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There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris i

by snw 9y ago

There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions: - SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1] - OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2] - OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3] - Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4] Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine. [1] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS [2] http://www.omniosce.org http://www.omniosce.org [3] https://www.openindiana.org https://www.openindiana.org [4] http://www.tribblix.org http://www.tribblix.org

cryptonector 9y ago
The nostalgia I feel is for Sun, for MPK17, for the people I got to work with, and the technology. Of those things only Sun is gone, but the people scattered, and technology, though still vibrant, is still always at risk -- it depends too much on Bryan Cantrill and friends to keep it going, while the Linux crowd blissfully ignores all the good ideas and reinvents every wheel badly. We're in a dark ages with a sliver of light. We might be in it for a while. People who have never used ZFS, SMF, DTrace, or FMA, have no idea that they are stuck in the dark.
samoright 9y ago
How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?
- rhinoceraptor 9y ago
  You can run docker containers on hardware instead of on virtual machines.
  - Annatar 9y ago
    ...And unlike on Linux, it treats the entire datacenter as one giant machine.
- snw 9y ago
  In my case illumos provided two things: - zones allowed for a much higher deployment density and better utilisation of our hardware than other virtualization technology would have. - zfs snapshots. We've integrated those into our product and when a customer messes up they now have button to instantly restore to a known good state. Doing both of these things would have been a lot harder on another os.
- mysterydip 9y ago
  A different OS can solve some of the pain points of the mainstream options. Depending on your business, the features a different OS brings could have a large impact on performance or stability. Potential areas for improvement could be anything from filesystem to process concurrency to virtualization.
  - fulminatorz68 9y ago
    I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.
    - feld 9y ago
      "migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.
Annatar 9y ago
There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. There is nothing odd in that: contrary to the Linux party line and all the Linux hype, before illumos and SmartOS, Solaris was the most advanced operating system on the planet. As others have very accurately described and pointed out in the comments on the other reduction in force thread, this was sadly lost on the Linux generation which "grew up on the PC in their parents' basement".
unethical_ban 9y ago
Things make a lot more sense now. For having been interested tangentially in OpenSolaris (I still have its "bible" as a monitor stand) I never knew Illumos was the kernel, and other OSes based on it. I assumed all the different Solaris spinoffs were complete forks, and thus assumed they were all dead or dying. I will say the wikis are not inspiring; many on Illumos, OpenIndiana and SmartOS have pages last edited multiple years ago. For Illumos, I think your info above is more useful than the alphabetical listing of distros on the wiki. I think the marketing on OI's site could better tell the "why use me over Fedora/Ubuntu/BSD?" story, and SmartOS could spend less time selling its public cloud service, and more time telling me how to create a private cloud. Its docs are not super discoverable. All just observations; take them for what they're worth. I do think it's neat that Solaris has lived on, and it makes me want to throw up a lab server to poke around a few hours. Thanks for your work and the comment.
- snw 9y ago
  Oh yes, the wikis definitly do need some love. Documentation is beeing worked on as far as I know. A lot more of activity is going on in irc on freenode, so if you start playing with your lab server or are just interested in general you might want to drop by in #illumos or #smartos.

by snw 9y ago

cryptonector 9y ago

The nostalgia I feel is for Sun, for MPK17, for the people I got to work with, and the technology. Of those things only Sun is gone, but the people scattered, and technology, though still vibrant, is still always at risk -- it depends too much on Bryan Cantrill and friends to keep it going, while the Linux crowd blissfully ignores all the good ideas and reinvents every wheel badly. We're in a dark ages with a sliver of light. We might be in it for a while. People who have never used ZFS, SMF, DTrace, or FMA, have no idea that they are stuck in the dark.

samoright 9y ago

How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?

rhinoceraptor 9y ago
You can run docker containers on hardware instead of on virtual machines.
- Annatar 9y ago
  ...And unlike on Linux, it treats the entire datacenter as one giant machine.
snw 9y ago
In my case illumos provided two things: - zones allowed for a much higher deployment density and better utilisation of our hardware than other virtualization technology would have. - zfs snapshots. We've integrated those into our product and when a customer messes up they now have button to instantly restore to a known good state. Doing both of these things would have been a lot harder on another os.
mysterydip 9y ago
A different OS can solve some of the pain points of the mainstream options. Depending on your business, the features a different OS brings could have a large impact on performance or stability. Potential areas for improvement could be anything from filesystem to process concurrency to virtualization.
- fulminatorz68 9y ago
  I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.
  - feld 9y ago
    "migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.

Annatar 9y ago

There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. There is nothing odd in that: contrary to the Linux party line and all the Linux hype, before illumos and SmartOS, Solaris was the most advanced operating system on the planet. As others have very accurately described and pointed out in the comments on the other reduction in force thread, this was sadly lost on the Linux generation which "grew up on the PC in their parents' basement".

unethical_ban 9y ago

Things make a lot more sense now. For having been interested tangentially in OpenSolaris (I still have its "bible" as a monitor stand) I never knew Illumos was the kernel, and other OSes based on it. I assumed all the different Solaris spinoffs were complete forks, and thus assumed they were all dead or dying. I will say the wikis are not inspiring; many on Illumos, OpenIndiana and SmartOS have pages last edited multiple years ago. For Illumos, I think your info above is more useful than the alphabetical listing of distros on the wiki. I think the marketing on OI's site could better tell the "why use me over Fedora/Ubuntu/BSD?" story, and SmartOS could spend less time selling its public cloud service, and more time telling me how to create a private cloud. Its docs are not super discoverable. All just observations; take them for what they're worth. I do think it's neat that Solaris has lived on, and it makes me want to throw up a lab server to poke around a few hours. Thanks for your work and the comment.

snw 9y ago
Oh yes, the wikis definitly do need some love. Documentation is beeing worked on as far as I know. A lot more of activity is going on in irc on freenode, so if you start playing with your lab server or are just interested in general you might want to drop by in #illumos or #smartos.