It seemed like a simple problem to fix

While a bit under the weather last week, I decided to try and fix what at first glance appears to be a simple problem:

need to ship the manpage with exa

Now, exa is a modern file lister, and the package on Tribblix doesn't ship a man page. The reason for that, it turns out, is that there isn't a man page in the source, but you can generate one.

To build the man page requires pandoc. OK, so how to get pandoc, which wasn't available on Tribblix? It's written in Haskell, and I did have a Haskell package.

Only my version of Haskell was a bit old, and wouldn't build pandoc. The build complains that it's too old and unsupported. You can't even build an old version of pandoc, which is a little peculiar.

Off to upgrade Haskell then. You need Haskell to build Haskell, and it has some specific requirements about precisely which versions of Haskell work. I wanted to get to 9.4, which is the last version of Haskell that builds using make (and I'll leave Hadrian for another day). You can't build Haskell 9.4 with 9.2 which it claims to be too new, you have to go back to 9.0.

Fortunately we do have some bootstrap kits for illumos available, so I pulled 9.0 from there, successfully built Haskell, then cabal, and finally pandoc.

Back to exa. At which point you notice that it's been deprecated and replaced by eza. (This is a snag with modern point tools. They can disappear on a whim.)

So let's build eza. At which point I find that the MSRV (Minimum Supported Rust Version) has been bumped to 1.70, and I only had 1.69. Another update required. Rust is actually quite simple to package, you can just download the stable version and package it.

After all this, exa still doesn't have a man page, because it's deprecated (if you run man exa you get something completely different from X.Org). But I did manage to upgrade Haskell and Cabal, I managed to package pandoc, I updated rust, and I added a replacement utility - eza - which does now come with a man page.

When zfs was young

On the Solaris 10 Platinum Beta program, one of the most exciting promised features was ZFS, the new file system.

I was especially interested, given that I was in a data-heavy position at the time. The limits of UFS were painful, we had datasets into several terabytes already - and even the multiterabyte file system support that got added was actually pretty useless because the inode density was so low. We tried QFS and SAM-QFS, and they were pretty appalling too.

ZFS was promised, and didn't arrive. In fact, there were about 4 of us on the beta program who saw the original zfs implementation, and it was quite different from what we have now. What eventually landed as zfs in Solaris was a complete rewrite. The beta itself was interesting - we were sent the driver, 3 binaries, and a 3-line cheatsheet, and that was it. There was a fundamental philosophy here that the whole thing was supposed to be so easy to use and sufficiently obvious that it didn't need a manual, and that was actually true. (It's gotten rather more complex since, to be fair.)

The original version was a bit different in terms of implementation than what you're used to, but not that much. The most obvious change was that originally there wasn't a top-level file system for a pool. You created a pool, and then created your file systems. I'm still not sure which is the correct choice. And there was a separate zacl program to handle the ACLs, which were rather different.

In fact, ACLs have been a nightmare of bad implementations throughout their history on Solaris. I already had previous here, having got the POSIX draft ACL implementation reworked for UFS. The original zfs implementation had default aka inheritable ACLs applied to existing objects in a directory. (If you don't immediately realise how bad that is, think of what this allows you to do with hard links to files.) The ACL implementations have continued to be problematic - consider that zfs allows 5 settings for the aclinherit property as evidence that we're glittering a turd at this point.

Eventually we did get zfs shipped in a Solaris 10 update, and it's been continually developed since then. The openzfs project has given the file system an independent existence, it's now in FreeBSD, you can run it (and it runs well) on Linux, and in other OS variations too.

One of the original claims was that zfs was infinitely scalable. I remember it being suggested that you could create a separate zfs file system for each user. I had to try this, so got together a test system (an Ultra 2 with an A1000 disk array) and started creating file systems. Sure, it got into several thousand without any difficulty, but that's not infinite - think universities or research labs and you can easily have 10,000 or 100,000 users, we had well over 20,000. And it fell apart at that scale. That's before each is an NFS share, too. So that idea didn't fly.

Overall, though, zfs was a step change. The fact that you had a file system that was flexible and easily managed was totally new. The fact that a file system actually returned correct data rather than randomly hoping for the best was years ahead of anything else. Having snapshots that allowed users to recover from accidentally deleted files without waiting days for a backup to be restored dramatically improved productivity. It's win after win, and I can't imagine using anything else for storing data.

Is zfs perfect? Of course not, and to my mind one of the most shocking things is that nothing else has even bothered to try and come close.

There are a couple of weaknesses with zfs (or related to zfs, if I put it more accurately). One is that it's still a single-node file system. While we have distributed storage, we still haven't really matured that into a distributed file system. The second is that while zfs has dragged storage into the 21st century, allowing much more sophisticated and scalable management of data, there hasn't been a corresponding improvement in backup, which is still stuck firmly in the 1980s.

SMF - part of the Solaris 10 legacy

The Service Management Facility, or SMF, integrated extremely late in the Solaris 10 release cycle. We only got one or two beta builds to test, which seemed highly risky for such a key feature.

So there was very little time to gather feedback from users. And something that central really can't be modified once it's released. It had to work first time.

That said, we did manage some improvements. The current implementation of `svcs -x` is largely due to me struggling to work out why a service was broken.

One of the obvious things about SMF is that it relies on manifests written in XML. Yes, that's of its time - there's a lot of software you can date by the file format it uses.

I don't have a particular problem with the use of XML here, to be honest. What's more of a real problem is that the manifest files were presented as a user interface rather than an internal implementation detail, so that users were forced to write XML from scratch with little to no guidance.

There are a lot of good features around SMF.

Just the very basic restart of an application that dies is something that's so blindingly obvious as a requirement in an operating system. So much so that once it existed I refused to support anything that didn't have SMF when I was on call - after all, most of the 3am phone calls were to simply restart a crashed application. And yes, when we upgraded our systems to Solaris 10 with SMF our availability went way up and the on-call load plummeted.

Being able to grant privileges to a service, and just within the context of that service, without having to give privileges to an application (eg set*id) or a user, makes things so much safer. Although in practice it's letting applications bind to privileged ports while running as a regular user, as that's far and away the most common use case.

Dependencies has been a bit of a mixed bag. Partly because working out what the dependencies should be in the first place is just hard to get right, but also because dependency declaration is bidirectional - you can inject a dependency on yourself into another service, and that other service may not respond well, or you can create a circular dependency if the two services are developed independently.

One part of dependency management in services is deciding whether a given service should start or not given the state of other services (such as its dependencies). Ideally, you want strict dependency management. In the real world, systems are messy and complicated, the dependency tree isn't terribly well understood, and some failure modes don't matter. And in many cases you want the system to try and boot as far as possible so you can get in and fix it.

A related problem is that we've ended up with a complex mesh of services because someone had to take the old mess of rc scripts and translate them into something that would work on day 1. And nobody - either at the time or since  - has gone though the services and studied whether the granularity is correct. One other thing - that again has never happened - once we got a good handle on what services there are is to look at whether the services we have are sensible, or whether there's an opportunity to rearchitect the system to do things better, And because all these services are now baked into SMF, it's actually quite difficult to do any major reworking of the system.

Not only that, but because people write SMF manifests, they simply copy something that looks similar to the problem at hand, so bad practices and inappropriate dependency declarations multiply.

This is one example of what I see as the big problem with SMF - we haven't got supporting tools that present the administrator with useful abstractions, so that everything is raw.

In terms of configuration management, SMF is very much a mixed bag. Yes, it guarantees a consistent and reproducible state of the system. The snag is that there isn't really an automated way to capture the essential state of a system and generate something that will reproduce it (either later or elsewhere) - it can be done, but it's essentially manual. (Backing up the state is a subset of this problem.)

It's clear that there were plans to extend the scope of SMF. Essentially, to be the Solaris version of the Windows registry. Thankfully (see also systemd for where this goes wrong) that hasn't happened much.

In fact, SMF hasn't really involved in any material sense since the day it was introduced. It's very much stuck in time.

There were other features that were left open. For example, there's the notion of the scope of SMF, and the only one available right now is the "localhost" scope - see the smf(7) manual in illumos - so in theory there could be other, non-localhost, scopes. And there was the notion of monitor methods, which never appeared but I can imagine solving a range of niggling application issues I've seen over the years.