel’s GPL), the latest EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems are certainly great and are actually faster than ZFS, at least when compared to FreeBSD’s latest ZFS implementation. The only time that ZFS on PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 was actually faster than EXT4 or Btrfs was when performing random writes of small file sizes and a low thread count, however, once the number of threads became too high or the size increased, Btrfs immediately popped back to being the faster file-system. It is also noting that as our earlier Btrfs benchmarks have shown, when enabling the transparent zlib compression in Btrfs, its performance jumps up even more. Btrfs also has automatic optimizations for a solid-state drive.
As the review states there are a series of feature set check marks we can give to ZFS; however, btrfs is fast checking the boxes to effectively erase the feature leadership that ZFS currently enjoys. As to the alpha status of btrfs the Meego project announced the use of btrfs in their production level distribution. Since Intel and Nokia are behind Meego I imagine that they are serious about ensuring quality products using Meego. For btrfs it means that the quality concerns will largely become moot — at least for the mobile devices use case.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to make a prediction: for the storage use case the OpenSolaris project is at serious risk from perceived neglect by Oracle, legal encumbrance from NetApp, a license mismatch between the CDDL and GPL, and finally real competitors with strong quality on alternative platforms. I’m predicting that we will see the rise of a competitive open source storage project using a variety of technologies but based on Linux instead of Solaris.
UPDATE 1
Today the Illumos project was announced as a kind of pseudo fork of OpenSolaris. While this does not mitigate the NetApp risk it is an insurance against Oracle’s apparent neglect.
UPDATE 2
There has been a recently leaked memo about Oracle and (Open)Solaris here, which talks about OpenSolaris now not being the source of innovation, but instead the closed version of Solaris will be. Oracle is also going to preserve unique and valued innovations for themselves first, in ClosedSolaris. The net thinks that this is the official end of OpenSolaris as we know it. With this in mind, again if I were a heavy user of OpenSolaris I’d be looking for a Plan B. Illumos is a possibility, but with Oracle really backing out of OpenSolaris as we know it, does it mean that a real and honest fork of OpenSolaris is in order? Also of recent note, with Oracle on the patent warpath I do have to personally wonder if there is some hidden risk in using OpenSolaris outside of a contract deal with Oracle whereby you have defined rights and not open source rights. Be careful all yea users of Solaris technologies and make sure you read the fine print.
