On 10/29/06, Jens Elkner <elkner at cs.uni-magdeburg.de> wrote:
> > For example, let's say we take a radical approach
> > and go with a completely new packaging scheme, in
> > Nevada.
>
> > How will this impact people who want to
> > upgrade from Solaris 10 or Solaris 9.
>
> Who really cares?
Most of the commercial and government sector who can't take
the downtime to completely rebuild every server when a new OS release
comes out.
> Its a completely new system, so one has to bite once in the
> sour apple and has to make a fresh install.
No, in most cases it is _not_ a completely new system. We have
servers here that have seen 2 or 3 major OS upgrades.
> Windows users do that all the time (even when they do not
> upgrade to a new version ;-)).
Since when is the Windows method the one to emulate ? Just
reboot and if that doesn't fix the problem reload the OS again ...
> So I think, it probably has not a big impact - might be unusual,
> but probably not more. And if they see, that they really get something
> new, modern, fast and a companion DVD with a lot of "uncommon"
> software they might need (of course in a little bit better quality than
> the current one), small wounds will heal very fast. BTW: Has
> somebody ever made a survey, who really needs live upgrades and
> who actually does it? I would guess, this is a big savings potential.
It is very clear that your perspective is academic. We use
Live Upgrade all the time. We have been LUing 8 to 9 and now we are
LUing 9 to 10. I was able to upgrade our six backup servers with
effectively no downtime. We run backups and restores all day as well
as night. I could not have done that without Live Upgrade.
> > Until recently we supported upgrades from 3 previous
> > releases, which meant we had to support Solaris 8
> > too. I am not sure what kind of backward
> > compatibility is required by Linux distros like RHAT
> > or Suse.
>
> Not sure, what your defintion of "backward comaptibility" is.
> The common practice I see (some small companies + LUG
> members/students), if there is a new release, a fresh install is
> made and thus all software runs as it should ...
In the Linux realm, where almost all software is repackaged
for each new release of the Kernel, that may work. Sun has a 'binary
compatibility gaurantee', that if an application is written and
compiled according to some basic development guidelines, it will run
withotu modification on the currently supported releases of Solaris.
In general we have found that as long as an application doesn't use
any of the 'new' features of an OS version, it runs just fine on the
new OS release. In other words, Solaris 10 is supposed to run any and
all software that was written (to the rules) that runs on Solrais 9 or
8.
Now, having said that, we usually wait for the application
vendor to 'support' the new release of Soalris before we upgrade to
it. The backward compatibility makes the certification of applications
on the new release of Solaris much easier and faster. It almost always
takes the form of testing and not rewriting of code.
--
Paul Kraus
