5 ms·

Aren't they also ex-Joyent? Joyent ran customer VMs in prod on Illumos for many years so there's a lot of experience there.

by quux 3y ago

steveklabnik 3y ago
Many people, including part of the founding team, are ex-Joyent, yes. Some also worked at Sun, on the operating systems that illumos is ultimately derived from.
littlestymaar 3y ago
bcantrill used to work at Sun then became CTO at Joyent, so the reason why Joyent ran Illumos is probably the same reason as why Oxide is, because Cantrill likes it and judges that it's a good fit for what they are doing.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  As I elaborated above, bcantrill did not decree that we must use illumos. Technical decisions are not handed down from above at Oxide.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    I saw your comment[1] after I wrote mine, but I'm not saying that he's forcing you guys to use it (that would not a good way of being a CTO at a start-up…), but that doesn't prevent him from advocating for solutions he believes in. Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39180706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39180706
    - sunshowers 3y ago
      (I work at Oxide.) Bryan is just one out of several illumos experts here. If none of those were around, sure, maybe we wouldn't have picked illumos -- but then we'd be unrecognizably different. I came into Oxide with a Linux background and zero knowledge of illumos. Learning about DTrace especially has been great.
      - bbkane 3y ago
        I'd like to learn DTrace (especially after the recent 20yr podcast episode), but I worry it'll never make into mainstream Linux debugging, and hence only useful for more niche jobs.
        sunshowers 3y ago
        Your concern is completely reasonable -- a thing I'd add though is that both Windows and macOS have DTrace support.
        4ad 3y ago
        DTrace in macOS was always a third class citizen, it never worked very well, and in fact, on arm64 machines it doesn't work at all (panics the kernel).
        sunshowers 3y ago
        That's really unfortunate :(
        bbkane 3y ago
        I was excited, but it looks like both MacOS and Windows require special admin permissions for my laptop that I doubt my work would approve (completely reasonable to require this, it just makes it unusable for me).
        4ad 3y ago
        It's actually not reasonable to require this if you do it right. On Solaris and illumos DTrace works just fine for a normal user. You simply have access to fewer probes if you are less privileged. Not the case on FreeBSD/Windows/macOS, where it's all or nothing. Still, on FreeBSD you just need root, on macOS you need to boot into a special kernel mode which doesn't even work on modern Apple Silicon machines.
        roland-s 3y ago
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      > Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company? I don't know how to respond to this question, because to me it reads like "if things were completely different, what would they be like?" I have no idea if you could even argue that a company could be the same company with different founders. What I can say is that this line of questioning still makes me feel like you're implying that this choice was made simply based on preference. It was not. I am employee #17 at Oxide, and the decision still wasn't made by the time I joined. But again, the choice was made based on a number of technical factors. The RFD wasn't even authored by Bryan, but instead by four other folks at Oxide. We all (well, everyone who wanted to, I say "we" because I in fact did) wrote out the pros and cons of both, and we weighed it like we would weigh any technical decision: that is, not as a battle of sports teams, but as a "hey we need to drive some screws: should we use a screwdriver, a hammer, or something else?" sort of nuts-and-bolts engineering decision.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        > we weighed it like we would weigh any technical decision: that is, not as a battle of sports teams, but as a "hey we need to drive some screws: should we use a screwdriver, a hammer, or something else?" sort of nuts-and-bolts engineering decision. I'm not saying otherwise. In fact, when I wrote my original comment, I actually rewrote it multiple time to be sure it wouldn't suggest I was thinking it was some sort of irrational decision (that's why I added the “it's a good fit for what they are doing”), but given your reaction it looks like I failed. Written language is hard, especially in a foreign language, sorry about that.
        steveklabnik 3y ago
        It's all good! I re-wrote what I wrote multiple times as well. Communication is hard. I appreciate you taking the effort, sorry to have misunderstood. Heck, there's a great little mistake of communication in the title: this isn't just "intended" to power the rack, it does power the rack! But they said that because we said that in the README, because that line in the README was written before it ended up happening. Oops!

Aren't they also ex-Joyent? Joyent ran customer VMs in prod on Illumos for many years so there's a lot of experience there.

by quux 3y ago

Aren't they also ex-Joyent? Joyent ran customer VMs in prod on Illumos for many years so there's a lot of experience there.

steveklabnik 3y ago

Many people, including part of the founding team, are ex-Joyent, yes. Some also worked at Sun, on the operating systems that illumos is ultimately derived from.

littlestymaar 3y ago

bcantrill used to work at Sun then became CTO at Joyent, so the reason why Joyent ran Illumos is probably the same reason as why Oxide is, because Cantrill likes it and judges that it's a good fit for what they are doing.

steveklabnik 3y ago
As I elaborated above, bcantrill did not decree that we must use illumos. Technical decisions are not handed down from above at Oxide.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  I saw your comment[1] after I wrote mine, but I'm not saying that he's forcing you guys to use it (that would not a good way of being a CTO at a start-up…), but that doesn't prevent him from advocating for solutions he believes in. Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39180706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39180706
  - sunshowers 3y ago
    (I work at Oxide.) Bryan is just one out of several illumos experts here. If none of those were around, sure, maybe we wouldn't have picked illumos -- but then we'd be unrecognizably different. I came into Oxide with a Linux background and zero knowledge of illumos. Learning about DTrace especially has been great.
    - bbkane 3y ago
      I'd like to learn DTrace (especially after the recent 20yr podcast episode), but I worry it'll never make into mainstream Linux debugging, and hence only useful for more niche jobs.
      - sunshowers 3y ago
        Your concern is completely reasonable -- a thing I'd add though is that both Windows and macOS have DTrace support.
        4ad 3y ago
        DTrace in macOS was always a third class citizen, it never worked very well, and in fact, on arm64 machines it doesn't work at all (panics the kernel).
        sunshowers 3y ago
        That's really unfortunate :(
        bbkane 3y ago
        I was excited, but it looks like both MacOS and Windows require special admin permissions for my laptop that I doubt my work would approve (completely reasonable to require this, it just makes it unusable for me).
        4ad 3y ago
        It's actually not reasonable to require this if you do it right. On Solaris and illumos DTrace works just fine for a normal user. You simply have access to fewer probes if you are less privileged. Not the case on FreeBSD/Windows/macOS, where it's all or nothing. Still, on FreeBSD you just need root, on macOS you need to boot into a special kernel mode which doesn't even work on modern Apple Silicon machines.
      - roland-s 3y ago
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    > Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company? I don't know how to respond to this question, because to me it reads like "if things were completely different, what would they be like?" I have no idea if you could even argue that a company could be the same company with different founders. What I can say is that this line of questioning still makes me feel like you're implying that this choice was made simply based on preference. It was not. I am employee #17 at Oxide, and the decision still wasn't made by the time I joined. But again, the choice was made based on a number of technical factors. The RFD wasn't even authored by Bryan, but instead by four other folks at Oxide. We all (well, everyone who wanted to, I say "we" because I in fact did) wrote out the pros and cons of both, and we weighed it like we would weigh any technical decision: that is, not as a battle of sports teams, but as a "hey we need to drive some screws: should we use a screwdriver, a hammer, or something else?" sort of nuts-and-bolts engineering decision.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      > we weighed it like we would weigh any technical decision: that is, not as a battle of sports teams, but as a "hey we need to drive some screws: should we use a screwdriver, a hammer, or something else?" sort of nuts-and-bolts engineering decision. I'm not saying otherwise. In fact, when I wrote my original comment, I actually rewrote it multiple time to be sure it wouldn't suggest I was thinking it was some sort of irrational decision (that's why I added the “it's a good fit for what they are doing”), but given your reaction it looks like I failed. Written language is hard, especially in a foreign language, sorry about that.
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        It's all good! I re-wrote what I wrote multiple times as well. Communication is hard. I appreciate you taking the effort, sorry to have misunderstood. Heck, there's a great little mistake of communication in the title: this isn't just "intended" to power the rack, it does power the rack! But they said that because we said that in the README, because that line in the README was written before it ended up happening. Oops!