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Get Smart with SmartOS

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Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#11

Post by mikestew »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #3

SmartOS looks interesting, but I've never had a good chance to try it on a real project. I do actually have an extra box at work that I suppose I could spin up in my copious spare time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with it. Are LX-branded zones complete enough to run something like a build environment based around a vendor-dropped toolchain? > The Unix-like operating system [...] I know I'm late to this party, being…

It feels like trademark law has been twisted toward requiring misrepresentation rather than preventing it.

There are technical differences, as well. Most of the time one will never tell the difference (hence "Unix-LIKE": you'll likely never know). But BSD is not Linux, and vice-versa. For a really poor analogy, kind of like the electric version of an ICE automobile. Looks a lot like the ICE version (well, the grill is kind of funny), operates mostly the same, but under the hood it's different.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#12

Post by bcantrill »

SamWhited wrote: post #5

I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if you don't, but I use Terraform and Pac…

Glad to hear that there are aspects of SmartOS that you enjoy, and sorry that it's been a mixed bag. More specifically, my apologies on the documentation: it's an area in which we've always been very short staffed, and our focus on documentation has necessarily been more aligned with our products than our projects.

As for maintaining software: if you can be more specific where you're running into issues, we can figure out what's going on. Generally, we don't have too much software that isn't maintained at all, but we also do reimplement components from time to time, and you might have run into an issue on a component that is being replaced -- but my apologies if or where we weren't upfront about that...

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#13

Post by 88e282102ae2e5b »

nbsd4life wrote: post #9
88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #7

I really wish I could use SmartOS, but I couldn't even install some common Python packages without getting a compilation error. Looking such problems up on issue trackers revealed old requests for compatibility with SmartOS, and no follow-up from the developers. I'm not sure what the recourse is, I just don't know enough about C to fix this myself. I assumed this would be a common enough problem that the solution wou…

I recommend using the package manager than building yourself. If something needs to be modified about the source, it will first be patched in the widely used package manager. convincing upstream to take in a patch & then waiting for a new version to be released with that patch takes time.

The problem is, I am using the package manager (pip in this case). I guess because the wheels aren't built for SmartOS it has to compile them.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#14

Post by detaro »

88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #13
nbsd4life wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend using the package manager than building yourself. If something needs to be modified about the source, it will first be patched in the widely used package manager. convincing upstream to take in a patch & then waiting for a new version to be released with that patch takes time.

The problem is, I am using the package manager (pip in this case). I guess because the wheels aren't built for SmartOS it has to compile them.

I'd guess they mean "use the system package manager", given that they talk about patches not in upstream?

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#15

Post by SamWhited »

masklinn wrote: post #10
SamWhited wrote: post #5

I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if you don't, but I use Terraform and Pac…

> The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead). Have you sent that feedback, possibly pinged bcantrill on the issue (being Joyent's CTO I'd expect devdocs would fall under…

Yes, I've mentioned it to support. (EDIT*: removed "multiple times" because I'm not sure that's true; I forget if it was just once or if I followed up about other projects)

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#16

Post by SamWhited »

bcantrill wrote: post #12
SamWhited wrote: post #5

I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if you don't, but I use Terraform and Pac…

Glad to hear that there are aspects of SmartOS that you enjoy, and sorry that it's been a mixed bag. More specifically, my apologies on the documentation: it's an area in which we've always been very short staffed, and our focus on documentation has necessarily been more aligned with our products than our projects. As for maintaining software: if you can be more specific where you're running into issues, we can figur…

Thanks for the reply; the problem I've had is mostly with things on your GitHub and images you maintain. For example, I asked about the Postgres image and whether it was maintained ages ago and was told that you're not sure if you'll maintain it or not. This is fair, and I don't expect updates the next day, but it's still on Postgres 9.6 and doesn't mention if you plan on ever updating it again. If not, that's fine, but please mark it as such so we know if we should rely on that image or not (we're building our own right now, which is fine, but we'd rather know).

Also, lots of little things on GitHub like the examples of using Prometheus and others have PRs (some of them by me) which have never had any comments, no acknowledgement that they've been seen, but also no indication that the project isn't maintained or is just an example and that we shouldn't submit PRs.

All that being said, in general thanks for a great product.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#17

Post by jsiepkes »

We've been running our private cloud on Triton / SmartOS with Packer and Terraform for a while now and for us its really working well. I do think however that Triton / SmartOS works best when used in a true cloud native fashion (meaning stateless containers). One could probably use it in a "classic" way but you might not reap all the benefits of the solution.

I also like that Triton has clear upgrade paths when new versions are released. Something that was usually the biggest issue with OpenStack.

I try to run everything as much as possible in native (ie. Illumos) zones since I like SMF better then systemd. But if I can't get it to work I use an LX zone (container with Linux ABI compatibly) with CentOS. Which gets me all the benefits of true containers (Zones) with ZFS and dtrace.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#18

Post by jsiepkes »

breul99 wrote: post #4

I wanted to like SmartOS, but the documentation for Arch really had me spoiled. The Joyent/SmartOS docs are a mess of information for different versions that really aren't conducive to a confident first time user. That and it had problems with a pretty vanilla supermicro build. It did pick up my linux ZFS pool without a problem though, which was a nice surprise.

We are run our Triton / SmartOS nodes mostly on SuperMicro hosts. I have never encountered hardware compatibly issues.

Do you recall what issues you bumped into? Might save me some potential headaches / pitfalls in the future ;-)

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#19

Post by 88e282102ae2e5b »

detaro wrote: post #14
88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, I am using the package manager (pip in this case). I guess because the wheels aren't built for SmartOS it has to compile them.

I'd guess they mean "use the system package manager", given that they talk about patches not in upstream?

Ah, I see, thanks. Still, that's a non-starter. Many of the packages I use are not available through any system package manager, and it would preclude using virtualenvs.

OTOH, I desperately want to move away from Python.

Re: Get Smart with SmartOS

#20

Post by xte »

While I was using OpenSolaris (and Solaris before, till 9 6/06) as a personal desktop from SXDE->SXCE->OpenIndiana, I have tried many fork (Belenix, Damm small solaris, Nexenta, OI) I have to say that IllumOS is essentially dead as Irix was before and no one have enough manpower and FOSS culture to bring it back to life.

OpenSolaris nicest features like zfs (with IPS/BE, zones, branz on top), crossbow, SMF, FMA etc may remain or recreated for some time but the whole OS unfortunately is dead.

Irix legacy leave us with OpenGL, even if today nearly nobody know their origin, xfs even if is now EOL fs, STL, even if C++ now is well... Harmful. Many other good things including probably the best CDE out there but it does not exists anymore and it's hw with it. OpenSolaris will probably do the same.

I think people coming from traditional unix companies do not understand the hard lesson they get from Microsoft and GNU/Linux: today's student's, young aspiring users are tomorrow technicians. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if it's not good on their desktop will be marginal, the same for good big iron architectures. OpenSolaris itself start to be known thanks to Ian Murdock (Debian founder, hired by SUN, dead in unclear situation few years ago), not before OpenIndiana, simply because of the lacking of FOSS culture SUN has, even if OpenIndiana does not introduce, at least at start, any particular feature.

I still miss osol, I still hope for a real alternative to GNU/Linux, only to Linux to be more precise, I still hope to see a good architecture at a price and assembly that can be used as alternative to x86 on the desktop (I hope for OpenPower now) but nothing came to the horizon...

After SUN death I've tried to came back to FreeBSD: essentially a pain to use on modern desktop hw, even if I pry for many FreeBSD features from jails to geli passing through securelevel, freebsd-update, a base system consistent with the kernel, a damn simple init (despite raw compared to modern init's), good fw/network performance, rock solid stability, ... but still does not work well on commodity hw. I dream DragonflyBSD hammer storage but I can't really run Dragonfly as my desktop...

In the end I hope we as FOSS users, can came to a modern OS on free hardware and I fear our next desktop will be a kind of mobile-crap with lock-in builtin to the point of actual mobile crap. We need such free solution not only for IT but even for democracy.

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