[OpenIndiana-discuss] Support OI and illumos for GSoC 2012

[Bayard Bell]

Hi, Nikola,

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 8:06 PM, Nikola M <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bayard Bell wrote:
>> VirtualBox has proven to be effectively unusable
>> (building from source takes days instead of hours, and debug kernels
>> suffer awful performance and lockups)
> Why Vmware?
> Vmware is not available for Openindiana/Illumos.
> And Virtualbox is there for Solaris and until now, Illumos/Openindiana.

To reiterate: what we need is a set of free and easy virtualization
solutions for students who don't yet have an illumos distro installed.

VirtualBox, as already explained, is unusable for development on
several levels. The VirtualBox developers are very clear in saying
that their virtual desktop product doesn't target the developer space.
Asking an Oracle-owned product to devote cycles to making their
product enable development for illumos is a dead letter and VirtualBox
a dead end. I've interacted directly with the VirtualBox developers--I
like them, they seem to know their stuff, but none of that is going to
get past the fact that the problems here require a considerable
allocation of resources controlled by the lawnmower.

> Maybe reason for mentioning VmWare is because you think students have MS
> Windows or OSX on their laptops and just lucky ones have Linux?

We make no assumptions about this or judgements about what existing
installs mean. vmWare gets coverage where KVM is not an option, which
is why I'm asking after both. If someone's building the OS on a guest
and saying it doesn't work (which is entirely consistent with previous
experience), we need viable and flexible options for other kinds of
guests.

> Maybe one nice dual-boot setup (Installing system on same disk as
> current one but on separate partition) with setting up ZFS and
> Openindiana on it with numerous separate boot environments (BE's) for
> testing Illumos kernels are in place for development?

We're seeing a lot of students who are already triple-booting laptops
and can't take on another bare metal OS install as the price of entry.
Repartioning with enough space to add another OS isn't a solution that
gets people in the door. Once people are in the door, it's a different
question. We need to get them there.

We've already got a volunteer, but I'm always happy to have a team.

Cheers,
Bayard