#zfs send #zfsonlinux file system on linux VM on #smartos using zfs volumes for the VM to zfs recv on a smart machine. Got that? — Max Bruning (@mrbruning) April 27, 2013
It’s Google Summer of Code time again! Know any students who’d like to work on truly great technology? Send ‘em here.
A Smarter OS - video: Joyent’s Ben Rockwood and Blake Irvin and Eric Saxby of Wanelo talk SmartOS on the Foodfight show. With special guest appearance by Bryan Horstmann-Allen of SourceFire. Why do these folks love and use SmartOS? DTrace, SMF, ZFS…? Let them count the ways!
Technical Videos – “An up-to-date listing of nearly 400 technical videos I have been involved in, one way or another, in the six years I’ve been working with Solaris, illumos, SmartOS, and related people, technologies, and companies. They are listed in reverse chron order by date of the event…” Deirdré Straughan
“Startup Pluribus Networks is proposing a top-of-rack server/switch combination that can run applications, provide storage and provision services like DNS, DHCP, load balancing, firewalls, analytics and packet capture. Through the company’s operating system and hypervisor software, two or more of these server/switch combinations can create a large, virtual data center fabric with network virtualization and software-based control with a variety of proprietary and standard APIs.” – Jim Duffy, Network World. Why is this on the SmartOS blog? Because one of the company’s founders is Sunay Tripathi, the father of the Crossbow network virtualization technology that’s in SmartOS.
Joyent’s Ben Rockwood and Blake Irvin and Eric Saxby of Wanelo talk SmartOS on the Foodfight show. With special guest appearance by Bryan Horstmann-Allen of SourceFire.
Why do these folks love and use SmartOS? DTrace, SMF, ZFS…
SmartOS (and Linux) /proc Tools - “One of the many differences between Linux and Solaris-based systems is the /proc file system. On Linux, this is documented proc(5), and for SmartOS, proc(4).” – Max Bruning
Bruning Questions: ZFS Record Size - “”I thought ZFS record size is variable: by default it’s 128K, but write 2KB of data (assuming nothing else writes), then only 2KB writes to disk (excluding metadata). What does record size actually enforce?” – Max Bruning answers this question!
Training: DTrace: Core Features and Performance Analysis
dates: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 at 9:00 AM - Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 5:00 PM (PDT)
location: Joyent, One Embarcadero Center, 9th Floor, San Francisco CA 94111
This course introduces DTrace and teaches common performance analysis techniques. It is intended for system support staff, system administrators, developers, and anyone who would like to quickly learn DTrace and some practical methods for applying it. This course teaches core features of DTrace that are available in many enterprise and cloud computing environments, and is taught from a Joyent SmartMachine, a restricted environment that provides these features. Kernel internal analysis is not covered. (An advanced course for kernel-level DTrace is planned in the future.)
This course makes extensive use of labs, where performance issues based on real-world cases are simulated in isolation for the students to solve, with help from the instructor. For some this is the highlight of the course, putting the methodologies learned into practice and seeing how they work first-hand.
Why SmartOS in my lab? – “I want an uncomplicated and fast route from CPU to storage with as few storage widgets between them as necessary. I want a compute/storage server that is as fast to set up as an iPhone. I want computational capability as close to my data as possible.” – Christopher Hogue
CDDL License
Since Oracle has shut down opensolaris.org, and with it the canonical copy of the CDDL, you should know that
it’s in the source tree on GitHub and illumos.org, and the header on each file refers to that first source. You can also find copies at:
Troy Dietrich, a new member of Joyent’s cloud operations team, did a series of blog posts on playing with SmartOS in a VBox environment, with lots of detail on how he set it up:
Intro SmartOS Setup pt 1: the general expectations, layout, and router infrastructure VM (IVM) for our SmartOS sandbox environment
Installing SVR4 packages on SmartOS – “we do continue to ship the pkgtrans utility with SmartOS, and this is our gateway into converting SVR4 packages into more useful formats. The rest of this post will explore how we can do that.” – Jonathan Perkin
Finding straggler ZFS datasets in SmartOS – “Do you use SmartOS and often wonder, “Exactly how many ZFS orphans have I left floating around?” — it happens.” - Jamie Alquiza
Bruning Questions: Where’s My Memory Going? – “While teaching a combined SDC, SmartOS Internals, ZFS Internals, and DTrace course over the last 2 weeks, a student noted that he thought he was seeing a memory leak…” – Max Bruning
Other schedulers? Illumos? – “The more I looked at the [illumos scheduler] code, the more it felt like it pretty much did everything the Linux kernel has been trying to do for ages. Not only that, but it’s built like an aircraft, whereas ours [Linux] looks like a garage job with duct tape by comparison.” – Con Kolivas
