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

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 20:50, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> AIX is a very, very solid operating system; I'd put it on par with VMS
> in terms of maturity and stability.  Yes, it's weird[0].  It does,
> however, have a consistent LVM that works (and two very nice native
> filesystems, for that matter).  Given that we're discussing storage, and
> Sun seems to be boinking the dog, whereas IBM has this stuff figured
> out, it seems a very valid comparison regardless of AIX's position on
> your list of favorite operating systems.

I think you are being overly pessimistic about what Sun is doing with
ZFS.

Right now you can't boot off ZFS, but Sun has said that they are going
to support that sometime soon.  So for now, you have this weird, split
UFS/ZFS setup, which will go away.

The separation of interfaces is a canard, because no person in their
right mind, is going to allow valuable data to be stored on a filesystem
that is not supported by the OS vendor or a third party; as would be
possible if you had a defined API and could plug in your own code on
either the upper or the lower layer.  There would be too much
finger-pointing.

Since ZFS is all of one piece anyways (pragmatic design decision), what
they do internally doesn't matter a whole lot as long as it has useful
features that customers want.  

>From a programming standpoint, you still have all the typical filesystem
calls, working exactly as they do with UFS, right?  And that is what
99.99% of Sun's market is going to care about.  THAT is the abstraction
that matters.

--Patrick