Blog - /Tech

Tonight, I went to a Project Indiana and OpenSolaris tech talk. Ian Murdock (the founder of Debian) was the presenter. It was interesting to hear him reminisce about using the old black-and-green terminals in the Math building when he was a Purdue student, and which building he was in while starting Debian. This is a historically-interesting day to have a tech talk, since Project Indiana will get a Developer Preview release tomorrow.

It looks like one of the goals of Project Indiana is to remove some of the rough edges that have been fixed in GNU/Linux for years. One example that he gave was seeing "^H" on the screen when hitting backspace (or delete, one of the two). Another facet of the project is to provide "apt-like" package management for Solaris, with possibilities of having local mirrors of the central Sun package repository. Not many packages will be present in the Developer Preview release — just enough to get an idea of how it will work.

This new package manager will be different than apt, though Ian initially tried to convince them to use apt. One difference is that in addition to packages, it will support "patches", which contain only the files changed in an update of a package. Enterprise people seem to want this. It will also feature integration with ZFS, to the point where you can "roll back" after installing a massive amount of packages, if something breaks. This uses ZFS snapshots, I believe. Sun apparently had to fix an issue (though this is only fixed on the x86 architecture, currently) where they had to have some files stored in a UFS partition rather than ZFS. The fixing of this was probably a prerequisite for this system-wide rollback to become feasible.

An eye-opener is that they will be using GRUB as their bootloader. Since their partitions can be all-ZFS, they must have patched GRUB to support ZFS. What is especially of interest is that since GRUB is available under GPLv2, and Sun will be distributing their modifications, this ZFS support must also be distributed in source form under GPLv2. I wonder if we could see this GRUB driver be expanded into a full-fledged Linux driver for ZFS. It might be a stretch to assume that the code is useful for that, but it's fun to speculate.

One guy who works from Purdue was griping about ZFS backups and tar. When asked whether he had filed a bug on it, he said that he preferred to just harass the Sun representatives about it whenever they come to campus. That struck me as exceptionally lame.