7 ms·

OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.10 is here – openindiana

91 points by rodrigo975 7y ago

mlacks 7y ago
My first deep dive into the open source contribution community was Open Indiana in 2017. I really love how welcoming this community is to newcomers, and how well the communication is between members.
mylons 7y ago
it’s pretty hard to tell what openindiana does. seems like they develop Hipster but what is that? there wasn’t any clear info after spending a few minutes on the site.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  It’s basically an open source version of FreeNAS (minus the Corporate backing) as I understand it. Edit: I'm wrong. It is an Open Source version of Sun/Solaris.
  - timc3 7y ago
    Would love to know how your thought process brought you to that conclusion! But no it isn’t. It’s more of a Solaris fork ( which I used to run)
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. I was mistaken.
- samdixon 7y ago
  Nav bar "openindiana - Community-driven illumos Distribution. Homepage has links to "What is Illumos" and "The Hipster Distribution" which is described as "Hipster is a codename for rapidly moving development branch of OpenIndiana". The article linked was simply a short list of patch notes, but if you navigate the site it has available information.
- crtlaltdel 7y ago
  https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#what-is-openindiana https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#what-is-openi...
- wrigby 7y ago
  From what I can tell, OpenIndiana is to Illumos as Fedora is to Linux (GNU/Linux to be pedantic), and Illumos is based on OpenSolaris. So what we have here is essentially a Solaris distribution?
- dehrmann 7y ago
  It's a marketing and naming failure that people are asking what this is.
  - ktm5j 7y ago
    If you go to their main page (the post link is just an announcement) then you can't miss the big print "What is Illumos" etc. You're failing to look ;P
mikestew 7y ago
I guess it's an OS? And this is what I got from poking around, which I only did because Indiana is where I grew up. I would have otherwise quickly given up and moved onto the next item on HN. "illumos is a consolidation of software that forms the core of an Operating System. It includes the kernel, device drivers, core system libraries, and utilities. It is the home of many technologies include ZFS, DTrace, Zones, ctf, FMA, and more. We pride ourselves on having a stable, highly observable, and technologically different system. In addition, illumos traces it roots back through Sun Microsystems to the original releases of UNIX and BSD."
- wrigby 7y ago
  Looks like it's a fork of OpenSolaris[1], which is pretty cool - I didn't realize there was a Solaris variant still under active development. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    "Project Indiana" was Sun's code name for open sourcing Solaris as OpenSolaris. There are other variants under development. Illumos probably is the largest one, SmartOS another.
    - amyjess 7y ago
      Illumos is the kernel, and SmartOS and OpenIndiana are both Illumos distributions. The OS is packaged the same way Linux is, with different distributions maintained by people outside the kernel devs.
      - DominoTree 7y ago
        I'd just like to interject for a moment...
      - the_why_of_y 7y ago
        Illumos is not just the kernel, it's a complete operating system - as is traditional in UNIX. This idea that you get a kernel from somewhere and a libc from somewhere else and a init from a third place etc. is quite unique to GNU/Linux. I think it's not ideal to use the term "distribution" for their downstreams like SmartOS etc. because it reminds people of all these GNU/Linux distributions, but a better term doesn't immediately come to mind...
unethical_ban 7y ago
OpenIndiana/Illumos/SmartOS documentation is pretty rough - when I last looked about two years ago, the docs were all a hodgepodge of old wikis and few videos. If you want widespread understanding and adoption, beginner docs need to be available and up to date.
- timc3 7y ago
  I just read the Solaris documentation
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Is there a solaris documentation online? I would expect Oracle to have put it behind a paywall.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      It is indeed online, sans paywall: https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/solaris.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/solaris.html Of course, with some Illumos distributions/derivatives/whatever-we're-calling-them, things are different due to using different tools or otherwise deviating from upstream Solaris. Better to start with your specific distro's documentation and use Oracle's Solaris docs to fill in the gaps, adjusting as necessary.
shrubble 7y ago
Good things in open source Solaris: ZFS implementation is rock solid Excellent fault isolation - even on x64, I had some ECC ram that went bad; it isolated the bad bank, stopped using it, and continued. RAM showed as total minus the amount. Zones as containers, great for many purposes Excellent performance under memory pressure Bad: documentation on some things, less hardware support, some aspects are quite different from Linux/BSD way
- gnufx 7y ago
  Is ZFS more solid than in Linux? Linux does the same with bad RAM, and you'll often see that in large installations. (Monitoring should check you have the number of DIMMs and CPUs expected, modulo a fiddle factor for reported memory size, which depends on BIOS.)
  - retrovm 7y ago
    Linux chipkill ECC support is a crapshoot. Intel redesigned it all for Skylake and later CPUs and Linux still hasn't caught up with the changes. Some of it mostly works on pre-Skylake, but often doesn't. I've seen Linux killing processes that have a bad physical page mapped, but the process just gets killed in a loop because the kernel is too stupid to actually take the page offline.
    - gnufx 7y ago
      So, does IllumOS support Skylake properly? Anyhow, the implication that it's unique in handling bad memory is unfounded. (I haven't run Skylake or SunOS/Opensolaris at any scale, but I have substantial experience with large Linux-based HPC systems with memory problems and not hit such problems.)
      - retrovm 7y ago
        I seriously doubt that illumos has the edac sorted out on newer parts. That's why i recommend running it in a VM.
  - 7y ago
coat 7y ago
According to the Solaris wikipedia article, it looks like Oracle has added major features/enhancements since going back to closed source. Do any of those features make it back to illumos/Open Indiana?
kitotik 7y ago
For me, OpenSolaris and it’s offshoots are much like BeOS in that they felt “right” from the first moment. Of course followed by great sadness from the lack of mass adoption.
e12e 7y ago
So, is it alive? I had the impression joyent gave up on solaris/smartos - are there still any serious support from companies using Solaris in anger?
- neilalexander 7y ago
  SmartOS is still very much alive and it's a solid platform.
ktm5j 7y ago
I have some old SPARC hardware that I'd love to get OI running on.. so personally I'm excited about the imminent SPARC support that seems to be just around the corner. Someone posted to their dev mailing list with links to working install images for SPARC!! https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2019-November/022822.html https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2019-N... edit: whoops that's the wrong link.. and I can't seem to find the right one... perhaps it's too new for the message thread to be in the archives, or maybe it was taken down for some reason.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  There's also DilOS which is OpenIndiana + apt that is built for both sparc and intel http://www.dilos.org http://www.dilos.org
  - ktm5j 7y ago
    Oh very cool! Thanks for sharing, I'll have to take a look at this
rubyn00bie 7y ago
I tried Illumos a while ago, and was pretty stoked for Solaris in general because it was where ZFS performed the best but at the time it was pretty darn hard to use because of the extremely scattered documentation (this was before ZFS on Linux even close to ready). Any using OpenIndiana on the daily for anything? If so, what? You have any pro-tips or tricks for folks looking to dig in?
- retrovm 7y ago
  I use it daily but I haven't "used it" in about 6 years because it just sits there in the corner serving without me having to touch it. When I needed docs I used to just refer to Oracle's.
- seized 7y ago
  I "use it" daily but it runs on my Supermicro NAS. Has 30+ drives attached to it in several pools. Its fast and stable and just... Sits there working. Currently its at 75 days uptime but it did a year at one point. Asides from some tinkering getting bonding working the way I wanted it to on two NICs I never have to screw with it or worry about it at an OS level. Note that I dont like the "all in one" approach to storage or running anything but the bare minimum on my storage itself. So the fact that docker/etc/etc isnt available is fine. All this thing runs is NappIT (ZFS management, like FreeNAS), Monit and Smartd. It has a bunch of things that are just so far ahead of Linux/ZoL. Big one is timeslider (auto snapshot management) and the sheer glory that is boot environments. Once you have those its hard to downgrade. Upgrade went bad/not working? Reboot to previous boot environment and done. Back to the previous version/working state. Like VMware snapshots but on the bare metal boot drives. My one wish is for it to be more current with ZFS features. It was ahead of ZoL for so long... Now I just want ZFS encryption to make it to OpenIndiana so I can use that without changing away from OpenIndiana.

91 points by rodrigo975 7y ago

My first deep dive into the open source contribution community was Open Indiana in 2017. I really love how welcoming this community is to newcomers, and how well the communication is between members.

mylons 7y ago

it’s pretty hard to tell what openindiana does. seems like they develop Hipster but what is that? there wasn’t any clear info after spending a few minutes on the site.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
It’s basically an open source version of FreeNAS (minus the Corporate backing) as I understand it. Edit: I'm wrong. It is an Open Source version of Sun/Solaris.
- timc3 7y ago
  Would love to know how your thought process brought you to that conclusion! But no it isn’t. It’s more of a Solaris fork ( which I used to run)
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I was mistaken.
samdixon 7y ago
Nav bar "openindiana - Community-driven illumos Distribution. Homepage has links to "What is Illumos" and "The Hipster Distribution" which is described as "Hipster is a codename for rapidly moving development branch of OpenIndiana". The article linked was simply a short list of patch notes, but if you navigate the site it has available information.
crtlaltdel 7y ago
https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#what-is-openindiana https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#what-is-openi...
wrigby 7y ago
From what I can tell, OpenIndiana is to Illumos as Fedora is to Linux (GNU/Linux to be pedantic), and Illumos is based on OpenSolaris. So what we have here is essentially a Solaris distribution?
dehrmann 7y ago
It's a marketing and naming failure that people are asking what this is.
- ktm5j 7y ago
  If you go to their main page (the post link is just an announcement) then you can't miss the big print "What is Illumos" etc. You're failing to look ;P

mikestew 7y ago

I guess it's an OS? And this is what I got from poking around, which I only did because Indiana is where I grew up. I would have otherwise quickly given up and moved onto the next item on HN. "illumos is a consolidation of software that forms the core of an Operating System. It includes the kernel, device drivers, core system libraries, and utilities. It is the home of many technologies include ZFS, DTrace, Zones, ctf, FMA, and more. We pride ourselves on having a stable, highly observable, and technologically different system. In addition, illumos traces it roots back through Sun Microsystems to the original releases of UNIX and BSD."

wrigby 7y ago
Looks like it's a fork of OpenSolaris[1], which is pretty cool - I didn't realize there was a Solaris variant still under active development. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  "Project Indiana" was Sun's code name for open sourcing Solaris as OpenSolaris. There are other variants under development. Illumos probably is the largest one, SmartOS another.
  - amyjess 7y ago
    Illumos is the kernel, and SmartOS and OpenIndiana are both Illumos distributions. The OS is packaged the same way Linux is, with different distributions maintained by people outside the kernel devs.
    - DominoTree 7y ago
      I'd just like to interject for a moment...
    - the_why_of_y 7y ago
      Illumos is not just the kernel, it's a complete operating system - as is traditional in UNIX. This idea that you get a kernel from somewhere and a libc from somewhere else and a init from a third place etc. is quite unique to GNU/Linux. I think it's not ideal to use the term "distribution" for their downstreams like SmartOS etc. because it reminds people of all these GNU/Linux distributions, but a better term doesn't immediately come to mind...

unethical_ban 7y ago

OpenIndiana/Illumos/SmartOS documentation is pretty rough - when I last looked about two years ago, the docs were all a hodgepodge of old wikis and few videos. If you want widespread understanding and adoption, beginner docs need to be available and up to date.

timc3 7y ago
I just read the Solaris documentation
- user5994461 7y ago
  Is there a solaris documentation online? I would expect Oracle to have put it behind a paywall.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    It is indeed online, sans paywall: https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/solaris.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/solaris.html Of course, with some Illumos distributions/derivatives/whatever-we're-calling-them, things are different due to using different tools or otherwise deviating from upstream Solaris. Better to start with your specific distro's documentation and use Oracle's Solaris docs to fill in the gaps, adjusting as necessary.

shrubble 7y ago

Good things in open source Solaris: ZFS implementation is rock solid Excellent fault isolation - even on x64, I had some ECC ram that went bad; it isolated the bad bank, stopped using it, and continued. RAM showed as total minus the amount. Zones as containers, great for many purposes Excellent performance under memory pressure Bad: documentation on some things, less hardware support, some aspects are quite different from Linux/BSD way

gnufx 7y ago
Is ZFS more solid than in Linux? Linux does the same with bad RAM, and you'll often see that in large installations. (Monitoring should check you have the number of DIMMs and CPUs expected, modulo a fiddle factor for reported memory size, which depends on BIOS.)
- retrovm 7y ago
  Linux chipkill ECC support is a crapshoot. Intel redesigned it all for Skylake and later CPUs and Linux still hasn't caught up with the changes. Some of it mostly works on pre-Skylake, but often doesn't. I've seen Linux killing processes that have a bad physical page mapped, but the process just gets killed in a loop because the kernel is too stupid to actually take the page offline.
  - gnufx 7y ago
    So, does IllumOS support Skylake properly? Anyhow, the implication that it's unique in handling bad memory is unfounded. (I haven't run Skylake or SunOS/Opensolaris at any scale, but I have substantial experience with large Linux-based HPC systems with memory problems and not hit such problems.)
    - retrovm 7y ago
      I seriously doubt that illumos has the edac sorted out on newer parts. That's why i recommend running it in a VM.
- 7y ago

coat 7y ago

According to the Solaris wikipedia article, it looks like Oracle has added major features/enhancements since going back to closed source. Do any of those features make it back to illumos/Open Indiana?

kitotik 7y ago

For me, OpenSolaris and it’s offshoots are much like BeOS in that they felt “right” from the first moment. Of course followed by great sadness from the lack of mass adoption.

e12e 7y ago

So, is it alive? I had the impression joyent gave up on solaris/smartos - are there still any serious support from companies using Solaris in anger?

neilalexander 7y ago
SmartOS is still very much alive and it's a solid platform.

ktm5j 7y ago

I have some old SPARC hardware that I'd love to get OI running on.. so personally I'm excited about the imminent SPARC support that seems to be just around the corner. Someone posted to their dev mailing list with links to working install images for SPARC!! https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2019-November/022822.html https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2019-N... edit: whoops that's the wrong link.. and I can't seem to find the right one... perhaps it's too new for the message thread to be in the archives, or maybe it was taken down for some reason.

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
There's also DilOS which is OpenIndiana + apt that is built for both sparc and intel http://www.dilos.org http://www.dilos.org
- ktm5j 7y ago
  Oh very cool! Thanks for sharing, I'll have to take a look at this

rubyn00bie 7y ago

I tried Illumos a while ago, and was pretty stoked for Solaris in general because it was where ZFS performed the best but at the time it was pretty darn hard to use because of the extremely scattered documentation (this was before ZFS on Linux even close to ready). Any using OpenIndiana on the daily for anything? If so, what? You have any pro-tips or tricks for folks looking to dig in?

retrovm 7y ago
I use it daily but I haven't "used it" in about 6 years because it just sits there in the corner serving without me having to touch it. When I needed docs I used to just refer to Oracle's.
seized 7y ago
I "use it" daily but it runs on my Supermicro NAS. Has 30+ drives attached to it in several pools. Its fast and stable and just... Sits there working. Currently its at 75 days uptime but it did a year at one point. Asides from some tinkering getting bonding working the way I wanted it to on two NICs I never have to screw with it or worry about it at an OS level. Note that I dont like the "all in one" approach to storage or running anything but the bare minimum on my storage itself. So the fact that docker/etc/etc isnt available is fine. All this thing runs is NappIT (ZFS management, like FreeNAS), Monit and Smartd. It has a bunch of things that are just so far ahead of Linux/ZoL. Big one is timeslider (auto snapshot management) and the sheer glory that is boot environments. Once you have those its hard to downgrade. Upgrade went bad/not working? Reboot to previous boot environment and done. Back to the previous version/working state. Like VMware snapshots but on the bare metal boot drives. My one wish is for it to be more current with ZFS features. It was ahead of ZoL for so long... Now I just want ZFS encryption to make it to OpenIndiana so I can use that without changing away from OpenIndiana.