Solaris 10 Zones on Illumos Tribblix

https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2020/08/solaris-10-zones-on-tribblix.html

by todsacerdoti • 6 years ago

74 27 6 years ago

ptribble.blogspot.com

trollied• 6 years ago

I really liked Solaris. ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, brilliant hardware.

It's a shame Oracle destroyed it (mostly) and Sun. Though some might argue that Linux taking over played a part in that.

A parallel universe with Sun surviving & properly embracing open source would have been very interesting.

hylaride3• 6 years ago

Solaris 10 really was the pinnacle of UNIX. At a previous company, we were doing with Solaris zones and ZFS snapshots essentially a docker-like development ecosystem. We were really excited about the crossbow networking project, but then the Oracle acquisition happened almost all new and innovative work stopped.

In a more perfect world, Joyent would have become bigger than it was. Alas...

canadian_tired2• 6 years ago

Oh yeah. I remember The Announcement (sale of Sun to Oracle). Punch to the gut.

binarycrusader2• 6 years ago

I'll assume that was a typo and you meant Solaris 11. Solaris 11 has some amazing advancements over 10 in terms of security, packaging, and many other metrics.

Also, for the record, it is objectively untrue that all new and innovative work stopped. My primary disappointment was the silent discontinuation of the OpenSolaris project.

severino• 6 years ago

For me, the biggest shame is that Linux never got to adopt all these brilliant technologies like ZFS or Dtrace, directing efforts to alternatives that are nowhere near the quality or reliability of the former.

Yes I know there's a long time debate about whether the CDDL license is GPL compatible or not. Too bad this came from the Sun era, years before the Oracle acquisition.

SubjectToChange• 6 years ago

Dtrace was GPL'd and it is available on Linux now. Although, it is too little too late as BPF based tools are already here and offer more flexibility.

DrScientist2• 6 years ago

I'd agree - some great stuff, great innovation.

The problem was they grew hugely during the dot com bubble - to a size that was never sustainable, and then post bubble, couldn't work out how to make enough money from their offerings in the face of Linux on commodity PC hardware.

Not just OS/hardware either - the Java ecosystem and Libre/Open office still live on.

canadian_tired2• 6 years ago

I will always look back on Solaris wistfully. It was (and will always be) my favorite Unix. When containers showed up... oh man... my lab guys lost their mind. We had a never ending parade of upgrades...and server rotation. Enter zones... and things just become OOM easier. Want a zone of your own? No prob. Wonderful isolation and resource allocation, too. The network stack was a bit iffy in the early days, but Sun sorted it out. All our zones (incl. root!) were on NAS... we could move zones around the hardware at will. It was incredibly useful and a whole lot of fun.

sicnus• 6 years ago

Solaris 10 has been EOL since what this time last year? No more updates are going out to it. So if you are still running a Solaris 10 zone then you aren't able to patch it.

cosmojg• 6 years ago

This post is about Tribblix, the Slackware of Illumos, a well-supported fork of OpenSolaris. The ecosystem is alive and well.

DrScientist2• 6 years ago

Yes and no - as they lost the University crowd a while ago to Linux, you are pretty much on your own if you want to compile some third party code on Solaris, so while the OS is perfectly viable on a subset of hardware - it's not something you'd either want to install on a laptop or try and build and run random code from github.

Annatar3• 6 years ago

Tribblix is unlike Slackware - it uses AT&T SVR4 packaging with zap which is akin to yum on top, whereas Slackware used tape archives. Yes, tape archives for backing up to tape. That says it all.

tyingq• 6 years ago

The article is about migrating some existing systems that can't easily run on anything newer to at least be on supported hardware.

indigodaddy• 6 years ago

Solaris 10/11 are still heavily entrenched in the telecom/ISP industry. Not going away anytime soon.

rbanffy2• 6 years ago

Oracle will milk this cow until it bleeds. And then they'll bleed it until it's dry.

kyuudou• 6 years ago

Also with big banks and other finance. And some parts of gubmint.

oomkiller• 6 years ago

Poking around in the weirdness that is Solaris is so much fun. The comments in the source code are legendary as are the man pages, seemingly much more helpful than other platforms, with a focus on providing good examples. Zones, DTrace, ZFS, and SMF are incredible tools that were over a decade ahead of their time. Zones in particular seem to still offer isolation advantages over the various implementations of containers on Linux. Designing a cohesive system for containing multitenant workloads had its advantages. I'm glad enthusiasts have been able to keep Illumos going, it would be a shame for nobody to be running all that code.

Annatar3• 6 years ago

Asserting that Solaris has weirdness is an insult, because Solaris is the AT&T System V Release 4.0 reference implementation. Solaris is also the reference implementation for libc functions like malloc, threading, realtime kernel implementation, NFS, NIS, containers, shared memory, SCSI, fiberchannel, high performance TCP/IP networking, network virtualization, parallel service startup/shutdown, POSIX compliant shells, POSIX AWK, XPG4 and XPG6 userland, I could go on and on and on; if you want to write an implementation of some IEEE, POSIX or RFC specification, or some kernel or userland subsystem, Solaris / illumos is the place to refer to on how to do that, and how to do it correctly.

mapgrep• 6 years ago

Some comments are treating this as an opportunity for a Solaris wake and while I certainly don't object I wonder if needs pointing out that there is a lively ecosystem of Illumos derivatives, Illumos itself being a derivative of Solaris (via what was once called OpenSolaris).

Some examples include SmartOS (Samsung maintained datacenter centric flavot, lots of tools for rapid/easy deployment of compute nodes and machine images); OmniOS (for laptops); and one I had never heard of until this post, Tribblix.

A common pattern is to run other OSes in some zones via bhyve (linux and bsd) or kvm or lx branded zones (linux). But the native platform can handle many scenarios these days.

ptrott2017• 6 years ago

Just a note to say Tribblix is a fantastic Illumos distribution that works well on AWS. Peter Tribble deserves much applause for maintaining this. If you are curious re: Illumos and need a place to start - Tribblix is a good one. Have fun.

Solaris 10 Zones on Illumos Tribblix

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