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I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. If Joyent wanted to stick with a UNIX then why not FreeBSD and help implement KVM there? Wasn't XEN a

I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. If Joyent wanted to stick with a UNIX then why not FreeBSD and help implement KVM there? Wasn't XEN already available for Dom0? I just don't see much mindshare in Illumos/SmartOS for keeping up with current server hardware drivers. I really would have liked to see one of the existing BSDs benefit from the time they've put into this project. Obviously Linux already has KVM, and there are new implmentations of DTrace and ZFS. Btrfs is not too many more kernel releases away from being considered stable(fsck being a glaring problem) and if you want container-based virtualization you've got LXC(some prefer OpenVZ). With that said, who is their target audience?

hello_moto 15y ago
They have a lot of investment around Solaris (let's not argue about Solaris, OpenSolaris, Illumos) since a few years ago. Brought a lot of ex-SUN engineers, hired open source activist around OpenSolaris, probably built their infrastructure around it as well.
- rednaught 15y ago
  Thanks. But didn't they also have a lot of FreeBSD such as during the TextDrive days?
  - hello_moto 15y ago
    Probably customer + talent acquisition as opposed to technology/infrastructure.
dap 15y ago
You're suggesting Joyent should have finished porting DTrace, ZFS, and Zones to FreeBSD, and then port KVM to FreeBSD, instead of just porting KVM to Illumos?
- rednaught 15y ago
  FreeBSD has already had ZFS and DTrace for years. They have Jails which would have benefited from Solaris' stronger Zones/Containers. There are already a lot of BSD users. Where are the Illumos users? Are you suggesting that all BSD users go to SmartOS? I used HP-UX and AIX for many years...the one off UNIX systems just end up recreating each other due to fragmentation. They are not the way forward. The smaller mind share/usage of OpenSolaris/Illumos isn't helping. Wouldn't contribution to a BSD have strengthened the community?
  - dap 15y ago
    Not at all. The beauty of KVM on SmartOS is that Joyent's customers can run BSD, or Linux, or Windows, or whatever they want without even knowing it's running on top of Illumos. That's why the user base isn't as much an issue. But the underlying foundation is critical. I'm actually really glad BSD is adopting DTrace and I'm sure it will be successful, but the BSD documentation says that it's experimental and not yet production ready (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dtrace.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dt...). Solaris DTrace has been in production since at least 2005. Disclaimer: I work for Joyent, but I do not speak for them.
    - rednaught 15y ago
      I agree the foundation is critical. So would you say that the extensive community use of KVM on SmartOS has decided it is production quality compared to use on Linux?
    - moe 15y ago
      without even knowing it's running on top of Illumos What's the advantage of running Linux->KVM->Illumos instead of Linux->KVM->Linux?
      - acdha 15y ago
        DTrace and ZFS are both great and lack competitive alternatives on Linux. For years, the horrid state of Solaris' userland made it hard to justify order-of-magnitude support increases but this lets you use the best parts without having to suffer through things like a system-destroying package updater[1] simply to get a reliable filesystem. 1. At a previous employer, we bought Sun compute nodes. Nice hardware, arrived with Solaris 10 preinstalled. Each time we got a new shipment I'd get them racked and see if the updater wouldn't render the system unbootable after the first run. Second reboot was always to the Debian installer.
grey 15y ago
The Linux implementations of ZFS are dog slow, and for the last few weeks I've been evaluating btrfs as a possibility for my home storage server, and I've ruled it out completely. btrfs has been "Close to a stable release" for years now, but if you follow their mailing list there are still people reporting total loss of large filesystems once or twice a week (This week I saw filesystem corruption from an unexpected power outtage, and last week there was a data loss/corruption bug caused by a pool of drives with different sector sizes), I desperately want btrfs to be mature but it's more than a few releases away from being stable.
lsc 15y ago
last I looked, xen was culled from openindiana (then the only functional Illumos based distro) - this was back in the days when we thought xen was dying, back before it was pushed upstream in Linux.

hello_moto 15y ago

They have a lot of investment around Solaris (let's not argue about Solaris, OpenSolaris, Illumos) since a few years ago. Brought a lot of ex-SUN engineers, hired open source activist around OpenSolaris, probably built their infrastructure around it as well.

rednaught 15y ago
Thanks. But didn't they also have a lot of FreeBSD such as during the TextDrive days?
- hello_moto 15y ago
  Probably customer + talent acquisition as opposed to technology/infrastructure.

dap 15y ago

You're suggesting Joyent should have finished porting DTrace, ZFS, and Zones to FreeBSD, and then port KVM to FreeBSD, instead of just porting KVM to Illumos?

rednaught 15y ago
FreeBSD has already had ZFS and DTrace for years. They have Jails which would have benefited from Solaris' stronger Zones/Containers. There are already a lot of BSD users. Where are the Illumos users? Are you suggesting that all BSD users go to SmartOS? I used HP-UX and AIX for many years...the one off UNIX systems just end up recreating each other due to fragmentation. They are not the way forward. The smaller mind share/usage of OpenSolaris/Illumos isn't helping. Wouldn't contribution to a BSD have strengthened the community?
- dap 15y ago
  Not at all. The beauty of KVM on SmartOS is that Joyent's customers can run BSD, or Linux, or Windows, or whatever they want without even knowing it's running on top of Illumos. That's why the user base isn't as much an issue. But the underlying foundation is critical. I'm actually really glad BSD is adopting DTrace and I'm sure it will be successful, but the BSD documentation says that it's experimental and not yet production ready (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dtrace.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dt...). Solaris DTrace has been in production since at least 2005. Disclaimer: I work for Joyent, but I do not speak for them.
  - rednaught 15y ago
    I agree the foundation is critical. So would you say that the extensive community use of KVM on SmartOS has decided it is production quality compared to use on Linux?
  - moe 15y ago
    without even knowing it's running on top of Illumos What's the advantage of running Linux->KVM->Illumos instead of Linux->KVM->Linux?
    - acdha 15y ago
      DTrace and ZFS are both great and lack competitive alternatives on Linux. For years, the horrid state of Solaris' userland made it hard to justify order-of-magnitude support increases but this lets you use the best parts without having to suffer through things like a system-destroying package updater[1] simply to get a reliable filesystem. 1. At a previous employer, we bought Sun compute nodes. Nice hardware, arrived with Solaris 10 preinstalled. Each time we got a new shipment I'd get them racked and see if the updater wouldn't render the system unbootable after the first run. Second reboot was always to the Debian installer.

grey 15y ago

The Linux implementations of ZFS are dog slow, and for the last few weeks I've been evaluating btrfs as a possibility for my home storage server, and I've ruled it out completely. btrfs has been "Close to a stable release" for years now, but if you follow their mailing list there are still people reporting total loss of large filesystems once or twice a week (This week I saw filesystem corruption from an unexpected power outtage, and last week there was a data loss/corruption bug caused by a pool of drives with different sector sizes), I desperately want btrfs to be mature but it's more than a few releases away from being stable.

lsc 15y ago

last I looked, xen was culled from openindiana (then the only functional Illumos based distro) - this was back in the days when we thought xen was dying, back before it was pushed upstream in Linux.