[geeks] Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris bits to be in next version of OSX

[Nick B.]

Ahh, the famous "It's a mainframe, I don't care if it does not look like one,
and does not act like one, and really bears no resemblence to a mainframe.  It
is still a mainframe as IBM declared it to be!"
AIX is very intresting, but I'd avoid using it to prove points as to what's
a good idea and what is not a good idea.
	Nick
On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 06:35:16PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
> > Ooh.  I like the self-healing-data aspect.  I think that's worth
> > violating a few abstraction barriers to get, as long as nothing gets
> > functionally broken in the process.
> 
> Except that there's no reason to break down the barrier between volume
> manager and filesystem to get there.  Set some blocks aside for
> checksums in the volume manager, and you have the same functionality.
> 
> For instance, AIX has been doing things like this for years.  -Every-
> slice lives inside a volume group managed by the LVM.  If you have a
> volume group stating that there will exist more than one copy of each
> block, AIX will -tell you- if/where a bad block comes into play, return
> data from the good block, and deactivate the bad block.  This isn't new,
> and AIX doesn't have separate maintenance tools, mount tables, and
> nethodologies for dealing with filesystems guarded by the LVM in this
> fashion.
> 
> The added bonus to the AIX approach is that you get this for -all-
> slices, including paging slices.  It's Nice when you can replace a device
> holding your page slice without rebooting the system.
> 
> The more sinister side of this is how Sun is selling it.  "Silent data
> corruption"?  What in the world is that supposed to mean?
> 
> Data corruption does not happen unless there is a bug in the stack of
> code somewhere between fread() and the SCSI transaction or unless the
> hardware is defective.  There's nothing silent about it.  Either
> hardware or software has failed; this is the general case for a failure
> in a RAID metadevice.   So Sun's RAID implementation can handle that
> scenario?  Well, uh, great.  That's rather why we have RAIDs in the
> first place, isn't it?
> 
> If Sun is trying to say that their RAID software can handle errors not
> directly derived from hardware failures, they might want to rethink the
> implications of that statement before waving it about on a banner.
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Patschke    )   "A man who never dreams goes slowly mad."
> Elgin, TX           (      --Thomas Dolby, "Valley of the Mind's Eye"
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