OpenSolaris vs. Linux Kernel Benchmarks

[deanjo]

So?

I was talking about the File system and not the operating system.

This is why OS X supplied UFS. UFS is indeed a POSIX file system and is provided for compatibility reasons.

The reason why HFS+ is used by default is becuase the GUI, the non-UNIX stuff, needs to have it's resource forks for them to work properly and you'd run into problems on UFS.

Errr, wrong, UFS was dropped as an installable option in 10.5. Not needed anymore.

Beleive me. I know this because I was trying to deal with managing ~90 Mac OS X workstations when that was new and was getting really tired of having to rescue their file systems and repair permissions.

Wow a whole 90 systems, that would cover the employee lounge systems on the size of OS X networks I've worked on. The OS X networks I've managed range from 400-700 seats and users were given full admin privileges as they were to needed to fully replicate issues of Mac users. Their workstations were their test machines.

No.

HFS+ uses : as a path deliminator and all paths must be full paths.

Like I said before the BSD-VFS layer is used to trick the Unix half of the operating system into thinking it's on a POSIX-like file system.

I ran into these issues quite often when I was trying to combine my Unix scripting skills with Apple's GUI stuff to automate things for students. If you think that openning up a terminal gives you access to what is happenning 'underneath' that pretty GUI that OS X uses... your going to be dissappointed.

You really haven't used OS X in a while, scripting in OS X is no different then any other unix when it comes to syntax. The path delimiters are all handled at a kernel level, transparent to the end user completely.

Ya... a server system with a reliable, UPS-backed. power supply is not a situation were you would tend to run into problems.

I helped administrate the Macs used in the electronic imaging and graphics classrooms of 2 college campuses. Total number of Macs were about 200+. Which is going to be about the largest concentration of Macs that your likely to see anywere around were I live.

At the time they ranged from beige tower G3s to the dual proccessor G5 machines. The most common being the PowerMac G4s.

The networks I managed were far greater in size and in a hostile environment. Workstations had no UPS back up and still data loss was not an issue on those at all either. Those ranged from the very first iMacs running 9 and 10.0 all the way up to 10.5 and on the latest hardware. People would do a hardshut downs and power would go out all the time. Still data loss was not present. If there was data loss it was because of hardware failure.

If Apple was to move to ZFS (as the default for everything) then that would be very very very good move and very impressive.

Sure ZFS would be nice, it would be nice on all OS's.

However I am convinced that Apple doesn't give a flying fart about the server market or anything to do with the 'enterprise' weither it was in desktops or server deployments. Home users couldn't give a shit less about the file system and there really isn't any good reason for them to do so.. just as long as they use Time Machine with external media effectively, which is exactly why Apple can get away with having a lousy file system.

lol Time machine was not intended to make up for filesytems, it's there for when users have a brain fart and delete something they wanted back later. Your right though, Apple concentrates on it's desktops market but to say they don't give a shit about their enterprise users is completely false. They wouldn't go through the bother of writing custom formware for their xserve's ADMs if that was the case. They would do like so many other venders and use plain jane consumer drives that have firmware that is optimized for windows use. You can read more about this and the other testing practises here http://db.tidbits.com/article/10166.

[legkodymov]

Why not take latest development edition for openSolaris? snv 112 included in Solaris express edition, for example.

[drag]

You really haven't used OS X in a while, scripting in OS X is no different then any other unix when it comes to syntax. The path delimiters are all handled at a kernel level, transparent to the end user completely.

Well good.

Because when trying to combine Apple Scripting features for the GUI with Unix script for munging files and mounting file systems it was a huge pain in the ass to be translating between the HFS+ paths for the Apple scripting into Unix paths for the shell scripting.

Errr, wrong, UFS was dropped as an installable option in 10.5. Not needed anymore.

Well I suppose that means that you can no longer install OS X to UFS.. which is fine. I'd never want to install OS X on UFS anyways. The non-Unix half of OS X never worked well at all and was never a recommended configuration.

However that does not mean that I would actually try to use HFS+ for anything serious. Housing the OS is one thing, but actually using it as a active storage volume is quite another.

I am not going to trust HFS+ with anything important on the Unix side of the fence.

Even with all the work Apple has put into it HFS+ and their Posix file system emulation stuff can't handle even something as simple and fundamental as multiple hard links correctly. If you try to create multiple hard links to a file on HFS+ Apple creates a wacky little very-hidden file in those directories as part of their work around for not supporting it. Trying to use multiple hardlinks is prone to all sorts of corruption and nasty corner cases.

I know you keep thinking I am making this stuff up. But remember you were the one originally telling me that : was only used on the ancient HFS stuff and that HFS+ uses Unix paths.

Seriously. How can anybody think that HFS is POSIX-compliant or a safe Unix FS to use when it doesn't even support something as fundamental as case sentitivy? POSIX says that file names are to be treated as nothing more then a string of bytes. That's it. The only illegal characters are 'null' and '/'... everyhting else goes. Capital letters, lower case leters, control characters, newlines, tabs, spaces, etc etc. All these things are legal and are used to resolve individual file names.

Sure case insentivity is nice to have since it is much more user friendly by far.. but it's definately not POSIX compatible. POSIX compatibility is completely overrated if your looking at desktop usability... but the high level of complexity and just plain weirdness of HFS+ is not good and means that it's error prone no matter what.

If you don't believe me...
http://rixstep.com/2/2/20070718,00.shtml

[deanjo]

W POSIX says that file names are to be treated as nothing more then a string of bytes. That's it. The only illegal characters are 'null' and '/'... everyhting else goes. Capital letters, lower case leters, control characters, newlines, tabs, spaces, etc etc. All these things are legal and are used to resolve individual file names.

Sure case insentivity is nice to have since it is much more user friendly by far.. but it's definately not POSIX compatible. POSIX compatibility is completely overrated if your looking at desktop usability... but the high level of complexity and just plain weirdness of HFS+ is not good and means that it's error prone no matter what.

If you don't believe me...
http://rixstep.com/2/2/20070718,00.shtml

Case sensitivity has been present in HFS+ for a long time now. You have options of either case sensitive or non case sensitive since 10.3. Also if you would read your own link you would be see that it's referring to and written pre Leopard. Again, old and outdated info.

[calum]

Sun (now oracle) has its own breed of CPU.

(Sun is not "now Oracle"... until Oracle sign on the dotted line, which is expected to happen in a few months time, it's business as usual as separate companies.)

[bugmenot]

I question the validity of the SQL benchmark results. Can you explain to me how the Linux system is supposed to be able to handle thousands of transactions per second, while being ACID compliant? That's just not physically possible with a hard drive. All this benchmark tells me is that the storage subsystem of Linux is in a bad shape, if it allows things like this to happen (and if it's not a database configuration issue).

[kraftman]

I question the validity of the SQL benchmark results. Can you explain to me how the Linux system is supposed to be able to handle thousands of transactions per second, while being ACID compliant? That's just not physically possible with a hard drive. All this benchmark tells me is that the storage subsystem of Linux is in a bad shape, if it allows things like this to happen (and if it's not a database configuration issue).

Is this real world benchmark? Nope. In real world benchmarks results will be much different and then you'll see real Linux advantage over os x (or over Solaris which isn't performance monster there). It's, because of database configuration, but I'm not sure if it's an issue, because I don't know what was tested.

[feefref09]

As with the Linux distros, you should chose one binary repository and stick with it from the start, I mean load ON Operating system and Network then chose one only repo.

Also, GNUish last OpenSolaris has its own package management, so, do not install legacy binary providers, or you get into trouble.

Also be certain to keep in mind that OpenSolaris has become a generic name for all non pure Sun Solaris products.
Indiana .NOT. Milax.NOT. Solaris Express.NOT. Nexenta OS.NOT. SchilliX.NOT. marTux.NOT.Solaris
Analogy with Linux distros, all Linux kernel based, you cannot mix repos from Ubuntu with NovellSUSE or Mandriva and RHat.