Checking out Opensolaris 2008.05

Package Management

Critics of Solaris's package management system have a little bit to cheer them up; although OpenSolaris still uses the same cryptic, inflexible system that Solaris always has, it does have a new graphical and text frontend.

Alas, the graphical frontend is next to useless; poorly designed, slow and quite painful to use. I stuck with it for about five minutes, until I realised that it was nowhere near flexible enough for my needs. It didn't even appear capable of showing information about packages that were available in the repository, but not yet installed, which - to me - appears to defeat the purpose of having a package manager at all.



The new command-line frontend, however, is a definite improvement upon the regular Solaris packaging tools. Installing and updating packages is simpler than ever before - almost Debianesque. Almost. The tool is clearly powerful - but is, unfortunately, rather needlessly complex. Just getting a listing of the contents of one package requires this:

pkg contents -t dir,file,link,hardlink -o action.name,mode,pkg.size,path,target SUNWzfs

Compare this to the simplicity of 'dpkg -L' under Debian, or 'rpm -ql' under Redhat.

Where it really shines, however, is its ability to integrate package upgrades with zfs, and perform them within a snapshot of the existing system. This, called an image-upgrade, allows the system administrator to backout of an upgrade easily, if necessary. And it certainly came in handy, when an issue with the upgrade process caused my server to become unbootable; going back to the original installation image fixed this easily.



Zones

Solaris Zones are a simple, low-overhead approach to virtualisation. If you've ever played with Xen under Linux, you'll know just how painful it can be to set up. It took me only 25 minutes to get a working Solaris Zone up and running, from scratch, with no prior experience in having done this.

It's even possible to create a zone as a ZFS clone of the host operating system, so that the guest zone uses very little space at all - the only extra space used is that which needs to be different from the host.

The light overhead of Solaris zones comes at a price however - not all operations are allowed within a guest zone, and certain kernel operations (even something as simple as mknod) won't work.

Conclusion

There's a lot to like about OpenSolaris 2008.05, especially if you've come from a Solaris background. If, on the other hand, you've come from a Linux background, you may find yourself fairly unimpressed with the various niggles, lack of drivers and annoyingly old set of command-line tools. Nevertheless, I found that OpenSolaris is a marked improvement upon Solaris 10, and especially from a server point of view, and look forward to seeing its features rolled out in the forthcoming Solaris 11.