Saturday, September 4, 2010

EON ZFS takes the road to Illumos

By now Oracle's leaked letter and the fate of Opensolaris, source gates closing, is probably well known. It seems that Solaris 11 will be Oracle's sole OS focus, and while it's unknown if it will be open source or not, the opensolaris community and it's users were ignored, abandoned and left facing a nasty dose of hard realities.

The options left for the opensolaris community (including EON ZFS Storage) were bleak. Sun Microsystems was built on great innovation and thanks to a previous Solaris kernel engineer Garrett D'Amore and the open-source effort called illumos, there is new hope. It's stated that illumos will be 100% community driven and owned and many smart people who are committed to opensolaris and ZFS have signed on to breathe life into this effort and free our reliance from Oracle's handouts.

EON is testing the road to illumos and I have compiled the nightly a couple of times. Some build times:
297mins/~5 hrs    Quad core Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz w/2GB RAM
52mins/~1 hr      Dual X5570 @ 2.93Ghz w/4GB RAM
The journey should be interesting ...