BFU, RIP
20 May '10 - 00:00 by benrFor those of you who may be unclear on what BFU is, it has become short for Blazing Fast Upgrades. The Solaris ("Nevada OS/Network Consolidation", to be specific) source traditionally had the ability to output BFU images, which are really just cpio archives that can be overlaid on an installed system. The idea was to allow developers to quickly and painlessly (as possible) update to the new builds without the usual patch hassles or doing a full re-install.
For some time now you've had the option to download CD/DVD images of OpenSolaris (or SX:CE, or whatever), the source and tools themselves, or BFU images. When you combine BFU with the ACR (Automatic Conflict Resolution) tool, you could keep ugprading from build to build for a while before the works got so gummed up that you needed to reinstall.
You'll notice that snv_139 and snv_140 didn't include BFU's, making me wonder if this was a temporary problem or a permanent change.
Turns out BFU's are, essentially, gone for good. The source, supposedly, can still produce them, but they will no longer be provided with the source releases and very soon they won't be possible at all.
In March, Liane Praza announced in a Flag Day report, among other things, that:
"BFU is still available (though ACR is not), but pkg image-update is the preferred testing method. Support for BFU is expected to be removed in a few builds."
That was March, "in a few builds" is now.
I'm informed by James McPherson that following the integration of the IPS packaging changes, the onu ("Os/Net Update") tool will be replacing BFU, preforming essentially the same function.
If you want to keep up on all the deep changes that are happening to ON because of IPS, please subscribe to the on-ips-dev mailing list.
I hope you can start to understand just how major a change IPS really is... its not a topical cream for Solaris... its a heart transplant.
To me, a heart transplant would be ripping out the OpenSolaris kernel or libc and replacing it with some other thing. IPS, otoh, is more like skin – new packaging, same innards.
Oh, and until we do actually remove $SRC/tools/scripts/bfu.sh, you can still use the ‘a’ flag in your NIGHTLY_OPTIONS and produce BFU archives. Though why you would want to do that, when we’ve got onu (which is written to do things intelligently in an IPS world), I don’t know.
James C. McPherson - 20 May '10 - 02:56
James: I like the heart transplant analogy because, there is a lot of prepratory work, a lot of complications leading up to the proceedure, then a long surgery and weeks of recovery…. but, in the end, your back to your old self, just with some new leasons to learn about how to treat yourself.From an end-user point of view, its a major change, but largely superficial in appearance, at least from your point of view as an insider. (Admins in the field are not so happy as you guys are inside.) But for anyone interested in the code, this is a big nasty changeover. I gave up last night after 3 hours trying to build a nightly clean.
benr - 20 May '10 - 03:41
How can I/we help you build nightly if you don’t tell us what problems you’re having? Did you email about the build issues to on-discuss or a similar mailing list? The only traffic I saw from you in #opensolaris last night related to build failures, only comments regarding your IPS blog post.James C. McPherson - 20 May '10 - 03:54
@James: Hey now… I wasn’t trying to offend you. I didn’t have time to work out what was up such that I could make a coherent request on the the lists, and frankly I’m busy enough with work that I shouldn’t really be messing around with it anyway. :)You are always generous and helpful and I’ve greatly appreciated the posts you’ve made on the lists recently regarding ON, they’ve been great.
benr - 20 May '10 - 06:36
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So, since they’re replacing BFU with IPS as the preferred method, does that mean they’ll provide an IPS repo with b140 available? I’m still staring at b134 at [[http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/en/inde..]].Tony (Email) - 20 May '10 - 18:27
Yep… and they managed to completely screw Solaris up with it.It time to start migrating to Linux. I’d go to FreeBSD, but it doesn’t have any clustering software, so it looks like CentOS is in the cards.
UX-admin - 21 May '10 - 02:34
“To me, a heart transplant would be ripping out the OpenSolaris kernel or libc and replacing it with some other thing. IPS, otoh, is more like skin – new packaging, same innards.”Wow. Now isn’t that a point of view from a Sun perspective.
What about all Solaris customers who, like myself, have hundreds or even thousands of packages?
What about customers who depend on Flash™ and have developed processes and change and lifecycle management around it?
Just to get one package working correctly is a tremendous amount of work – architecture, engineering, documentation, testing, debugging, testing… and now, all of that work must be redone, because eventually SVR4 packaging will be ditched?
What about the costs of this migration? How much is all that rework going to cost your existing customers (myself included)?
What about LACK OF FUNCTIONALITY of IPS with respect to SVR4 packaging?
It’s easy to call something “skin” when the only view is the one from inside of the organization, but there are other perspectives and issues to this.
To me, it seems like blatant disregard of the situation in the trenches, or is it perhaps narrowmindedness of Sun engineering? The only action ever needed in IPS is addition or removal of drivers?
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