The OpenIndiana community | Hacker News Reader

The OpenIndiana community

ezcrypt.it

The author of this post has not stated who he spoke to. I suspect he has spoken to a random from #openindiana on irc.freenode.net, who is not actually an active developer.

The OpenIndiana developers collaborate on #oi-dev on irc.freenode.net.

Also the Solaris kernel is excellent and has features that put it ahead of the game in many areas. Take Solaris Zones, the fully virtualised network stack (crossbow), the COMSTAR SCSI (iSCSI/FCoE) target framework, the Fault Management Architecture (FMA), along with a whole host of other advantages, put it significantly ahead of the game. Also thanks to Joyent the illumos kernel supports KVM, something FreeBSD does not.

I spent just a few minutes in the OpenIndiana code base and found it rife with potential issues. For example, in the hsfs file system, there are no pointer assertions to protect against null pointers:

http://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/comm...

lines 158 thru 171... are just one example.

While yes, you could find this anywhere in any code base, we're talking about OpenIndiana. If this kind of issue is present in the file system handler, there's NO way this project is ready for prime time, never mind a production release.

The Solaris kernel isn't great. The only reason anyone's using Illumos based stuff is ZFS and possibly dtrace.

FreeBSD has good ports of ZFS and Dtrace now.

I still like Solaris for SMF, but I consider the policies of Oracle, and the ...uncertainty... of illumos to be important considerations.

What do you think will happen when a NULL pointer is dereferenced?

OpenIndiana is an illumos distribution, like Debian or Gentoo are Linux distributions. Just as Debian and Gentoo aren't authors of the Linux kernel, OpenIndiana is not the author of the illumos kernel.

The illumos kernel is derived from the Oracle Solaris source code tree. Solaris is an enterprise UNIX system used to power some of the largest financial systems in the world.

So if that's not ready for primetime, then perhaps you'd care to elaborate on what is?

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