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Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). The expanded into offering Linux using

Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). The expanded into offering Linux using some clever stuff to support Linux runtime on Solaris (kind of like WINE, but much simpler since Linux is much more similar to Solaris and also fully open source). All with DTrace so you had some great transparency on what was going on with the underlying hardware.

throw0101a 7y ago
> Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better hardware utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation
- cbsmith 7y ago
  > When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. Nope. Solaris Zones.
  - jen20 7y ago
    Incorrect. FreeBSD was in use first, as founder David Young’s own history [1] describes. OpenSolaris and zones came later. [1]: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/amp/ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17...
    - cbsmith 7y ago
      Hrm.. I don't even remember them having a BSD jailed offering, but I'll take your evidence over my lack of evidence.
bogomipz 7y ago
I thought Joyent was built around SmartOS? Although I never really understood the significance of the different Open Solaris forks. Or are these the same?
- heinrichhartman 7y ago
  SmartOS is an Illumos distribution. Notable others include: OmniOS, OpenIndiana, Nexcenta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenSolaris_distributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenSolaris_dist...
- rjzzleep 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I have a smartos setup because for now it still runs quite stable. Joyent/SmartOS was the one that added KVM support and a bunch of other features to the kernel, but I think it was merged into IllumOS. It's quite limited and has a clunky interface. When I tried to contact anyone there to add UEFI boot support there wasn't even so much of a: "we don't care". The problem with SmartOS, Illumos and the rest of the Solaris world is that while for Linux you can find heaps of books, forums, stackoverflow entries there are 3 books for OpenSolaris. SmartOS has seemingly great design, but it's absolutely nontransparent on how to use it. The documentation is subpar, lots of the wiki reads more like an experiment than an actual documentation. If you hit a bug, be prepared to spend hours on github issues to see if someone found a solution to it(might as well skip it because it's unlikely). If you use Triton and the API for it all is good, but if you want to use a SmartOS cluster directly, everything thing will be fine until you make a mistake or try to do something non standard and then good luck to you. There's a great/fun talk by Bryan cantrill about how management killed Solaris. But if you ask me it's only one half of the story. The other half is elitism. If you want people to engage in your open source project it needs to be decently reasonable to work with and you should be able to get some sort of feedback, even if that feedback is "lol, what you're doing is completely wrong why don't you RTFM here". But the attitude I saw was more like: "Our stuff is greater than everything else so why should we bother with you".
  - kbenson 7y ago
    Not a IllumOS/SmartOS user, but can you comment on how good the man pages are? What you state is sometimes a complaint I hear about OpenBSD, but from my experience using OpenBSD (which was mostly almost a decade ago now) is that's because they actually put a huge amount of effort into making sure the man pages were not just correct, but comprehensive (to the point of requiring code patches to include an accompanying man page patch if it added/changed a feature or changed functionality). When first using OpenBSD this was jarring, because I just wasn't conditioned to expect that system level features would have useful man pages, as that was almost never the case in Linux. As a simple example of this, here[1] is the OpenBSD man page for ifconfig. Note that it contains liberal references to other man pages of similar quality and completeness where a protocol or functionality might be better explained. Once I learned this, very little outside help was required to setup OpenBSD firewalls stateful failover of firewall connection state as well as VPN tunnels with automatic IP failover with CARP. All from a handful of man pages. So, that said, does OpenSolaris have good man pages? If it does, it might be that RTFM is the correct initial response to most questions, as it would be the up to date and definitive information about the what and how of things. A simple comparison of ifconfig[1] makes it look somewhat good, but that doesn't mean it's kept up to date and accurate. Can anyone comment if this is the case? 1: https://man.openbsd.org/netstart.8 https://man.openbsd.org/netstart.8 2: https://illumos.org/man/1M/ifconfig https://illumos.org/man/1M/ifconfig
cbsmith 7y ago
...I get voted up and then a day later I realize I made my usual mistake of typing in "Illuminos" instead of "Illumos". Apologies to everyone who suffered through reading that.

throw0101a 7y ago

> Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better hardware utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation

cbsmith 7y ago
> When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. Nope. Solaris Zones.
- jen20 7y ago
  Incorrect. FreeBSD was in use first, as founder David Young’s own history [1] describes. OpenSolaris and zones came later. [1]: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/amp/ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17...
  - cbsmith 7y ago
    Hrm.. I don't even remember them having a BSD jailed offering, but I'll take your evidence over my lack of evidence.

bogomipz 7y ago

I thought Joyent was built around SmartOS? Although I never really understood the significance of the different Open Solaris forks. Or are these the same?

heinrichhartman 7y ago
SmartOS is an Illumos distribution. Notable others include: OmniOS, OpenIndiana, Nexcenta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenSolaris_distributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenSolaris_dist...
rjzzleep 7y ago
Disclaimer: I have a smartos setup because for now it still runs quite stable. Joyent/SmartOS was the one that added KVM support and a bunch of other features to the kernel, but I think it was merged into IllumOS. It's quite limited and has a clunky interface. When I tried to contact anyone there to add UEFI boot support there wasn't even so much of a: "we don't care". The problem with SmartOS, Illumos and the rest of the Solaris world is that while for Linux you can find heaps of books, forums, stackoverflow entries there are 3 books for OpenSolaris. SmartOS has seemingly great design, but it's absolutely nontransparent on how to use it. The documentation is subpar, lots of the wiki reads more like an experiment than an actual documentation. If you hit a bug, be prepared to spend hours on github issues to see if someone found a solution to it(might as well skip it because it's unlikely). If you use Triton and the API for it all is good, but if you want to use a SmartOS cluster directly, everything thing will be fine until you make a mistake or try to do something non standard and then good luck to you. There's a great/fun talk by Bryan cantrill about how management killed Solaris. But if you ask me it's only one half of the story. The other half is elitism. If you want people to engage in your open source project it needs to be decently reasonable to work with and you should be able to get some sort of feedback, even if that feedback is "lol, what you're doing is completely wrong why don't you RTFM here". But the attitude I saw was more like: "Our stuff is greater than everything else so why should we bother with you".
- kbenson 7y ago
  Not a IllumOS/SmartOS user, but can you comment on how good the man pages are? What you state is sometimes a complaint I hear about OpenBSD, but from my experience using OpenBSD (which was mostly almost a decade ago now) is that's because they actually put a huge amount of effort into making sure the man pages were not just correct, but comprehensive (to the point of requiring code patches to include an accompanying man page patch if it added/changed a feature or changed functionality). When first using OpenBSD this was jarring, because I just wasn't conditioned to expect that system level features would have useful man pages, as that was almost never the case in Linux. As a simple example of this, here[1] is the OpenBSD man page for ifconfig. Note that it contains liberal references to other man pages of similar quality and completeness where a protocol or functionality might be better explained. Once I learned this, very little outside help was required to setup OpenBSD firewalls stateful failover of firewall connection state as well as VPN tunnels with automatic IP failover with CARP. All from a handful of man pages. So, that said, does OpenSolaris have good man pages? If it does, it might be that RTFM is the correct initial response to most questions, as it would be the up to date and definitive information about the what and how of things. A simple comparison of ifconfig[1] makes it look somewhat good, but that doesn't mean it's kept up to date and accurate. Can anyone comment if this is the case? 1: https://man.openbsd.org/netstart.8 https://man.openbsd.org/netstart.8 2: https://illumos.org/man/1M/ifconfig https://illumos.org/man/1M/ifconfig

cbsmith 7y ago

...I get voted up and then a day later I realize I made my usual mistake of typing in "Illuminos" instead of "Illumos". Apologies to everyone who suffered through reading that.