Sun Microsystems brought out an updated version of
OpenSolaris Monday that includes Project Crossbow, a network stack
for a multiprocessor and multithreaded approach that will result in
faster networking.
The new release is called OpenSolaris 2009.6, a nomenclature that
borrows from Ubuntu's practice of using the year and month of the
year that a new release comes out.
The OpenSolaris 2009.6 networking stack has been rewritten to
take advantage of large-scale, multiprocessor servers functioning
on a high-speed network. The new Project Crossbow capabilities take
advantage of multithreading to speed instruction passing and
message handling on heavily virtualized servers. In addition, it's
able to generate virtual network interfaces, allowing more virtual
machines to run on each piece of hardware, said John Fowler,
executive VP of systems at Sun.
The ZFS files system in OpenSolaris has been enhanced to
recognize flash storage devices and designate them as read and
write accelerators. They can be automatically managed by ZFS to
improve performance on writes to storage or retrieving data from
flash storage.
Support for Microsoft's CIFS file system has been added as a
peer to ZFS. The move allows OpenSolaris to support Windows
semantics for security, naming, and access rights, which allows
transparent file use across Windows, Linux, and Solaris operating
environments, Fowler said in Monday's announcement at CommunityOne,
a Sun developer conference in San Francisco.
Sun also added high-performance support of iSCSI and Fibre
Channel block protocols into the OpenSolaris kernel. Any storage
topology can now work with systems running on an OpenSolaris
server, Fowler said. The virtualization capabilities built into
OpenSolaris include enhanced Containers operation, where a server's
resources are partitioned for use by virtual machines running under
one shared copy of the operating system. The approach is considered
lighter weight than hypervisor-supervised virtualization, where
each VM on a server includes its own copy of the operating system.
OpenSolaris also supports VMs running under Sun's version of the
Xen open source hypervisor, xVM.
Sun for the first time published claims of OpenSolaris
performance advantages over Linux. It said in a statement that
OpenSolaris delivers 35% better memory management, 22% better
integer arithmetic, and 18% better multithread scheduling compared
with "the latest Linux releases." The company didn't specify
whether Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell's SUSE, Ubuntu Linux,
or all three were included in the comparison.