Evil Marketing

As a techie I'm always stunned by IBM marketing... Then how many times have I read in IBM's manuals that Solaris supports only 32 LUNs or why Opterons are bad and Xeons are better (2 years ago) just because they didn't sell them back then. I don't know about you but I always value honesty. While marketing has its own rules IBM often cross the line. Too often for me.
Maybe its just that 'nobody got fired for buying from IBM' attitude in companies were techies have no say at all what company is buying and those managers are buying IBM marketing.

I don't want to say their HW is crap - honestly quite often it's good. It's just most over-hyped HW on the planet I guess and their technical documentation is hard to distinguish from marketing one. Then you should definitely check yourself all IBM's claims regarding that HW as you will quite often find it doesn't actually do what they said it will...

I totally agree with below statement:

Moral: Be VERY VERY CAREFUL when you read big blue.

Niagara-2 Servers

Finally Niagara-2 servers have arrived. Check T5120, T5220 and T6320. What I really like about those systems is (except T2 cpu of course) the number of disks you can put as internal disks.

The architecture document is also helpful.

Compilers

I've been playing with sysbench on Solaris SPARC lately and... it surprised me how big difference compiler can make - ok I haven't been trying all the options but still...
So lets look at sysbench/cpu test - what is a difference if sysbench was compiled using gcc version 3.4.3 (-O2, -O3 basically produces similar results) vs Sun Studio 12 (-fast)


It is about 7x performance difference!

But lets look into memory test and I get mixed results - with one thread cc produced faster code, with more threads it produced slower one.


It's possible that after tweaking gcc parameters one could get similar performance to sun studio compilers (or vice verse in mem test) however people tend to compile applications with basic parameters usually. I wouldn't expect such big difference between these two compilers with larger applications... but you never know.

I'm not going into any holy-compiler wars - it's just that sometimes one can be surprised.

Encrypting ZFS

Thanks to Darren J Moffat we now have an alpha support for cryptography in ZFS.
Only bfu archives are provided for now - so if you want something more polished you've got to wait more time. Now is a good time to provide feedback, comments, etc.

Phase 1 Functionality implemented

• Per pool wrapping key (DSKEK)
• per dataset keytype.
  • pwrap: Randomly generated per dataset key wrapped by DSKEK
  • pool: Use DSKEK directly. Will likely NOT be supported in final release.
• zpool keymgr load|unload|status
  • passphrase & key in file only
• Per dataset encryption
  • NOTE: use only aes-128-cbc, aes-256-cbc
  • aes-192-cbc is broken
• Encrypted snapshots
• Clones "inherit" crypto properties regardless of path hierarchy clone promotion also works
• Encryption is a create time only property
• Encrypted datasets don't mount with 'zfs mount -a' unless key is present
• pool history records key creation/clone.

Xen integrated into snv_75

Finally Xen port to Solaris has been integrated into build 75. It's called xVM.

Software Crypto Performance

Interesting results - Solaris 10 08/07 (update 4) on v440, no crypto card.

openssl speed rsa1024 -engine pkcs11 -multi N
openssl speed rsa1024 -multi N


Where N was 1 2 4 8



As you can see even without having crypto card there's huge performance increase by using pkcs11 - different algorithm implementation and different compiler?

Data Corruption

CERN has published a paper on data corruption in their data center.
Here you can find some comment and nice summary for those findings.

ZFS

Niagara-2 details

Interesting article on latest UltraSparc-T2 (aka Niagara-2). Definitely worth reading.

SPARC64-VI

Build 74 of Nevada integrates support for 4-core SPARC64 CPU:

Solaris Nevada supports Jupiter CPU for OPL platform.
Jupiter CPU is a 4 core variant of the current shipping
Olympus-C CPU, which has 2 cores.  Both Olympus-C and
Jupiter has 2 CPU strands per CPU core.

Official name for Jupiter CPU is "SPARC64-VII".
Official name for current Olympus-C CPU is "SPARC64-VI".
Official name for OPL platform is "Sun SPARC Enterprise Mx000".

Sun to Acquire Lustre

That is interesting:

Sun Microsystems Expands High Performance Computing Portfolio With Definitive Agreement to Acquire Assets of Cluster File Systems, Including the Lustre File System

Solaris 10 Update 4

After some delays it's finally here - Solaris 10 08/07 (update 4).
Some new features in update 4 below - check for all of them in What's New.

• NSS & nscd enhacements (see Sparks project)
• iSCSI Targer support
• ZFS built-in iSCSI target support (similar to sharenfs)
  
• SATA tagged queuing
• IP Instances for Zones (separate IP stack for zones)
• ability to modify routing, packet filtering, network interfaces within a zone
  
• Zone's resource limits enhacements
• Dtrace support in a zone
• Compact Flash (CF) support - ability to boot Solaris from CF
• NVidia accelerated gfx driver included out of the box

IBM to distribute Solaris

That's an interesting news. First IBM and Sun started to support Solaris x86 on IBM's x86 blade servers, then HP again started to support Solaris x86 on most of its x86 servers, then early this year Intel joined Open Solaris, and now:

IBM and Sun announced that IBM will distribute the Solaris operating system (OS) and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x servers and Blade Center servers. Sun President and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and IBM Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Bill Zeitler, jointly presented the news during a press conference on August 16, 2007. This news follows Intel's endorsement of Solaris in January. Today, the Solaris OS is supported on more than 820 x86-based platforms and more than 3000 x86-based applications.

Read more.

Also see Jonathan's blog entry on the announcement.

Niagara2

Finally Sun introduced Niagara-2 CPU - see the announcement.

Trusted System with one click?

I've been going thru latest heads-ups for Nevada and found this. In the past we had Trusted Systems which were entirely separate system installs. Then with Trusted Extensions in Solaris 10U3 you could get a Trusted System by just installing your software. Now all is required is a one command... I'm a little bit oversimplifying here of course but still looks like we're getting Trusted Systems features being more and more part of a standard operating system.

DTrace vs. SystemTap

No, no more comparisons - every one who has actually try both just a little bit know it doesn't really make sense to compare them. SystemTap is just another toy noone is using in a production and for a good reasons.
Nevertheless if you are interested in some background of DTrace vs. SystemTap read this blog entry.