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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

Good things in open source Solaris:

ZFS implementation is rock solid

Excellent fault isolation - even on x64, I had some ECC ram that went bad; it isolated the bad bank, stopped using it, and continued. RAM showed as total minus the amount.

Zones as containers, great for many purposes

Excellent performance under memory pressure

Bad: documentation on some things, less hardware support, some aspects are quite different from Linux/BSD way

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The hardware support is thin, so it makes sense to run it in a VM. I run mine inside VMWare ESXi, which has excellent hardware support. I give all the storage to the OpenSolaris VM, which in turn re-exports iSCSI volumes that are used by the other VMs. Solaris's iSCSI daemon is rock-solid, as is their CIFS server. It's miles ahead of the network storage daemons available for Linux. And of course it's all backed by ZFS.

They have a separate cifs daemon vis à vis samba? Does it run on Linux? :)

It does not run on Linux, because parts of it are implemented in the opensolaris kernel. It is dramatically better than Samba.

For more concrete information on hardware support check out the Illumos hardware compatibility list https://illumos.org/hcl/

Is ZFS more solid than in Linux?

Linux does the same with bad RAM, and you'll often see that in large installations. (Monitoring should check you have the number of DIMMs and CPUs expected, modulo a fiddle factor for reported memory size, which depends on BIOS.)

Linux chipkill ECC support is a crapshoot. Intel redesigned it all for Skylake and later CPUs and Linux still hasn't caught up with the changes. Some of it mostly works on pre-Skylake, but often doesn't. I've seen Linux killing processes that have a bad physical page mapped, but the process just gets killed in a loop because the kernel is too stupid to actually take the page offline.

So, does IllumOS support Skylake properly? Anyhow, the implication that it's unique in handling bad memory is unfounded. (I haven't run Skylake or SunOS/Opensolaris at any scale, but I have substantial experience with large Linux-based HPC systems with memory problems and not hit such problems.)

I seriously doubt that illumos has the edac sorted out on newer parts. That's why i recommend running it in a VM.

Is ZFS more solid than in Linux?

Yes, considering ZFS was originally developed by Sun for Solaris. It's been 8 years since I've been a Solaris admin, but we ran production DB workloads on JBODs with ZFS with no problems.

Though I've not run ZFS on linux myself, I've heard that many of its issues stemmed around the fact that due to CDDL/GPL incompatibilities, they couldn't have ZFS in the kernel until very recently.

potato potato. They are using (some of) the ZFS on Linux code at this point anyway.

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