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I really hope users and developers can embrace the amazing technology that is present in illumos and its derivatives, much of which came out of Sun Solaris. Th

I really hope users and developers can embrace the amazing technology that is present in illumos and its derivatives, much of which came out of Sun Solaris. Things like ZFS, Zones, DTrace, SMF, and Crossbow were locked up inside Sun Solaris for many years because it was proprietary. The effort to open source it took a long time and because of how Solaris was built (with various third party things) Sun essentially had to release under a slightly odd license, the CDDL. Meanwhile Linux, which had ascended to dominance post dot com bubble, solidified its lead as the defacto default server operating system, a fairly well earned dominance built on being the first truly free Unix available for x86/PC hardware, and at a time when that was a truly lesser tier of hardware (unlike today). But today I worry we've settled into a mindset of "the linux way is best because it is dominant" - if you use linux you can google your stack traces, you know that even if the tech is inferior (coughbtrfscoughsystemtapcoughsystemdcoughepoll*cough) many other people are in the same boat and in theory hordes of developers will -- might? -- make patches to fix the problem. No one ever got fired for choosing linux, basically. I've migrated a bunch of personal projects to a server I own running SmartOS, an Illumos derivative. One thing I've learned is that it's actually really viable and nice these days to use an alternative operating system. I imagine it's similar with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, vanilla Illumos, etc. These systems run on a pretty impressive array of hardware and are able to leverage the near total standardization of the hardware/bios stack and the inroads made by other projects to bootstrap to viability. E.g. SmartOS uses pkgsrc from the netbsd project for packaging, took some boot technology from FreeBSD, and in general is able to tap into the universe of "unix like" tools, even if many of those tools are most often used on linux. Anyway if you get a chance give this stuff a spin, it's pretty eye opening what you can accomplish. Zones, to me in particular, feel like a game changer.

conception 7y ago
Yeah, we store PBs on https://omniosce.org/ https://omniosce.org/ and it's rock solid.
peatmoss 7y ago
Vehemently agree. Monoculture is a huge risk to IT generally right now. I love Linux and must use it for some things, because nothing else is really supported, but I really worry about a world where all the servers run Linux. I think the thing I miss most about the 90s and early 00s was that different unix-like systems took big, bold, and divergent approaches. Computing felt less “nailed down”... like there were more possibilities.
- h1d 7y ago
  > I really worry about a world where all the servers run Linux. As long as BSD stays with BSD license, it won't happen.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    Why would that matter for end users? Users really only care about cost of ownership, ease of use, support, etc. which is to say, they want to use what everyone else is using.
    - h1d 7y ago
      Who said about end users? Many embedded systems and such use BSD because they don't have to release their changes as open source, which pretty much forbids their use of Linux. If you meant by "servers" such on clouds, maybe it's already Linux only.
flyinghamster 7y ago
I got into OpenSolaris shortly before Oracle swooped in and killed it. For a long while, I ran OpenIndiana on a server where I work, but I found that it really wasn't friendly to white-box hardware. In particular, it was prone to hiccuping badly if I hot-swapped SATA drives on an AMD AHCI controller. I probably would have had better luck if the system had an SAS HBA for the drives, but that wasn't going to happen. I finally switched it to Ubuntu Server with ZoL, and the hot-swap woes went away completely. As for systemd vs. SMF, I'd take systemd any day over the crawling XML horror of SMF. :)
deleted 7y ago
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jjav 7y ago
Agreed, too much monoculture is harmful. Although I've been using Linux since the beginning ('92), I'm installing more BSDs these days because quality is declining in the Linux world (as you well coughed). Small historical timeline correction though: > Things like ZFS, Zones, DTrace, SMF, and Crossbow were locked up inside Sun Solaris for many years Solaris 10 (which contained the bulk of these) came out in 2005 and Open Solaris open sourced the code also in 2005. The timeline is more complex because not everything came in Solaris 10 at once and not everything open sourced at once... but at a high level, most of these technologies were open sourced relatively soon after initial release. (I was at Sun back then and involved with Open Solaris effort.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
romaniitedomum 7y ago
> you know that even if the tech is inferior (coughbtrfscoughsystemtapcoughsystemdcoughepoll*cough) many other people are in the same boat and in theory hordes of developers will -- might? -- make patches to fix the problem. Bit of a bad cough you have there! Need a lozenge? With regard to technology, Solaris/Illumos went through the same init system battle with their next-gen init system SMF as GNU/Linux did with systemd. They had their share of hard-nosed refuseniks who vowed to remain on Solaris 9 forever rather than embrace the new. Lennart Poettering said that systemd was inspired in part by SMF[1]. [1] https://coreos.com/blog/qa-with-lennart-systemd.html https://coreos.com/blog/qa-with-lennart-systemd.html
- jsiepkes 7y ago
  Sure SMF wasn't universally liked with its introduction. Just like Apples Launchd. However the big difference is that for those 2 the resistance was mostly attributable to people not liking change. And that kind of resistance fades over time. Since its basically still the same thing only somewhat different. However the problem most people have with systemd is the massive (growing) scope. So because it keeps growing and changing the "resistance" people have towards it gets refueled all the time.
- Annatar 7y ago
  The main point of contention with SMF was the dismal lack of documentation on the XML required when it was first introduced into Solaris 10 (what we call "putback"). At the time, Sun had the inventor of XML on their payroll and suddenly XML started showing up everywhere, but XML has no business in configuration files on UNIX, which were traditionally designed to be trivial to understand and parse by both humans and tools like sed, AWK, grep and cut. As if that wasn't bad enough, adding insult to injury was that the configuration to various services was being stored in a private copy of SQLite, and there was no documentation on which application was storing which settings -- the only way to know was from reading the blogs of the engineers working on SMF. As you can imagine, this led to a lot of frustration, because the primary users of SMF were system administrators and they were basically left to fend for themselves: lacking documentation and third party developers not wanting to waste their time reverse-engineering SMF to write XML manifests for their services. However, SMF is actually very well designed and this makes it very powerful: I can for example declare configuration files as my dependencies in the XML manifest and when I import it, SMF will know to watch those files. If they change, SMF will call the manifest's refresh method, whatever it is. That's barely scratching the surface. What I think no one on the outside realized when SMF came out is that it was part of FMA, the fault management architecture, which makes Solaris and his derivatives be able to heal themselves provided the system is configured with enough redundancy, even on really unreliable shitty hardware like intel / AMD based systems. Nowadays SMF is well regarded and well understood, but the engineers rightly regret making it use XML, and it took years for the documentation to reach that expected level of high quality which we're so spoiled with in the rest of Solaris and illumos manual pages.
ris 7y ago
Well, enjoy it while it lasts because the GNU toolchain is in the process of deprecating & removing support for solaris 10.
- Annatar 7y ago
  That's fine, SVR4 tools were always superior anyway. I could never get used to GNU.
brmgb 7y ago
Solaris used to be far ahead compared to Linux. It's not really the case anymore. > coughbtrfscoughsystemtapcoughsystemdcoughepoll Btrfs is not as mature but design wise it is competitive with ZFS. Pool resizing is actually a lot nicer in Btrfs. SystemTap was not as good as Dtrace but Bpftrace is ihmo better than both. Event ports remain better than epoll but as a user that's not particularly significant. Systemd is ihmo better than SMF was. The combination of Linux namespaces and cgroup allow you to do everything zones can but are more flexible.
- loeg 7y ago
  I'm not a huge ZFS fan but I think ZFS-on-Linux more or less spells the death of BtrFS. BtrFS has been radically unfinished and unready for over a decade now; meanwhile ZFS is decades old and in-production for much of that time. Does anyone use BtrFS in production? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no. (To be clear, I don't think Solaris is the best platform to run ZFS today.)
  - ernst_klim 7y ago
    > Does anyone use BtrFS in production? Ahm, what? SLES provides Btrfs as the default choice. > With SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, we went the next step of innovation and started using the copy-on-write file system Btrfs as the default for the operating system, to support system snapshots and rollback. Also Facebook [1]. And yes, I use it everywhere. Oh, and ZFS is full of bugs as well, it's far from done and being actively fixed and improved by ZoL people, that's why freebsd people are switching to ZoL. I've never heard much arguments why ZFS is better than Btrfs, I would like to hear some (safe for RAID6). [1] https://www.linux.com/news/how-facebook-uses-linux-and-btrfs-interview-chris-mason/ https://www.linux.com/news/how-facebook-uses-linux-and-btrfs...
- AndWac 7y ago
  illumos split from Solaris around the time Solaris 11 has been released. Since then the development of both mostly diverge. Unlike others I think that Solaris is still being developed but not so obviously. Partly because it is limited to paying customers (non-paying customers can only access official releases like 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 and so on. And this happens seldomly) and most changes happen in not so obvious parts (eg. low level tools and protocols). BTW: From its Solaris inheritance illumos got a lot of technologies despite the always mentioned SMF, ZFS, Crossbow and DTrace. Eg. authorizations, privileges and roles. Things that I miss when I look at other OS's. Many valuable things are hidden below the surface. Between Linux and illumos there is a big difference between their development philosophies. For me Linux takes now the part of Windows two decades ago: It is heading towards a monoculture with masses of lemmings running with it mostly ignoring superior technology around.

conception 7y ago

Yeah, we store PBs on https://omniosce.org/ https://omniosce.org/ and it's rock solid.

peatmoss 7y ago

Vehemently agree. Monoculture is a huge risk to IT generally right now. I love Linux and must use it for some things, because nothing else is really supported, but I really worry about a world where all the servers run Linux. I think the thing I miss most about the 90s and early 00s was that different unix-like systems took big, bold, and divergent approaches. Computing felt less “nailed down”... like there were more possibilities.

h1d 7y ago
> I really worry about a world where all the servers run Linux. As long as BSD stays with BSD license, it won't happen.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  Why would that matter for end users? Users really only care about cost of ownership, ease of use, support, etc. which is to say, they want to use what everyone else is using.
  - h1d 7y ago
    Who said about end users? Many embedded systems and such use BSD because they don't have to release their changes as open source, which pretty much forbids their use of Linux. If you meant by "servers" such on clouds, maybe it's already Linux only.

flyinghamster 7y ago

I got into OpenSolaris shortly before Oracle swooped in and killed it. For a long while, I ran OpenIndiana on a server where I work, but I found that it really wasn't friendly to white-box hardware. In particular, it was prone to hiccuping badly if I hot-swapped SATA drives on an AMD AHCI controller. I probably would have had better luck if the system had an SAS HBA for the drives, but that wasn't going to happen. I finally switched it to Ubuntu Server with ZoL, and the hot-swap woes went away completely. As for systemd vs. SMF, I'd take systemd any day over the crawling XML horror of SMF. :)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jjav 7y ago

Agreed, too much monoculture is harmful. Although I've been using Linux since the beginning ('92), I'm installing more BSDs these days because quality is declining in the Linux world (as you well coughed). Small historical timeline correction though: > Things like ZFS, Zones, DTrace, SMF, and Crossbow were locked up inside Sun Solaris for many years Solaris 10 (which contained the bulk of these) came out in 2005 and Open Solaris open sourced the code also in 2005. The timeline is more complex because not everything came in Solaris 10 at once and not everything open sourced at once... but at a high level, most of these technologies were open sourced relatively soon after initial release. (I was at Sun back then and involved with Open Solaris effort.)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

romaniitedomum 7y ago

> you know that even if the tech is inferior (coughbtrfscoughsystemtapcoughsystemdcoughepoll*cough) many other people are in the same boat and in theory hordes of developers will -- might? -- make patches to fix the problem. Bit of a bad cough you have there! Need a lozenge? With regard to technology, Solaris/Illumos went through the same init system battle with their next-gen init system SMF as GNU/Linux did with systemd. They had their share of hard-nosed refuseniks who vowed to remain on Solaris 9 forever rather than embrace the new. Lennart Poettering said that systemd was inspired in part by SMF[1]. [1] https://coreos.com/blog/qa-with-lennart-systemd.html https://coreos.com/blog/qa-with-lennart-systemd.html

jsiepkes 7y ago
Sure SMF wasn't universally liked with its introduction. Just like Apples Launchd. However the big difference is that for those 2 the resistance was mostly attributable to people not liking change. And that kind of resistance fades over time. Since its basically still the same thing only somewhat different. However the problem most people have with systemd is the massive (growing) scope. So because it keeps growing and changing the "resistance" people have towards it gets refueled all the time.
Annatar 7y ago
The main point of contention with SMF was the dismal lack of documentation on the XML required when it was first introduced into Solaris 10 (what we call "putback"). At the time, Sun had the inventor of XML on their payroll and suddenly XML started showing up everywhere, but XML has no business in configuration files on UNIX, which were traditionally designed to be trivial to understand and parse by both humans and tools like sed, AWK, grep and cut. As if that wasn't bad enough, adding insult to injury was that the configuration to various services was being stored in a private copy of SQLite, and there was no documentation on which application was storing which settings -- the only way to know was from reading the blogs of the engineers working on SMF. As you can imagine, this led to a lot of frustration, because the primary users of SMF were system administrators and they were basically left to fend for themselves: lacking documentation and third party developers not wanting to waste their time reverse-engineering SMF to write XML manifests for their services. However, SMF is actually very well designed and this makes it very powerful: I can for example declare configuration files as my dependencies in the XML manifest and when I import it, SMF will know to watch those files. If they change, SMF will call the manifest's refresh method, whatever it is. That's barely scratching the surface. What I think no one on the outside realized when SMF came out is that it was part of FMA, the fault management architecture, which makes Solaris and his derivatives be able to heal themselves provided the system is configured with enough redundancy, even on really unreliable shitty hardware like intel / AMD based systems. Nowadays SMF is well regarded and well understood, but the engineers rightly regret making it use XML, and it took years for the documentation to reach that expected level of high quality which we're so spoiled with in the rest of Solaris and illumos manual pages.

ris 7y ago

Well, enjoy it while it lasts because the GNU toolchain is in the process of deprecating & removing support for solaris 10.

Annatar 7y ago
That's fine, SVR4 tools were always superior anyway. I could never get used to GNU.

brmgb 7y ago

Solaris used to be far ahead compared to Linux. It's not really the case anymore. > coughbtrfscoughsystemtapcoughsystemdcoughepoll Btrfs is not as mature but design wise it is competitive with ZFS. Pool resizing is actually a lot nicer in Btrfs. SystemTap was not as good as Dtrace but Bpftrace is ihmo better than both. Event ports remain better than epoll but as a user that's not particularly significant. Systemd is ihmo better than SMF was. The combination of Linux namespaces and cgroup allow you to do everything zones can but are more flexible.

loeg 7y ago
I'm not a huge ZFS fan but I think ZFS-on-Linux more or less spells the death of BtrFS. BtrFS has been radically unfinished and unready for over a decade now; meanwhile ZFS is decades old and in-production for much of that time. Does anyone use BtrFS in production? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no. (To be clear, I don't think Solaris is the best platform to run ZFS today.)
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  > Does anyone use BtrFS in production? Ahm, what? SLES provides Btrfs as the default choice. > With SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, we went the next step of innovation and started using the copy-on-write file system Btrfs as the default for the operating system, to support system snapshots and rollback. Also Facebook [1]. And yes, I use it everywhere. Oh, and ZFS is full of bugs as well, it's far from done and being actively fixed and improved by ZoL people, that's why freebsd people are switching to ZoL. I've never heard much arguments why ZFS is better than Btrfs, I would like to hear some (safe for RAID6). [1] https://www.linux.com/news/how-facebook-uses-linux-and-btrfs-interview-chris-mason/ https://www.linux.com/news/how-facebook-uses-linux-and-btrfs...
AndWac 7y ago
illumos split from Solaris around the time Solaris 11 has been released. Since then the development of both mostly diverge. Unlike others I think that Solaris is still being developed but not so obviously. Partly because it is limited to paying customers (non-paying customers can only access official releases like 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 and so on. And this happens seldomly) and most changes happen in not so obvious parts (eg. low level tools and protocols). BTW: From its Solaris inheritance illumos got a lot of technologies despite the always mentioned SMF, ZFS, Crossbow and DTrace. Eg. authorizations, privileges and roles. Things that I miss when I look at other OS's. Many valuable things are hidden below the surface. Between Linux and illumos there is a big difference between their development philosophies. For me Linux takes now the part of Windows two decades ago: It is heading towards a monoculture with masses of lemmings running with it mostly ignoring superior technology around.