[OpenIndiana-discuss] forum creation

[David Brodbeck]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 3:22 AM, Bruce Lilly <bruce.lilly at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 7:31 PM, Nikola M <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Regarding managing services on Unix-like OSes, illumos and Opensolaris
> > descendent OS'es enjoy Service management Facility (SMF), maybe you could
> > comment how it stand for you, comparing to other service management ways
> > you mentioned? If you have OI installed, you could try it out. (And see
> if
> > it could be improved).
> >
>
> SMF is mostly OK after the usual learning curve.
> What's not OK:
> 1. XML sucks
> 2. "Restarting too quickly" seems to happen too frequently for some
> services on reboot (usually for services where the daemon forks).
> 3. Poor support for conversion from init scripts (and XML sucks).
> http://wiki.loopback.org/index.php/How_to_add_a_service_to_svc helps, but
> XML sucks.
>

I find SMF rather opaque compared to SYSV init, but then I found SYSV kind
of opaque compared to BSD-style flat scripts at first. SMF is, however,
extremely well documented compared to similar systems on Linux (e.g.,
upstart.)  Just finding out how to disable a service on upstart took me a
lot of searching.

I agree about XML -- it manages to both be inefficient for computers *and*
hard for humans to read. ;)


> One issue with OpenIndiana encountered early on is limited networking
> driver support; specifically, OpenIndiana has no built-in support for
> Marvell "yukon" series Gigiabit Ethernet.
> I was able to find a Solaris driver from Marvell's web site, burn it to
> physical media, and sneakernet it; it works, but I wonder whether it will
> continue to work for future releases...
>

I got bitten by this with RAID controllers; many common 3ware ones are not
supported, or only supported for non-boot devices.  Third party binary
drivers quickly fall out of date with releases.  I think hardware support
is going to be one of the greatest challenges going forward, since relying
on stuff being added to Oracle's upstream kernels isn't viable anymore.

Software packages and management is a mish-mash.  Some packages are
> supported with pkg, but there's also OpenCSW and the Joyent/SmartOS
> pkgsrc/pkgin stuff (interestingly, pkgsrc was developed for NetBSD).
>

Yup, and because of compiler ABI and dependency issues, third-party package
systems like OpenCSW bring in their own parallel versions of most
libraries.  Trying to compile anything against the resulting system is a
nightmare because you can rarely get configure and gmake to all find the
correct include files and libraries instead of the system ones.  To be
fair, this is a mess that Illumos inherited; the package management system
under OpenSolaris was a complete circus from the start.