Wandering Thoughts archives

2017-04-24

What we need from an Illumos-based distribution

It started on Twitter:

@thatcks: Current status: depressing myself by looking at the status of Illumos distributions. There's nothing else like OmniOS out there.

@ptribble: So what are the values of OmniOS that are important to you and you feel aren't present in other illumos distributions?

This is an excellent question from Peter Tribble of Tribblix and it deserves a more elaborate answer than I could really give it on Twitter. So here's my take on what we need from an Illumos distribution.

  • A traditional Unix server environment that will do NFS fileservice with ZFS, because we already have a lot of tooling and expertise in running such an Illumos-based environment and our current environment has a very particular setup due to local needs. If we have to completely change how we design and operate NFS fileservice (for example to move to a more 'storage appliance' environment), the advantages of continuing with Illumos mostly go away. If we're going to have to drastically redesign our environment no matter what, maybe the simpler redesign is 'move to ZFS on FreeBSD doing NFS service as a traditional Unix server'.

  • A distribution that is actively 'developed', by which I mean that it incorporates upstream changes from Illumos and other sources on a regular basis and the installer is updated as necessary and so on. Illumos is not a static thing; there's important evolution in ZFS fixes and improvements, hardware drivers, and various other components.

  • Periodic stable releases that are supported with security updates and important bug fixes for a few years but that do not get wholesale rolling updates from upstream Illumos. We need this because testing, qualifying, and updating to a whole new release (with a wide assortment of changes) is a very large amount of work and risk. We can't possibly do it on a regular basis, such as every six months; even once a year is too much. Two years of support is probably our practical minimum.

    We could probably live with 'security updates only', although it'd be nice to be able to get high priority bug fixes as well (here I'm thinking of things that will crash your kernel or cause ZFS corruption, which are very close to 'must fix somehow' issues for people running ZFS fileservers).

    We don't need the ability to upgrade from stable release to stable release. For various reasons we're probably always going to upgrade by installing from scratch on new system disks and then swapping things around in downtimes.

  • An installer that lets us install systems from USB sticks or DVD images and doesn't require complicated backend infrastructure. We're not interested in big complex environments where we have to PXE-boot initial installs of servers, possibly with various additional systems to auto-configure them and tell them what to do.

In a world with pkgsrc and similar sources of pre-built and generally maintained packages, I don't think we need the distribution itself to have very many packages (I'm using the very specific 'we' here, meaning my group and our fileservers). Sure, it would be convenient for us if the distribution shipped with Postfix and Python and a few other important things, but it's not essential the way the core of Illumos is. While it would be ideal if the distribution owned everything important the way that Debian, FreeBSD, and so on do, it doesn't seem like Illumos distributions are going to have that kind of person-hours available, even for a relatively small package collection.

With that said I don't need for all packages to come from pkgsrc or whatever; I'm perfectly happy to have a mix of maintained packages from several sources, including the distribution in either their main source or an 'additional packages we use' repository. Since there's probably not going to be a plain-server NFS fileserver focused Illumos distribution, I'd expect any traditional Unix style distribution to have additional interests that lead to them packaging and maintaining some extra packages, whether that's for web service or X desktops or whatever.

(I also don't care about the package format that the distribution uses. If sticking with IPS is the easy way, that's fine. Neither IPS nor pkgsrc are among my favorite package management systems, but I can live with them.)

Out of all of our needs, I expect the 'stable releases' part to be the biggest problem. Stable releases are a hassle for distribution maintainers (or really for maintainers of anything); you have to maintain multiple versions and you may have to backport a steadily increasing amount of things over time. The amount of pain involved in them is why we're probably willing to live with only security updates for a relatively minimal set of packages and not demand backported bugfixes.

(In practice we don't expect to hit new bugs once our fileservers have gone into production and been stable, although it does happen every once in a while.)

Although 10G Ethernet support is very important to us in general, I'm not putting it on this list because I consider it a general Illumos issue, not something that's going to be specific to any particular distribution. If Illumos as a whole has viable 10G Ethernet for us, any reasonably up to date distribution should pick it up, and we don't want to use a distribution that's not picking those kind of things up.

Sidebar: My current short views on other Illumos distributions

Peter Tribble also asked what was missing in existing Illumos distributions. Based on an inspection of the Illumos wiki's options, I can split the available distributions into three sets:

  • OpenIndiana and Tribblix are developed and more or less traditional Unix systems, but don't appear to have stable releases that are maintained for a couple of years; instead there are periodic new releases with all changes included.

  • SmartOS, Nexenta, and napp-it are Illumos based but as far as I can tell aren't in the form of a traditional Unix system. (I'm not sure if napp-it is actively updated, but the other two are.)

  • the remaining distributions don't seem to be actively developed and may not have maintained stable releases either (I didn't look deeply).

Hopefully you can see why OmniOS hit a sweet spot for us; it is (or was) actively maintained, it has 'long term stable' releases that are supported for a few years, and you get a traditional Unix OS environment and a straightforward installation system.

solaris/IllumosDistributionNeeds written at 22:18:16; Add Comment

Corebird and coming to a healthier relationship with Twitter

About two months ago I wrote about my then views on the Corebird Twitter client. In that entry I said that Corebird was a great client for checking in on Twitter and skimming through it, but wasn't my preference for actively following Twitter; for that I still wanted Choqok for various reasons. You know what? It turns out that I was wrong. I now feel that Corebird is both a better Linux Twitter client in general and that it's a better Twitter client for me in specific. Unsurprisingly, it's become the dominant Twitter client that I use.

Corebird is mostly a better Twitter client in general because it has much better support for modern Twitter features, even if it's not perfect and there are things from Choqok that I wish it did (even as options). It has niceties like displaying quoted tweets inline and letting me easily and rapidly look at attached media (pictures, animations, etc), and it's just more fluid in general (even if it has some awkward and missing bits, like frankly odd scrolling via the keyboard). Corebird has fast, smooth updates of new tweets more or less any time you want, and it can transparently pull in older tweets as you scroll backwards to a relatively impressive level. Going back to Choqok now actually feels clunky and limited, even though it has features that I theoretically rather want (apart from the bit where I know that several of those features are actually bad for me).

(Corebird's ability to display more things inline makes a surprising difference when skimming Twitter, because I can see more without having to click on links and spawn things in my browser and so on. I also worked out how to make Corebird open up multiple accounts on startup; it's hiding in the per-account settings.)

Corebird is a better Twitter client for me in specific because it clearly encourages me to have a healthier approach to Twitter, the approach I knew I needed a year ago. It's not actually good for me to have a Twitter client open all the time and to try to read everything, and it turns out that Corebird's lack of some features actively encourages me to not try to do this. There's no visible unread count to prod me to pay attention, there is no marker of read versus unread to push me to trying to read all of the unread Tweets one by one, and so on. That Corebird starts fast and lets me skim easily (and doesn't hide itself away in the system tray) also encourages me to close it and not pay attention to Twitter for a while. If I do keep Corebird running and peek in periodically, its combination of features make it easy and natural to skim, rapidly scan, or outright skip the new tweets, so I'm pretty sure I spend less time catching up than I did in Choqok.

(Fast starts matter because I know I can always come back easily if I really want to. As I have it configured, Choqok took quite a while to start up and there were side effects of closing it down with unread messages. In Corebird, startup is basically instant and I know that I can scroll backwards through my timeline to where I was, if I care enough. Mostly I don't, because I'm looking at Twitter to skim it for a bit, not to carefully read everything.)

The net result is that Corebird has turned checking Twitter into what is clearly a diversion, instead of something to actively follow. I call up Corebird when I want to spend some time on Twitter, and then if things get busy there is nothing to push me to get back to it and maybe I can quit out of it in order to make Twitter be even further away (sometimes Corebird helps out here by quietly crashing). This is not quite the 'stop fooling yourself you're not multitasking here' experience that using Twitter on my phone is, but it feels closer to it than Choqok did. Using Corebird has definitely been part of converting Twitter from a 'try to read it all' experience to a 'dip in and see what's going on' one, and the latter is much better for me.

(It turns out that I was right and wrong when I wrote about how UI details mattered for my Twitter experience. Back then I said that a significantly different client from Choqok would mean that my Twitter usage would have to change drastically. As you can see, I was right about that; my Twitter usage has changed drastically. I was just wrong about that necessarily being a bad thing.)

linux/CorebirdViewsII written at 00:29:40; Add Comment


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