Switching from Solaris to Linux has become much easier in the last two years, with Linux developments in ZFS, Zones, and DTrace. I’ve been contributing (out of necessity), including porting my DTraceToolkit tools to Linux, which also work on BSD. What follows are topics that may be of interest to anyone looking to migrate their systems and skillset: scan these to find topics that interest you.
ZFS
ZFS is available for Linux via the zfsonlinux and OpenZFS projects, and more recently was included in Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution: Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS (April 2016). It uses a Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) to provide a Solaris-kernel interface on Linux, so that unmodified ZFS code can execute.
My company uses ZFS on Linux in production, and I’ve been the go-to person for deep ZFS problems. It feels largely the same, except kstats are in /proc/spl/kstat/zfs/arcstats, and I debug it with Linux tracing tools instead of DTrace (more on that next). There have been some issues on Linux, but overall it’s been ok, especially given how hard we push ZFS. We’ve used it for our container hosts (codename Titus) that do frequent snapshots, use send/recv, etc.
Read more at Brendan Gregg’s Blog
