8 ms·

OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

96 points by doener 1y ago

jtbayly 1y ago
I can’t figure out what this is from anything on the site. I suppose I need to know what Illumos is? My best guess is that it is an OS?
- mindcrime 1y ago
  Solaris, basically. Illumos was derived from the old OpenSolaris project. I don't know how much it's diverged, as I don't really follow this much. But that's more or less what it is.
  - sgt 1y ago
    Maybe the Perifractic equivalent of the Sun fanworld can buy the Solaris trademark and rename it!
    - joshuaissac 1y ago
      Solaris is still developed and sold by Oracle, and expected to be supported for a very long time. The current version, Solaris 11.4, is planned to be supported until 2037 at the earliest. The previous major version, Solaris 10, was released in 2005 and is supported until 2027. So they are unlikely to sell the trademark any time soon.
      - sgt 1y ago
        Who are still using Solaris though? And I say that as a previous SunOS and Solaris user for a couple of decades. Great technology. That's where I first got to play with dtrace and containers/zones.
        doublerabbit 1y ago
        Banks, large institutions and other enterprises all seem to keep the lights on for Solaris. Times I've heard it's time to migrate from with no one willing too and so the swamp just becomes swampier.
mikewarot 1y ago
As a Hoosier... I had to check the relevance... and learned it's basically a fork^3 of Solaris, a Sun operating system. OpenIndiana[3] <-- Illumos[2] <-- OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0] Note: I guessed here at <-- meaning fork of... any other options I should have used instead? [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris
- mbreese 1y ago
  From: https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/#what-is-the-openindiana-operating-system https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/#what-is-the-o... > Why is it called OpenIndiana? > OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution. (I never understood the naming either) But here's an ArsTechnica article from 2007 talking more about those origins from back when Sun was still trying to win back marketshare from Linux. It had long since lost that war, but was still trying to stay relevant. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/understanding-suns-project-indiana-the-quest-to-make-opensolaris-as-easy-to-adopt-as-ubuntu/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/understanding-... Illumos based OS's have been kicking around a lot longer than I anticipated.
  - weinzierl 1y ago
    Not sure if Ian Murdock had a say in the naming but his family was from Indiana.
    - giancarlostoro 1y ago
      > OpenIndiana takes its name from Project Indiana, the internal codename for OpenSolaris at Sun Microsystems before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana#History
splatter9859 1y ago
Wow. Illumos / Solaris is still kicking, eh? Really too bad Solaris didn’t stick around and was so horribly mismanaged by Sun. Solaris and Vax/VMS is where I started my career decades ago, and still brings back memories.
- geephroh 1y ago
  It (Solaris) was also the origin of ZFS, if I'm not mistaken.
  - spauldo 1y ago
    And DTrace. And NFS/NIS. And SunRPC. And OpenOffice (sort of - they bought the company that made it and then open sourced it). And... you get the idea. That's what I loved about Sun, really. They strive for a leadership role in the UNIX world by actually leading, instead of just trying to dominate. No company is perfect, but Sun was better than most. I was sad to see them go, but with Windows NT taking over corporate and Linux taking over networking, they just didn't have a place. They kept pushing "The network is the computer" at a time when PCs were cheap. If only they'd held out until the cloud craze hit...
- shrubble 1y ago
  I’m of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would decline.
  - thevillagechief 1y ago
    Still mad at IBM for screwing the pooch on that one. They basically handed the company to Oracle.
    - glhaynes 1y ago
      Did IBM consider purchasing Sun?
johnisgood 1y ago
I have to say, that I really loved OpenSolaris. I really have to try OpenIndiana. Can anyone tell me about their package manager?
- hualapais 1y ago
  OI uses IPS packaging, which is the same packaging used by Solaris 11 (some find it over engineered). Tribblix, on the other hand, is also an illumos-based distro but is based on Solaris 10 (and prior’s) SVR4 packaging which is managed via a utility called “zap”. Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    Thanks! Tribblix seems interesting at a quick glance. Does it have i3? Or is there a list of packages that I can see online?
    - ptribble 1y ago
      It has 30 desktop options, including i3 The repo has a list of packages http://pkgs.tribblix.org/ http://pkgs.tribblix.org/
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        I found it, thank you. :)
simne 1y ago
Look to figure out what is it: https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ To be short, it is opensource implementation of SUN Solaris OS. I don't know if it is already developed much.
- lproven 1y ago
  I am honestly really surprised at the number of comments from people who didn't know what it was. I did a sort of review 3Y ago. It may throw some light: https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/07/new_version_of_openindiana/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/07/new_version_of_openin...
gtirloni 1y ago
> illumos-closed package, containing binary blobs still necessary to build illumos-gate, was added https://docs.openindiana.org/release-notes/2016.10-release-notes/?h=blob#development-tools-and-libraries https://docs.openindiana.org/release-notes/2016.10-release-n... > There are a small handful of illumos components for which source code is not available. Over time, we have replaced most of the closed source components from the Sun era with new open source versions. This work is ongoing https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-closed-binaries https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close... > From this, however, project founder Garrett D'Amore took the last drop of the gate and announced illumos in mid-2010. https://illumos.org/docs/about/history/ https://illumos.org/docs/about/history/
- dfc 1y ago
  What does "took the last drop of the gate" mean?
  - tw04 1y ago
    The last code pull from Sun/opensolaris before they started completely diverging.
vinc 1y ago
I've been using OpenIndiana for a file server in my homelab since it came out and it's been quietly doing its job ever since without much issues. Coming from Linux it's not easy to find the equivalent commands of what I do on my other servers but it's also what I like about this project, it's another flavor of Unix to learn.
- spauldo 1y ago
  Sun had excellent documentation. But of course Oracle crapped all over it... If you can find documentation for Solaris 9 I imagine a lot of it would be the same. And there's the Solaris 8 Administration book from O'Reilly - I'm sure you can find PDFs of that floating around.
  - vinc 1y ago
    Yes there's indeed a lot of doc available, but the main issue I discovered is figuring out what's still relevant when you mostly come from a Linux background. Thanks for the PDF suggestion, I didn't think about looking for a book to get more context! I learned a lot about Plan 9 by following a boot camp ran by SDF, I wish there was something like that to promote Illumos distributions
- vinc 1y ago
  Edit: I checked the date and this server has been running since 2012 with just one re-installation a few years ago because it seemed faster than dealing with the issues I had after many years without upgrades. 13 years, nice! Between late 2010 and 2012 I was playing with OI in a VM, and I can read a lot of excitement about it in my old emails :)
tedivm 1y ago
I've spent two minutes look at this website and I still have no idea what this project is.
- rwolf 1y ago
  https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ looks like what you wanted, was not straightforward to get there from the homepage.
- lproven 1y ago
  It's a distro of OpenSolaris. Oracle bought Sun and killed OpenSolaris. There is a continuing community fork called illumos. OpenIndiana is a distro of illumos.
irusensei 1y ago
I don't know about Illumos but setting up a Solaris 10 machine to provide block devices through multi path iSCSI was a breeze with all the tooling it had. No config files needed it was all command line. It was for a university lab and it was the only ever contact I had with Solaris 10 and later versions or forks. I was mildly interested once since it had KVM but support was Intel only so that kept me away. I remember some hypervisor and storage products based on Illumos like Nexenta and Soylent OS. I'm guessing those projects faded into obscurity. Which is a shame. A lot of people was optimistic about OpenSolaris when it came out but Oracle gutted it.
- doublerabbit 1y ago
  I finally got my hands on using a Solaris machine at my last job to upgrading the backup software. All I could explain the OS as, was as a swamp. It's wants to work but doesn't work as it should and you always were knee-deep in sludge too.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Oracle ruined Sun Microsystems for sure, incl. OpenSolaris.
gigatexal 1y ago
Ahh man the nostalgia. I miss Sun. Oracle buys and ruins everything.
- spauldo 1y ago
  If only Broadcom would buy Oracle...
cnst 1y ago
Everything is converging on Linux these days, and even the majority of the people who used to promote Solaris, DTrace and ZFS, have seemingly moved on, mostly to Linux, somewhat to FreeBSD, too, per Brendan Gregg: Solaris to Linux Migration 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 - Sept 2017 (129 comments) In the BSD land, things aren't that much better, either. Netgate, the makers of pfSense, are now using Ubuntu for Netgate TNSR product. iXsystems, the descendants of BSDi, have moved FreeNAS / TrueNAS from FreeBSD to Linux. They're basically d/b/a TrueNAS now, and it's all Linux now. You used to need Solaris or illimos or FreeBSD for production-ready ZFS support, but now OpenZFS is provided exclusively for Linux and FreeBSD; note that Linux already comes first in the title; it would seem like it's only a matter of time before FreeBSD support may follow Solaris and illumos. Joyent, the commercial shepherds of OpenSolaris descendants like SmartOS, were acquired by Samsung, but the entire Solaris part of the equation, including Triton DataCenter orchestration, were subsequently offloaded to mnx.io, a tiny cloud hosting provider based out of a small town in Michigan. (Frankly, without Triton, I don't even understand what remains of Joyent at Samsung? Just the physical servers with the third-party software? It's basically just a name for Samsung's data centre ops and their presumably-Linux-based Private Cloud?) Apple used to use NetBSD for AirPort WiFi routers, but the whole router line has been discontinued. (I thought Apple actually already dropped NetBSD but couldn't find a source right now.) Last not least, DJB used to run OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, but then switched to Ubuntu after possibly being annoyed that too many steps were required to make FreeBSD work as a desktop: http://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html http://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html (my fav is that in FreeBSD the audio doesn't work unless you recompile the kernel). I think he initially may have abandoned OpenBSD because it was crashing too often for undetermined causes: http://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html http://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html. FreeBSD is still used by Netflix OpenConnect Appliance, which is a huge win, but feels like too many eggs in a single basket: Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738 - Sept 2021 (293 comments) But that's about it. Linux has won.
- ubedan 1y ago
  "There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ... Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead…well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do." I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and it very well could rise again for those users that want/need robust stability. One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company as their hypervisor. They published their reasoning for choosing illumos here: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2556s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2556s
tgma 1y ago
Is there really a valid use case these days if you are not a hobbyist/fanboy or have existing Solaris workload compared to FreeBSD (or Linux if licensing isn't an issue)? ZFS seems quite well-supported on those.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  Not that I'd really use it, but the integration of ZFS with the package manager on the one side and things like NFS on the other side made it really nice to use. If a package update failed for whatever reason one could simply revert to a previous boot environment and configuring permissions on NFS exports worked directly integrated with ZFS. Really nice. On other platforms there is a lot more fiddling around required.
- spauldo 1y ago
  Solaris is an actual System V, not a clone like Linux distros often are or a BSD. It's got excellent support for compiling software written for different UNIX systems. It does a lot of things with commands that other systems do with config files. But no, there really aren't any compelling reasons why a non-hobbyist would be interested. If Oracle had continued development on OpenSolaris then yes, but they have little interest in their own version of Solaris.
- vinc 1y ago
  I run a fileserver with ZFS + NFS since 2012 (I just checked the date) in my homelab and I'm happy about it. I could do the same on Linux of course but a little more OS diversity is not a bad thing!
sandreas 1y ago
AFAIK the interesting thing about these Illumos Forks is ZFS support together with a kernel based SMB server ability using it as file server. After enabling a share, connect as root and set NTFS alike ACL via Windows. The SMB server is using Windows SID (not uid/gid) as ACL and Windows-ish SMB groups on Illumos (not Unix groups) See https://illumos.org/man/8/smbadm https://illumos.org/man/8/smbadm
spauldo 1y ago
Anyone run this on top of KVM? I tried a while back but I don't know KVM or Qemu well and all the examples were ancient and didn't work for me. I'd love to play around with Solaris again (last I used it was Solaris 8 on an Ultra-1) but I don't have any decent hardware I'm willing to dedicate to the task.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  Last time I tried it worked fine. Didn’t install the GUI environment though as I wanted a headless server environment for some testing.

96 points by doener 1y ago

I can’t figure out what this is from anything on the site. I suppose I need to know what Illumos is? My best guess is that it is an OS?

mindcrime 1y ago
Solaris, basically. Illumos was derived from the old OpenSolaris project. I don't know how much it's diverged, as I don't really follow this much. But that's more or less what it is.
- sgt 1y ago
  Maybe the Perifractic equivalent of the Sun fanworld can buy the Solaris trademark and rename it!
  - joshuaissac 1y ago
    Solaris is still developed and sold by Oracle, and expected to be supported for a very long time. The current version, Solaris 11.4, is planned to be supported until 2037 at the earliest. The previous major version, Solaris 10, was released in 2005 and is supported until 2027. So they are unlikely to sell the trademark any time soon.
    - sgt 1y ago
      Who are still using Solaris though? And I say that as a previous SunOS and Solaris user for a couple of decades. Great technology. That's where I first got to play with dtrace and containers/zones.
      - doublerabbit 1y ago
        Banks, large institutions and other enterprises all seem to keep the lights on for Solaris. Times I've heard it's time to migrate from with no one willing too and so the swamp just becomes swampier.

mikewarot 1y ago

As a Hoosier... I had to check the relevance... and learned it's basically a fork^3 of Solaris, a Sun operating system. OpenIndiana[3] <-- Illumos[2] <-- OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0] Note: I guessed here at <-- meaning fork of... any other options I should have used instead? [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris

mbreese 1y ago
From: https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/#what-is-the-openindiana-operating-system https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/#what-is-the-o... > Why is it called OpenIndiana? > OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution. (I never understood the naming either) But here's an ArsTechnica article from 2007 talking more about those origins from back when Sun was still trying to win back marketshare from Linux. It had long since lost that war, but was still trying to stay relevant. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/understanding-suns-project-indiana-the-quest-to-make-opensolaris-as-easy-to-adopt-as-ubuntu/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/understanding-... Illumos based OS's have been kicking around a lot longer than I anticipated.
- weinzierl 1y ago
  Not sure if Ian Murdock had a say in the naming but his family was from Indiana.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    > OpenIndiana takes its name from Project Indiana, the internal codename for OpenSolaris at Sun Microsystems before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana#History

splatter9859 1y ago

Wow. Illumos / Solaris is still kicking, eh? Really too bad Solaris didn’t stick around and was so horribly mismanaged by Sun. Solaris and Vax/VMS is where I started my career decades ago, and still brings back memories.

geephroh 1y ago
It (Solaris) was also the origin of ZFS, if I'm not mistaken.
- spauldo 1y ago
  And DTrace. And NFS/NIS. And SunRPC. And OpenOffice (sort of - they bought the company that made it and then open sourced it). And... you get the idea. That's what I loved about Sun, really. They strive for a leadership role in the UNIX world by actually leading, instead of just trying to dominate. No company is perfect, but Sun was better than most. I was sad to see them go, but with Windows NT taking over corporate and Linux taking over networking, they just didn't have a place. They kept pushing "The network is the computer" at a time when PCs were cheap. If only they'd held out until the cloud craze hit...
shrubble 1y ago
I’m of the opinion that the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was the worst possible outcome; it guaranteed that Solaris would decline.
- thevillagechief 1y ago
  Still mad at IBM for screwing the pooch on that one. They basically handed the company to Oracle.
  - glhaynes 1y ago
    Did IBM consider purchasing Sun?

johnisgood 1y ago

I have to say, that I really loved OpenSolaris. I really have to try OpenIndiana. Can anyone tell me about their package manager?

hualapais 1y ago
OI uses IPS packaging, which is the same packaging used by Solaris 11 (some find it over engineered). Tribblix, on the other hand, is also an illumos-based distro but is based on Solaris 10 (and prior’s) SVR4 packaging which is managed via a utility called “zap”. Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Thanks! Tribblix seems interesting at a quick glance. Does it have i3? Or is there a list of packages that I can see online?
  - ptribble 1y ago
    It has 30 desktop options, including i3 The repo has a list of packages http://pkgs.tribblix.org/ http://pkgs.tribblix.org/
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      I found it, thank you. :)

simne 1y ago

Look to figure out what is it: https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ To be short, it is opensource implementation of SUN Solaris OS. I don't know if it is already developed much.

lproven 1y ago
I am honestly really surprised at the number of comments from people who didn't know what it was. I did a sort of review 3Y ago. It may throw some light: https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/07/new_version_of_openindiana/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/07/new_version_of_openin...

gtirloni 1y ago

> illumos-closed package, containing binary blobs still necessary to build illumos-gate, was added https://docs.openindiana.org/release-notes/2016.10-release-notes/?h=blob#development-tools-and-libraries https://docs.openindiana.org/release-notes/2016.10-release-n... > There are a small handful of illumos components for which source code is not available. Over time, we have replaced most of the closed source components from the Sun era with new open source versions. This work is ongoing https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-closed-binaries https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close... > From this, however, project founder Garrett D'Amore took the last drop of the gate and announced illumos in mid-2010. https://illumos.org/docs/about/history/ https://illumos.org/docs/about/history/

dfc 1y ago
What does "took the last drop of the gate" mean?
- tw04 1y ago
  The last code pull from Sun/opensolaris before they started completely diverging.

vinc 1y ago

I've been using OpenIndiana for a file server in my homelab since it came out and it's been quietly doing its job ever since without much issues. Coming from Linux it's not easy to find the equivalent commands of what I do on my other servers but it's also what I like about this project, it's another flavor of Unix to learn.

spauldo 1y ago
Sun had excellent documentation. But of course Oracle crapped all over it... If you can find documentation for Solaris 9 I imagine a lot of it would be the same. And there's the Solaris 8 Administration book from O'Reilly - I'm sure you can find PDFs of that floating around.
- vinc 1y ago
  Yes there's indeed a lot of doc available, but the main issue I discovered is figuring out what's still relevant when you mostly come from a Linux background. Thanks for the PDF suggestion, I didn't think about looking for a book to get more context! I learned a lot about Plan 9 by following a boot camp ran by SDF, I wish there was something like that to promote Illumos distributions
vinc 1y ago
Edit: I checked the date and this server has been running since 2012 with just one re-installation a few years ago because it seemed faster than dealing with the issues I had after many years without upgrades. 13 years, nice! Between late 2010 and 2012 I was playing with OI in a VM, and I can read a lot of excitement about it in my old emails :)

tedivm 1y ago

I've spent two minutes look at this website and I still have no idea what this project is.

rwolf 1y ago
https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/openindiana/ looks like what you wanted, was not straightforward to get there from the homepage.
lproven 1y ago
It's a distro of OpenSolaris. Oracle bought Sun and killed OpenSolaris. There is a continuing community fork called illumos. OpenIndiana is a distro of illumos.

irusensei 1y ago

I don't know about Illumos but setting up a Solaris 10 machine to provide block devices through multi path iSCSI was a breeze with all the tooling it had. No config files needed it was all command line. It was for a university lab and it was the only ever contact I had with Solaris 10 and later versions or forks. I was mildly interested once since it had KVM but support was Intel only so that kept me away. I remember some hypervisor and storage products based on Illumos like Nexenta and Soylent OS. I'm guessing those projects faded into obscurity. Which is a shame. A lot of people was optimistic about OpenSolaris when it came out but Oracle gutted it.

doublerabbit 1y ago
I finally got my hands on using a Solaris machine at my last job to upgrading the backup software. All I could explain the OS as, was as a swamp. It's wants to work but doesn't work as it should and you always were knee-deep in sludge too.
johnisgood 1y ago
Oracle ruined Sun Microsystems for sure, incl. OpenSolaris.

gigatexal 1y ago

Ahh man the nostalgia. I miss Sun. Oracle buys and ruins everything.

spauldo 1y ago
If only Broadcom would buy Oracle...

cnst 1y ago

Everything is converging on Linux these days, and even the majority of the people who used to promote Solaris, DTrace and ZFS, have seemingly moved on, mostly to Linux, somewhat to FreeBSD, too, per Brendan Gregg: Solaris to Linux Migration 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 - Sept 2017 (129 comments) In the BSD land, things aren't that much better, either. Netgate, the makers of pfSense, are now using Ubuntu for Netgate TNSR product. iXsystems, the descendants of BSDi, have moved FreeNAS / TrueNAS from FreeBSD to Linux. They're basically d/b/a TrueNAS now, and it's all Linux now. You used to need Solaris or illimos or FreeBSD for production-ready ZFS support, but now OpenZFS is provided exclusively for Linux and FreeBSD; note that Linux already comes first in the title; it would seem like it's only a matter of time before FreeBSD support may follow Solaris and illumos. Joyent, the commercial shepherds of OpenSolaris descendants like SmartOS, were acquired by Samsung, but the entire Solaris part of the equation, including Triton DataCenter orchestration, were subsequently offloaded to mnx.io, a tiny cloud hosting provider based out of a small town in Michigan. (Frankly, without Triton, I don't even understand what remains of Joyent at Samsung? Just the physical servers with the third-party software? It's basically just a name for Samsung's data centre ops and their presumably-Linux-based Private Cloud?) Apple used to use NetBSD for AirPort WiFi routers, but the whole router line has been discontinued. (I thought Apple actually already dropped NetBSD but couldn't find a source right now.) Last not least, DJB used to run OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, but then switched to Ubuntu after possibly being annoyed that too many steps were required to make FreeBSD work as a desktop: http://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html http://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html (my fav is that in FreeBSD the audio doesn't work unless you recompile the kernel). I think he initially may have abandoned OpenBSD because it was crashing too often for undetermined causes: http://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html http://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html. FreeBSD is still used by Netflix OpenConnect Appliance, which is a huge win, but feels like too many eggs in a single basket: Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738 - Sept 2021 (293 comments) But that's about it. Linux has won.

ubedan 1y ago
"There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ... Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead…well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do." I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and it very well could rise again for those users that want/need robust stability. One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company as their hypervisor. They published their reasoning for choosing illumos here: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2556s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2556s

tgma 1y ago

Is there really a valid use case these days if you are not a hobbyist/fanboy or have existing Solaris workload compared to FreeBSD (or Linux if licensing isn't an issue)? ZFS seems quite well-supported on those.

johannes1234321 1y ago
Not that I'd really use it, but the integration of ZFS with the package manager on the one side and things like NFS on the other side made it really nice to use. If a package update failed for whatever reason one could simply revert to a previous boot environment and configuring permissions on NFS exports worked directly integrated with ZFS. Really nice. On other platforms there is a lot more fiddling around required.
spauldo 1y ago
Solaris is an actual System V, not a clone like Linux distros often are or a BSD. It's got excellent support for compiling software written for different UNIX systems. It does a lot of things with commands that other systems do with config files. But no, there really aren't any compelling reasons why a non-hobbyist would be interested. If Oracle had continued development on OpenSolaris then yes, but they have little interest in their own version of Solaris.
vinc 1y ago
I run a fileserver with ZFS + NFS since 2012 (I just checked the date) in my homelab and I'm happy about it. I could do the same on Linux of course but a little more OS diversity is not a bad thing!

sandreas 1y ago

AFAIK the interesting thing about these Illumos Forks is ZFS support together with a kernel based SMB server ability using it as file server. After enabling a share, connect as root and set NTFS alike ACL via Windows. The SMB server is using Windows SID (not uid/gid) as ACL and Windows-ish SMB groups on Illumos (not Unix groups) See https://illumos.org/man/8/smbadm https://illumos.org/man/8/smbadm

spauldo 1y ago

Anyone run this on top of KVM? I tried a while back but I don't know KVM or Qemu well and all the examples were ancient and didn't work for me. I'd love to play around with Solaris again (last I used it was Solaris 8 on an Ultra-1) but I don't have any decent hardware I'm willing to dedicate to the task.

rbanffy 1y ago
Last time I tried it worked fine. Didn’t install the GUI environment though as I wanted a headless server environment for some testing.