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I for one agree with you, but the main issue with SmartOS, Opensolaris, Solaris etc. is not the operating system. It's that some things are half baked and enter

I for one agree with you, but the main issue with SmartOS, Opensolaris, Solaris etc. is not the operating system. It's that some things are half baked and enterprisy. What do I mean by that? Brendan Gregg did mention in his article about Solaris migration certain things like amount of developers out of box performance etc. Here are a few issues that the Solaris crowd failed to address and if they don't address it soon imho they will fortify their own demise: Hardware availability, if you have a blade center with 10G intel hardware everything will work fine, but want to run it on a ryzen? tough luck. This already disqualifies a bunch of curious developers. KVM support? Sure, but it's not well documented the tooling if you don't use the enterprise management tools by Joyent is horrible. The standard tooling `vmadm` in SmartOS will leave logadm residues that will spam your notifications it's been an unfixed bug for multiple years. UEFI? Nope. The tooling and documentation is the worst. Want to migrate from libvirt? You have to shut it down, dd the image to the zfs zone and hope that it works. If it didn't well you can't access vnc before the host is already booted into a failed state. The actual killer: Documentation. The SmartOS confluence wiki starts off by giving you a taste and the typical enterprise way they offer you training. That works just fine so long as you're one of select few choices to pick from(Jira loves that model). But when you fail to attract the crowd of developers, you're bound to fall behind. There's exactly 3 books on OpenSolaris, 0 on SmartOS and a bunch of technical old documents on Solaris from Oracle. There's probably been at least 15 Docker books this year alone. Whole bunch to manage kubernetes. For creating network topologies in linux you pick up a bunch of books that aren't outdated. I love the idea of SmartOS and I'll run my machines as long as I feel it makes sense and you might argue that the complexity is a lot lower than what linux provides, but that's besides the point. What the point in crossbow, HVM, etc. when the only place of information is: a) an old oracle tech paper b) an old oracle/sun/joyent consultant c) one of 5 blog posts that explain how to run it in your home NAS d) a wiki with so basic information that it's guaranteed not to work on your system At least the complexity of Linux is visible, and you can find a solution somewhere. Rather than having to find a consultant that guards that solution with his life.

Annatar 9y ago
The standard tooling `vmadm` in SmartOS will leave logadm residues that will spam your notifications it's been an unfixed bug for multiple years. So let's get this straight: when Linux zealots 15-20 years ago answered "you have the source! Fix it yourself!" that was okay, but when it comes to SmartOS, it's out of the question? Sure, but it's not well documented the tooling Read. The. Manual. Pages. It's a real UNIX and that means high quality documentation! No "Stack Overflow" vomit! The actual killer: Documentation. Repeat after me: I will read the manual pages. There was just a discussion on this subject recently here. b) an old oracle/sun/joyent consultant so old Solaris guys are no good? At least the complexity of Linux is visible, and you can find a solution somewhere. Linux has incredible kludges and brokenness under the hood, it's just that one needs to be an old UNIX guy to understand just how much of garbage "solutions" places like "Stack Overflow" offer. Rather than having to find a consultant that guards that solution with his life. I've always been happy to teach all that I know about UNIX and never had a complaint or heard an unkind word about my teaching efforts, on the contrary. Find yourself a mentor. "Stack Overflow" isn't one and could never substitute one.
- rjzzleep 9y ago
  Dude that elitest crap you're spouting is exactly what killed Solaris. Repeat after me: I read the manual pages and it's still crap. Your best source of documentation is the oracle documents they don't map 1:1 to SmartOS. Wanna learn about network topologies in SmartOS. Here's the 425 pages Oracle document that provides a tiny intro to how you "could" "maybe" get started [1] When I asked Joyent in 2013 for information needed to improve the wifi stack there was exactly zero interest. SmartOS supports docker images in a really interesting manner. But again it's half baked. It may work fine in the Joyent UI but that's meaningless. This is what a normal person has to do to get it running [2] Judging by the way you talk I really seriously doubt you have any meaningful architecture running on SmartOS that's self managed. If you want to set up a small private cloud that's SmartOS based you're better off trying Danube cloud, but who knows how long that's going to last [3] Compare that to AWS, you have a proper fully documented VPC tool that's Cloudformation, you have a whole bunch of recipes, you have tooling around working around the nasties of CloudFormation. It's just not attractive. You're the zealot here. If I may ask, have you ever contributed to illumos codebase in any way yet? [1]: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/pdf/821-1458.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/pdf/821-1458.pdf [2]: https://blog.jasper.la/docker-on-smartos-the-harder-way/ https://blog.jasper.la/docker-on-smartos-the-harder-way/ [3]: https://docs.danubecloud.org/user-guide/esdc/index.html https://docs.danubecloud.org/user-guide/esdc/index.html

Annatar 9y ago

The standard tooling `vmadm` in SmartOS will leave logadm residues that will spam your notifications it's been an unfixed bug for multiple years. So let's get this straight: when Linux zealots 15-20 years ago answered "you have the source! Fix it yourself!" that was okay, but when it comes to SmartOS, it's out of the question? Sure, but it's not well documented the tooling Read. The. Manual. Pages. It's a real UNIX and that means high quality documentation! No "Stack Overflow" vomit! The actual killer: Documentation. Repeat after me: I will read the manual pages. There was just a discussion on this subject recently here. b) an old oracle/sun/joyent consultant so old Solaris guys are no good? At least the complexity of Linux is visible, and you can find a solution somewhere. Linux has incredible kludges and brokenness under the hood, it's just that one needs to be an old UNIX guy to understand just how much of garbage "solutions" places like "Stack Overflow" offer. Rather than having to find a consultant that guards that solution with his life. I've always been happy to teach all that I know about UNIX and never had a complaint or heard an unkind word about my teaching efforts, on the contrary. Find yourself a mentor. "Stack Overflow" isn't one and could never substitute one.

rjzzleep 9y ago
Dude that elitest crap you're spouting is exactly what killed Solaris. Repeat after me: I read the manual pages and it's still crap. Your best source of documentation is the oracle documents they don't map 1:1 to SmartOS. Wanna learn about network topologies in SmartOS. Here's the 425 pages Oracle document that provides a tiny intro to how you "could" "maybe" get started [1] When I asked Joyent in 2013 for information needed to improve the wifi stack there was exactly zero interest. SmartOS supports docker images in a really interesting manner. But again it's half baked. It may work fine in the Joyent UI but that's meaningless. This is what a normal person has to do to get it running [2] Judging by the way you talk I really seriously doubt you have any meaningful architecture running on SmartOS that's self managed. If you want to set up a small private cloud that's SmartOS based you're better off trying Danube cloud, but who knows how long that's going to last [3] Compare that to AWS, you have a proper fully documented VPC tool that's Cloudformation, you have a whole bunch of recipes, you have tooling around working around the nasties of CloudFormation. It's just not attractive. You're the zealot here. If I may ask, have you ever contributed to illumos codebase in any way yet? [1]: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/pdf/821-1458.pdf https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/pdf/821-1458.pdf [2]: https://blog.jasper.la/docker-on-smartos-the-harder-way/ https://blog.jasper.la/docker-on-smartos-the-harder-way/ [3]: https://docs.danubecloud.org/user-guide/esdc/index.html https://docs.danubecloud.org/user-guide/esdc/index.html