7 ms·

I do know some folks that are still using it (or Joyent's SDC Hypervisor offering, which I guess also has numbered days since the Samsung aqui). Sadly, I don't

I do know some folks that are still using it (or Joyent's SDC Hypervisor offering, which I guess also has numbered days since the Samsung aqui). Sadly, I don't think it's got much time left. I do miss it, it was rock solid and the tooling was much better than linux at the time. Containers were implemented properly from the beginning, SMF is (still) much superior to SystemD, things like resource limits and so on could be applied in a much nicer manner. And it was fast too, when you had the sun compilers. Oh well. RIP.

jmarneweck 5y ago
Joyent SmartOS is now being maintained by MNX and the GitHub repositories have moved to https://github.com/TritonDataCenter https://github.com/TritonDataCenter
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Oh nice. I hadn't heard of mnx.io. They don't seem to be a huge player like Sun/Oracle, Joyent/Samsung though. I really wish them well, I loved that stack -- but I wouldn't bet on that stack anymore. I moved storage to FreeBSD, (internet) networking to OpenBSD and VM's live on proxmox when I am running actual hardware. Otherwise, $cloud.
  - itomato 5y ago
    Oxide has bet the farm on it.
    - cyberpunk 5y ago
      Yeah, but oxide is Bryan Cantrills company, so I mean what do you think they were going to use, BeOS? :}
      - mattl 5y ago
        I was surprised to read recently that Haiku is now being used in some commercial products.
        azinman2 5y ago
        What products? That is surprising.
        mattl 5y ago
        http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/products.html http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/products.html
        electroly 5y ago
        TuneTracker is old school BeOS from the old days, this isn't a new development by any stretch of the imagination. They just switched to using Haiku.
        mattl 5y ago
        It’s still Haiku being used commercially.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      I don't think so. Bhyve with a Rust frontend could run on other systems.
    - ksec 5y ago
      What is the relationship between MNX and Oxide? I cant google anything on it.
- gbrown_ 5y ago
  I saw the MNX announcement the other day and am still confused by it. What did Samsung acquire Joyent for if not the software, or did things simply not pan out and Samsung is now offloading bit?
  - RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 5y ago
    It felt like an acquihiring to build their internal cloud, with an hedge that if it's wildly successful, may even be offered as a public product. However, Linux (and containers running on Linux) ate everyone's lunch.
  - ksec 5y ago
    >or did things simply not pan out and Samsung is now offloading bit? Samsung wanted to enter the Public Cloud Space, ( The kind of business they would be interested in ), but their NAND and DRAM division would suffer order reduction from hyper scalers. In the end they sort of back off this segment of business.
- pbowyer 5y ago
  There's also https://danube.cloud/ https://danube.cloud/ which I think is a fork of SmartOS
trollied 5y ago
Zones and ZFS were great together. It was a rock solid OS, sitting on rock solid hardware. I enjoyed working with Sun kit back in the day, and it's such a shame that Oracle killed yet another great product.
- lazyier 5y ago
  Oracle didn't kill it. It was already dead when they bought it. What Oracle wanted when they bought Sun was Java. Solaris and the hardware just came along with the ride. There are a few people that they needed to support for contractual reasons and a legacy install here and there that they could continue to milk, but for everybody else Solaris was dead before 2009. This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it.
  - dijit 5y ago
    It’s impossible to reply to this because by virtue of thinking that the systems were good you can label anyone a fan. The fact remains: it was widely deployed, and we are still catching up to certain components of the operating system. Dtrace, ZFS and SMF are examples. Calling it dead only tells me that you weren’t in an industry that used it. It would be like claiming windows is dead because most things these days are cloud hosted and windows is very expensive there. It’s true in some sense but extremely blind to the rest of the industry.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      Exactly, had Oracle contuned the deveopment in the open in cooperation with the community it would have been an amazing system to this day.
    - prmoustache 5y ago
      Dtrace, zfs and smf were nice but came too late but they are things that appeal the engineer, not the manager that sign the contracts. And Sun was already on life support when Oracle bought them. Sure there was still a lot of companies still using mostly solaris back then - I worked for 2 of them as a Solaris "expert" somewhere during last decade - but all of them already had projects running about replacing Solaris for more cost effective redhat, even those that bought exadata racks. "expert" meaning I was still one of those survivors still young enough to be still willing to work in an operation team and having more than 5 years of experience administrating Solaris and AIX shit. I must say I loved the integration of zfs with gnome2's nautilus back then on opensolaris. I used it for a while as my daily driver at home.
proxysna 5y ago
Use omniOS, literally next best thing. Zones, smf and all the other great things. Amazing stuff.
- nix23 5y ago
  omniOS is absolutely great for servers!!
- ksec 5y ago
  Never heard of it so I had to look this up, OmniOS is a distribution of illumos. And for those who dont follow closely, illumos is forked from OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems.
  - proxysna 5y ago
    Exactly! OmniOS, Tribblix and Smartos are probably three most prominent ones. OpenIndiana is another one, but it is aimed at desktop computers.
TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
I'd never heard of SMF [0] before, and I'm not very familiarized with this problem domain. Maybe this is a dumb question, but if it was so great why hasn't anyone tried to replicate it for Linux? It always baffles me that superior tools can be developed while still failing to gain traction in alternative ecosystems. [0] https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/solaris/intro-smf-basics-s11.html https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/solaris/...
- fmakunbound 5y ago
  As I recall, it was a mess of XML files you edit and slow Java based tooling.
- PAPPPmAc 5y ago
  They did, it one of the larger parts of systemd that motivated its adoption and ubiquity. A bunch of commercial UNIXes sprung init replacements/extensions with process lifetime management systems in the 2000s, systemd is visibly influenced by many of their design choices. OS X natively uses launchd (uses plists for config, has a weak dependency system) , Solaris uses SMF (uses XML for config). There were also the daemontools/runit family, s6, and a couple others that sprung up from open source quarters.
- hapless 5y ago
  I looked at this once, and I seem to recall SMF relies on a Solaris-specific IPC mechanism with no simple analog on Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing)
binkHN 5y ago
> Containers were implemented properly from the beginning, SMF is (still) much superior to SystemD, things like resource limits and so on could be applied in a much nicer manner. This! Shame they didn’t make it free sooner—it might have lived longer.
otterley 5y ago
I’m curious as to why you think SMF is superior to systemd. Can you elaborate?
ashayh 5y ago
SMF, which is XML based is superior? Really? https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SMFServiceManifestNotes https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SMFServiceM... https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21798/firstboot-2.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21798/firstboot-2...
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Yep. What's wrong with XML?

jmarneweck 5y ago

Joyent SmartOS is now being maintained by MNX and the GitHub repositories have moved to https://github.com/TritonDataCenter https://github.com/TritonDataCenter

cyberpunk 5y ago
Oh nice. I hadn't heard of mnx.io. They don't seem to be a huge player like Sun/Oracle, Joyent/Samsung though. I really wish them well, I loved that stack -- but I wouldn't bet on that stack anymore. I moved storage to FreeBSD, (internet) networking to OpenBSD and VM's live on proxmox when I am running actual hardware. Otherwise, $cloud.
- itomato 5y ago
  Oxide has bet the farm on it.
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    Yeah, but oxide is Bryan Cantrills company, so I mean what do you think they were going to use, BeOS? :}
    - mattl 5y ago
      I was surprised to read recently that Haiku is now being used in some commercial products.
      - azinman2 5y ago
        What products? That is surprising.
        mattl 5y ago
        http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/products.html http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/products.html
        electroly 5y ago
        TuneTracker is old school BeOS from the old days, this isn't a new development by any stretch of the imagination. They just switched to using Haiku.
        mattl 5y ago
        It’s still Haiku being used commercially.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    I don't think so. Bhyve with a Rust frontend could run on other systems.
  - ksec 5y ago
    What is the relationship between MNX and Oxide? I cant google anything on it.
gbrown_ 5y ago
I saw the MNX announcement the other day and am still confused by it. What did Samsung acquire Joyent for if not the software, or did things simply not pan out and Samsung is now offloading bit?
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 5y ago
  It felt like an acquihiring to build their internal cloud, with an hedge that if it's wildly successful, may even be offered as a public product. However, Linux (and containers running on Linux) ate everyone's lunch.
- ksec 5y ago
  >or did things simply not pan out and Samsung is now offloading bit? Samsung wanted to enter the Public Cloud Space, ( The kind of business they would be interested in ), but their NAND and DRAM division would suffer order reduction from hyper scalers. In the end they sort of back off this segment of business.
pbowyer 5y ago
There's also https://danube.cloud/ https://danube.cloud/ which I think is a fork of SmartOS

trollied 5y ago

Zones and ZFS were great together. It was a rock solid OS, sitting on rock solid hardware. I enjoyed working with Sun kit back in the day, and it's such a shame that Oracle killed yet another great product.

lazyier 5y ago
Oracle didn't kill it. It was already dead when they bought it. What Oracle wanted when they bought Sun was Java. Solaris and the hardware just came along with the ride. There are a few people that they needed to support for contractual reasons and a legacy install here and there that they could continue to milk, but for everybody else Solaris was dead before 2009. This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it.
- dijit 5y ago
  It’s impossible to reply to this because by virtue of thinking that the systems were good you can label anyone a fan. The fact remains: it was widely deployed, and we are still catching up to certain components of the operating system. Dtrace, ZFS and SMF are examples. Calling it dead only tells me that you weren’t in an industry that used it. It would be like claiming windows is dead because most things these days are cloud hosted and windows is very expensive there. It’s true in some sense but extremely blind to the rest of the industry.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Exactly, had Oracle contuned the deveopment in the open in cooperation with the community it would have been an amazing system to this day.
  - prmoustache 5y ago
    Dtrace, zfs and smf were nice but came too late but they are things that appeal the engineer, not the manager that sign the contracts. And Sun was already on life support when Oracle bought them. Sure there was still a lot of companies still using mostly solaris back then - I worked for 2 of them as a Solaris "expert" somewhere during last decade - but all of them already had projects running about replacing Solaris for more cost effective redhat, even those that bought exadata racks. "expert" meaning I was still one of those survivors still young enough to be still willing to work in an operation team and having more than 5 years of experience administrating Solaris and AIX shit. I must say I loved the integration of zfs with gnome2's nautilus back then on opensolaris. I used it for a while as my daily driver at home.

proxysna 5y ago

Use omniOS, literally next best thing. Zones, smf and all the other great things. Amazing stuff.

nix23 5y ago
omniOS is absolutely great for servers!!
ksec 5y ago
Never heard of it so I had to look this up, OmniOS is a distribution of illumos. And for those who dont follow closely, illumos is forked from OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems.
- proxysna 5y ago
  Exactly! OmniOS, Tribblix and Smartos are probably three most prominent ones. OpenIndiana is another one, but it is aimed at desktop computers.

TheAceOfHearts 5y ago

I'd never heard of SMF [0] before, and I'm not very familiarized with this problem domain. Maybe this is a dumb question, but if it was so great why hasn't anyone tried to replicate it for Linux? It always baffles me that superior tools can be developed while still failing to gain traction in alternative ecosystems. [0] https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/solaris/intro-smf-basics-s11.html https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/solaris/...

fmakunbound 5y ago
As I recall, it was a mess of XML files you edit and slow Java based tooling.
PAPPPmAc 5y ago
They did, it one of the larger parts of systemd that motivated its adoption and ubiquity. A bunch of commercial UNIXes sprung init replacements/extensions with process lifetime management systems in the 2000s, systemd is visibly influenced by many of their design choices. OS X natively uses launchd (uses plists for config, has a weak dependency system) , Solaris uses SMF (uses XML for config). There were also the daemontools/runit family, s6, and a couple others that sprung up from open source quarters.
hapless 5y ago
I looked at this once, and I seem to recall SMF relies on a Solaris-specific IPC mechanism with no simple analog on Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_(computing)

binkHN 5y ago

> Containers were implemented properly from the beginning, SMF is (still) much superior to SystemD, things like resource limits and so on could be applied in a much nicer manner. This! Shame they didn’t make it free sooner—it might have lived longer.

otterley 5y ago

I’m curious as to why you think SMF is superior to systemd. Can you elaborate?

ashayh 5y ago

SMF, which is XML based is superior? Really? https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SMFServiceManifestNotes https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SMFServiceM... https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21798/firstboot-2.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21798/firstboot-2...

cyberpunk 5y ago
Yep. What's wrong with XML?