Re:The Day “/Proc” Died
by roryrjb on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @03:18PM
(#20338458)
I've never heard of mdb before. I mean I've never actually used Solaris (OpenSolaris/illumos to be specific) for anything other than a few experiments here and there but nothing in production. But I've been intrigued by it mostly due to watching talks by Bryan Cantrill. It seems that at least Joyent bets heavily on it, and it seems that's mostly due to ZFS. There's also DTrace in this area, again haven't used it, but I've been itching to use bpftrace on Linux as an equivalent. Anyway, what I really came to ask is, who uses Solaris or illumos? Does it have a future? How relevant is it?
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I've been using illumos on and off since it was called "OpenSolaris" and illumos is rapidly becoming less relevant just due to the tiny ecosystem. dtrace and mdb are both great tools, but it's getting to the point where ZFS on Linux (which possibly can't even be shipped as a binary without violating the Linux EULA) is seeing more usage than all other downstream consumers (and ZFS/FreeBSD was probably a wider usage than Illumos for a long while now).
Ultimately being a libre *nix that is better in a few ways than Linux seems to be a long-term losing proposition, as Linux will eventually check all the boxes you (even if it's not quite as nice) thus steadily shrinking your niche.
> the Linux EULA
What are you talking about? This isn't a thing that exists as far as I'm aware.