Repair, Upgrade or Replace

[I had decided to not publish this, but with the LX brand revived, I thought it would be an interesting story post]

The perpetual question

Repair, upgrade or replace? It doesn't matter if we are talking about an appliance, a car, furniture or a laptop. Whatever it is, it will break or become obsolete. It's all a question of scale and time, and outside pressures.

What do I mean by outside pressures? Let's say you have a car, it is yours and it is working fine. You drive it 30,000 miles each year. It does 20mpg (US). Let's say gas price is $3.50 a US gallon, that's a tad over $5000 a year to make it run (not counting normal maintenance). A lot of money to go from point A to point B, but still within reason. The outside pressure is minor. But let's bump up gas price to $9.00 a gallon, and we are now talking over $13,000 a year. $27,000 over two years. ROI on getting a new car with twice the mpg is now pretty obvious.

But what if there are no options

In our example above we assume there is such a thing as a 40mpg vehicule that can replace the one you have. But what if I told you it has to be able to tow 6000lbs? There might not be any option that fit the bill. So you have to compromise in one way or another. And that is where it gets complicated.

Lightweight, but not lightweight

If you spend times going from one place to another doing presentations, no doubt you've welcomed tablets and ultra portable laptops. To be able to demo a specific n-tier setup or even a whole datacenter directly on a 13" laptop that weighs less than 3.5 lbs is definitely a great thing.

I've been using for a few years a Sony Vaio Z that is totally custom. Large SSD, large drive, multi core. Ram was the limitation back then, 8GB. But anybody familiar with Solaris or (open source solaris) IllumOS based OSes knows that thanks to cpu and memory sharing between each zones and the full virtual networking capability of crossbow, you can simulate a lot of machines within that 8GB.

My outside pressure

Linux zones are no longer available, so I have to rely on virtualbox or other similar solutions. They dont share ressources such as memory and are not lightweight solutions like zones. 8GB is no longer acceptable. CPU or disk is not a problem (not dealing with big data, just terabyte scale).

Lack of solutions

For some reason there are very few lightweight laptops with > 8GB. 16GB seems to be the next barrier, but typically with a very low screen resolution. Why is that? I don't know. So, for right now I have to choice but to wait on technology to catch up, assuming market demand. [Or, now, hope to get LX branded zones back. If somebody was looking for a good business case, I'm giving you one]



François
@f_dion

LX zones back in illumos and OpenIndiana?

Branded Zones

If you've used Solaris and typed man lx, you saw:

Standards, Environments, and Macros lx(5)NAME

lx - Linux branded zone

DESCRIPTION


The lx brand uses the branded zones framework described in
brands(5) to enable Linux binary applications to run unmodi-
fied on a machine with a Solaris Operating System kernel.

The lx brand includes the tools necessary to install a Cen-
tOS 3.x or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x distribution inside
a non-global zone. The brand supports the execution of 32-
bit Linux applications on x86/x64 machines running the
Solaris system in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode.

Supported Linux Distributions
The lx brand emulates the system call interfaces provided by
the Linux 2.4.21 kernel, as modified by Red Hat in the RHEL
3.x distributions. This kernel provides the system call
interfaces consumed by the glibc version 2.3.2 released by
Red Hat.

In addition, the lx brand partially emulates the Linux /dev
and /proc interfaces.


But if you've followed the story, lx branded zones became a mere historical reference. Until now.

Reintroduction

David Mackay posted the following webrev to the illumos developer mailing list:

http://cr.illumos.org/~webrev/DavidJX8P/lx-zones-restoration/


This is great, and I hope this gets reintegrated and pushed in the next openindiana!

François
@f_dion

Virtual Box with SMF control

SMF

The Service Management Facility (SMF), first introduced in Solaris Nevada, as project Greeline, and then later in the commercial Sun Solaris, is the modern way to manage system and application services in a self healing, fault tolerant way. It replaces the old init mechanism.

Some historical background information (including all the PSARCs) on SMF is still available at opensolaris.org.

Another good read is the Joyent wiki.

VirtualBox

Alexandre Dumont published some scripts for Virtual Box, to integrate with SMF. That was in 2009. Not too long ago, I was trying to find his blog and it was down.

I just stumbled upon:
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=33249

And there is a sourceforge project for it, here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vboxsvc/

Installation

From the README, using the pkgadd in a global zone:

    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G

You probably want the -G flag. It doesn't block you from manually installing
the same package in a certain local zone where you'd use VirtualBox, but
it blocks automatic package propagation to those local zones which are
not expected to use and run VirtualBox. For us these zones are rare,
zero or one per machine (there is no definite/hardcoded limit though). YMMV.

To update the package you can simply remove the old version and install
anew, i.e.:
    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgrm COSvboxsvc
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G

A cleaner way is to use an admin file to overwrite an existing package,
i.e. one from LiveUpgrade:
    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G -a /etc/lu/zones_pkgadd_admin

Also note that this package "depends" on SUNWvbox, so that should be
installed beforehand.

Solaris Desktop on the move (ipad)

So as seen here in the picture, i'm still using solaris as my desktop. Big deal, right?

But this is on an Apple ipad 2. Using Oracle virtual desktop, served from a solaris 10 sun ray server, and to top it all off, from a vmware server. Oh yeah, and off verizon 3g or public wifi access points and VPN. What the Sun Microsystems sunray laptop could have been, plus relatively inexpensive

Since Apple will be making some announcements in a few hours (and who knows what will they announce- new ios or new iphone or just software ), I thought it might be a good time to mention this, for those that do not know about this solution. Granted, there are so many applications for the ipad / iphone and ipod, that it is easy to never see or hear about them.

Shortly, Solaris 11 fcs should be available, and SRS 5.2 will hopefully function properly on it, giving this a more modern desktop.

And now back to your regular programming... (no pun intended)