Solaris Archive

ZFS has received built-in deduplication. "Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data. Dedup is generally either file-level, block-level, or byte-level. Chunks of data - files, blocks, or byte ranges - are checksummed using some hash function that uniquely identifies data with very high probability. Chunks of data are remembered in a table of some sort that maps the data's checksum to its storage location and reference count. When you store another copy of existing data, instead of allocating new space on disk, the dedup code just increments the reference count on the existing data. When data is highly replicated, which is typical of backup servers, virtual machine images, and source code repositories, deduplication can reduce space consumption not just by percentages, but by multiples."

The Linux desktop has come a long way. It's a fully usable, stable, and secure operating system that can be used quite easily by the masses. Not too long ago, Sun figured they could do the same by starting Project Indiana, which is supposed to deliver a complete distribution of OpenSolaris in a manner similar to GNU/Linux. After using the latest version for a while, I'm wondering: why?

The team at Sun behind OpenSolaris has unleashed OpenSolaris 2009.06 upon the world. This new release comes packed with new features, changes, improvements, and fixes, and is the first release of OpenSolaris for SPARC, adding support for UltraSPARC T1, T2 (Sun4v), and UltraSPARC II, III and IV (Sun4u). Read on for some of the improvements that stand out.

ZFS and unbreakable upgrades were introduced in an earlier article. XercesTech has written a detailed article on how apt-get and zfs join forces to provide a worry-free upgrade experience. "While some operating systems provide the ability to roll back changes, they usually require significant time, or an experienced user with some external repair tools. The goal here is to be instant, if something goes wrong with an upgrade, it should be possible to boot into the old system without running any terminal commands, booting any rescue system or installation disc, or otherwise manually rolling things back."

Devzones, short for development zones, is a type of virtualization found in the Nexenta distribution. It can be used to define a base developer environment, which can be easily cloned many times. These copies can easily be destroyed and recreated. Devzones are built upon Opensolaris Zones, which are extensions of a chroot-like environment for the entire installed system. In other words, it allows for virtualization of an Opensolaris environment (and variants of Linux), without the performance hit that is generally associated with virtualization. This article gives a practical introduction into using Devzones.

A new update of Solaris 10 has been made available today. There are a lot of ZFS enhancements and the next-gen file system is now supported as an installable root file system. You can download it for x86 and SPARC here. Other than that there are new drivers, security enhacements, etc. Fore more information, check the what's new page.