OpenSolaris: Noted on zfs-discuss

Since the break, I’ve been working with Gary, Steve, Derek and Alan—plus Dermot and Bonnie, neither of whom blog—on the source code repository hosting for opensolaris.org, which I expect will come out of Beta pretty soon. The hosting model we worked out showed its versatility last week, when we added Mercurial support to the test site with only a few hours of work. (We had been doing the initial development using only Subversion repositories.) There are still a few bugs to fix and a few features to add, but adding this capability will take our open development effort a sizeable step forward.

In fact, I need to put the SCM work aside soon and join in the structuring of the final review of the OpenSolaris constitution. If you’re interested, see the Governance category at genunix.org.

But I’m still keeping up with the mail flows. One particularly interesting alias is zfs-discuss, which is a mix of the ZFS developers, early adopters, and potential deployers. There’s been discussions on reliability, Thumper, and a few issues people have had using zfs(1M) and zpool(1M). Occasionally, something more curious pops up, like Jim Connors’s posting, where he reveals

… I have a version of Solaris 10 U2 with ZFS functionality with a disk footprint of about 60MB. Creating a miniroot based upon this image, it can be compressed to under 30MB. Currently, I load this image onto a USB keyring and boot from the USB device running the Solaris miniroot out of RAM.

Neat.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris zfs Mercurial Subversion ]