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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
by 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 agoLooks 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 agoIllumos 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 agoI'd just like to interject for a moment...
- the_why_of_y 7y agoIllumos 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...
- dfox 7y agoIIRC Project Indiana was mostly about replacing Solaris' SysV packages based packaging system with IPS, so it even originally referred to something that can be considered as "Solaris distribution".
- timc3 7y agoThere are Multiple. I run them because it’s the fastest network ZFS device on the hardware I run that I have tested.
- e12e 7y agoHow do you define (use?) network zfs device? Nfs3, nfs4, iscsi, something else? And have you tested recent Linux w/zfs?
- chungus_khan 7y agoIt's especially cool because AFAIK the OpenSolaris family is the only current open-source UNIX System V distribution, and it has real AT&T code in it.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoIts convoluted history looks like this: Solaris (proprietary) -> Open Solaris -> Illumos -> Open Indiana. Sun open sourced Solaris, then Oracle bought them and closed sourced it again. But several forks remain of the open-sourced version. They didn’t help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name either. Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris. But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.
- npongratz 7y ago> But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose. Naming things is indeed one of the exactly two hard things in computer science, the others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. I'll see myself out.
- LiquidInsect 7y agoThree! The three hard things are naming things, cache invaliCONCURRENCYdation, and off by one errors!
- giancarlostoro 7y ago> They didn’t help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name either. Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris. But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose. I think I only knew what it was cause I go on DistroWatch a bit to keep tabs on any new distros. I assume not a looot of people do this.
- macintux 7y agoI’ve wondered whether the name traces to Ian Murdock. He went to work for Sun, as best I recall, after Progeny closed up shop, and had roots in Indiana (where Progeny was headquartered).