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What would we need to see from Illumos for it to qualify as being great like Solaris was?
by ryao 10y ago
What would we need to see from Illumos for it to qualify as being great like Solaris was?
- Annatar 10y agoIt's already great: SmartOS is the best one can get when it comes to running a cloud, public or private, and if that cloud must, without compromise, function correctly in the face of even the most severe failures, hardware or software wise. Zones + ZFS + fault management architecture (fmadm(1M) / svcadm(1M)) make it possible. Have a piece of software which must run on GNU/Linux? No problem, it'll happily run inside of an lx-branded zone with zero performance penalty, where both it (/usr) and the illumos native commands will be available (/native), so one can keep one's cake and eat it, too. Otherwise - there are 14,000 packages ready to run, something Solaris never, ever had. It's not a desktop operating system, it doesn't have that kind of a mass adoption. But on the other hand, when one considers just how Windows-like GNU/Linux became (systemd), it's better that it doesn't: it does one thing and does it well, and that's powering the high performance, massive clouds. For desktop, there's macOS, and that's fine.
- RantyDave 10y agoFWIW the packages are essentially NetBSD and the dependencies can be spectacular (pkgin in git). But lx works really, really well.