[oi-dev] Fwd: [developer] Please review 4989 - BIS

Tue Jul 22 18:07:11 UTC 2014

Well said Keith.

The idea here is to give OI (and any other distributors who might happen to
care) a chance to react, and work together with us; not to give OI veto
powers over a direction that makes obvious sense.

Right now, parted and co. are rotting bits in illumos.  Nobody maintains
them.  Most of us don't want them, and few have even used them.  I have
used parted *once* in my entire life.  That's it.  And that was about six
years ago.  Can't imagine using it today.

If OI (or someone else) wants them, they can always get them from source
history and set up a separate package to deal with them.  That's always
been relatively straight-forward.  In fact, these bits should have been in
a separate repo pretty much from the time they were first introduced.  Now
we can correct that.

Running illumos on bare metal makes great sense; as a hypervisor, you want
to do that.  But that use case is completely at adds with the idea of
running dual boot.

The dual boot use case is/was primarily intended for folks to be able to
use have multiple OS' on their hardware, and predates virtualization
technology.  These days, dual booting is just plain silly, and I cannot
imagine that I will ever configure a system for dual boot -- not just with
illumos, but with *any* OS.  Its just too damned inconvenient to reboot to
get to a different environment.  (Ok, special exception for lab systems,
where I need to run hardware sensitive tests -- like device drivers -- from
different OS images.  But I absolutely neither need nor want to shrink
partition tables there.  In fact, most often I have totally separate
physical disks.  This use case is also atypical -- being primarily folks
who work on physical device drivers.  These days I think anyone who dual
boots and isn't writing hardware drivers is either doing so as result of an
installation decision made years ago -- understandable, or is just insane.)

I have to confess that I use VMware (a commercial v12n product) for my
illumos work these days -- in fact right now I have a couple of different
OS' running on my laptop at the same time -- MacOS, 2 instances of illumos,
an instance of Windows, and an instance of CentOS.  It just wouldn't be
practical to do this multi boot.

I do believe that the main performance problems with building illumos
inside VirtualBox have been resolved.  I have heard a number of anecdotal
reports suggesting this -- I've not personally verified it myself, however
(being quite happy with VMware.)

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 9:41 AM, Keith Wesolowski via illumos-developer <
developer at lists.illumos.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 06:27:33PM +0200, Nikola M. via illumos-developer
> wrote:
>
> > OI is not prepared for this change untill parted and gparted are put
> > inside OI to serve it's users like they used to. (Would also thing other
> > distros should be informed about is at least) If Gparted and parted are
> > not illumos problem anymore, then don't let there be more problems for
> > users.
>
> We have been notified.  You guys are the only ones who seem to care,
> which is not surprising since this use case is no longer seen in the
> markets most other distributors have focused on.  Since nothing in ON
> depends on this, the correct decision is the one that's been taken: to
> remove it.  As a courtesy, distributors were pinged so that anyone who
> wants to continue shipping this software will have an opportunity to
> make other arrangements for doing so.  That's why this thread exists.
>
> As distributors and members of the illumos community, it is our dual
> responsibility to ensure that ON has the right contents and that our
> respective customer bases are properly served by the products we ship.
> It does not behoove us to insist that ON deliver something inappropriate
> to its general architecture solely for the benefit of our own customers.
> That's why you have oi-userland, we have illumos-extra, and other
> distributors have similar analogues.  Having to make one's own
> provisions for alternate delivery is simply part and parcel of being a
> distributor and should not induce the anger and hostility I'm reading
> here.
>
>
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