Oracle Still To Make OpenSolaris Changes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Still To Make OpenSolaris Changes

Since Oracle finished its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, there have been many changes to the open-source projects that were once supported under Sun now being discontinued by Oracle and significant changes being made to the remaining open-source products. One of the open-source projects that Oracle hasn't been too open about their intentions with has been OpenSolaris...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODAwNg

[King InuYasha]

Somebody's going to try to push for a fork if OpenSolaris is left to rot...

[gsacks]

Personally, I am more concerned about VirtualBox

[LinuxID10T]

Somebody's going to try to push for a fork if OpenSolaris is left to rot...

OpenSolaris really needs to change to a 6 month release schedule. That is why Ubuntu gets all the attention, release after release are pounded out on schedule. Personally, any longer than 6 months and stuff starts to stagnate.

[wswartzendruber]

I wonder if this will entail moving beyond GCC3.

[Veerappan]

Personally, I am more concerned about VirtualBox

Agreed. I haven't used OpenSolaris, but I use Solaris 10 on my work machine every day. It's fine, but nothing special. Linux works fine as an alternative for me on the machines I'm able to control for myself.

VirtualBox is much more important to me, as it gives me a free, open, and common platform for all of my virtualization needs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Without it, I'd either need to hope for Wine (or its alternatives) to always work, or I'd end up shelling out cash for multiple VMWare licenses (one for each host machine/OS combination).

[Dubhthach]

I'm currently running OpenSolaris b133 (released at the weekend) on my laptop. 2010.03 is to be based off b134 as far as I know. To put this in context 2009.06 is based on build 111b. Usually there is a two week window between Build releases, so they should be able to ship 2010.03 within March.

As for the Oracle page this is for people who get paid OpenSolaris support. Never been an issue for me as (a) I don't run it in production (b) I track the dev repo (think Rawhide in Redhat parlance)

To check what's changed ye can always look at the "Flag days" page which details changes that have gone into Builds. So just a matter of looking at the builds since 111 (2009.06).
http://static.opensolaris.org/on/flagdays/

Likewise for the x11 consolidation:
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/...win/changelogs

Some of the nice things to have gone in include:
ZFS Deduplication
zpool split (split your "raid1" zpool into two seperate pools)
Gnome 2.28
X.org 7.5
GEM support for Intel driver
Boomer -- new sound architecture based on OSS v4
ISCSI improvements including boot support
Fibre Channel Target for Comstar (build your own FC SAN)
More network/audio drivers
Virtual Terminal support (hey it's a big thing for Solaris)
Perl 5.10
Xen 3.4 (xVM)
Using ksh93 to produce a busybox equivalent
ls modernisation (solaris ls now supports --color etc.)

The other page I tend to keep an eye on is the ARC case page. For example here are all the ARC cases for 2010/2009 so far along with reference material.
http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/year/2010.html
http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/year/2009.html

[frische]

thanks, Dubhthach

Nothing to add expect maybe that os thrives for a ~~8 Month release schedule afaik. The blocker bugs in defect.os.o may be of interest to some, too.

[kebabbert]

OpenSolaris really needs to change to a 6 month release schedule. That is why Ubuntu gets all the attention, release after release are pounded out on schedule. Personally, any longer than 6 months and stuff starts to stagnate.

I dont understand what you mean? Could you clarify?

OpenSolaris builds are released every two weeks. Every 6 months, the current OpenSolaris build is tested and then released as "2008.11" or "2009.06" or "2010.03", etc. Maybe you didnt knew that?

And I doubt someone knowledgable would say that OpenSolaris development stagnates. The development is extremely rapid: Crossbow, ZFS deduplication, Comstar, etc

[abcxyz]

I actually doubt end of SXCE is related to Oracle. To me the reasons seems to be technical in nature: <http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/...+on/ON+IPS+FAQ>. Once that happens SXCE is impossible as some critical packages are no longer available in the correct format for that.