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OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

omnios.omniti.com

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Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#21

Post by justauser »

nosequel wrote: post #16
rollypolly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very ambitious. Do you know who they're targeting with this? Legacy systems perhaps?

Honestly, more and more people with big data problems are turning back to solaris kernels over linux because of how many issues there are with linux when you are really running it hard. ZFS, dtrace, and the Solaris kernel on new hardware is really a compelling argument over Linux.

I hate to be the one asking for a citation but can you share some examples of "more people" who have moved from Linux back to Solaris? I agree about excellence of Dtrace and ZFS but I'm just curious about your kernel comment.

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#22

Post by kenmazy »

patrickgzill wrote: post #11
hapless wrote: post #10

So we are now nested, what, six deep in forks? I've long since lost track: OpenSolaris => OpenIndiana => Illumos => this new thing ? are there some in-between steps? And we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility. Or a Sun compiler. Or Sun drivers, necessarily. Or a real guarantee of future source releases from Oracle. Who/what is this for?

Who is it for? My view: People who want to run ZFS for storage usage. ZFS is still better than Linux alternatives like LVM, BTRFS etc. To be picky, there is not an exact counterpart to ZFS under Linux. And with clones etc. you can set up 1 master KVM image and then clone it 10 or 100 times, saving a lot of disk space in the process (ZFS clones only use the amount of space that is different from the original). People…

Regarding zfs: the zfs on linux project (http://zfsonlinux.org/) is actually fairly mature and has decent performance ( though there are still some outstanding issues with using zvols as xen filesystems, and also if using a xen paravirt kernel ).

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#23

Post by stefanve »

I would love to have a special laptop edition of a OS like this.

Some nice features:

A nice VM overview/start/manage screen A way to group VM's so it starts multiple VM's with a single "click" (in a pre defined order).

Switching between VM's with a shortcut and/or alt-tab/expose visual style.

Host menu to openen up new VM's, looking at stats etc. maybe a fold down over the current VM

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#24

Post by justincormack »

kenmazy wrote: post #22
patrickgzill wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is it for? My view: People who want to run ZFS for storage usage. ZFS is still better than Linux alternatives like LVM, BTRFS etc. To be picky, there is not an exact counterpart to ZFS under Linux. And with clones etc. you can set up 1 master KVM image and then clone it 10 or 100 times, saving a lot of disk space in the process (ZFS clones only use the amount of space that is different from the original). People…

Regarding zfs: the zfs on linux project ( http://zfsonlinux.org/ ) is actually fairly mature and has decent performance ( though there are still some outstanding issues with using zvols as xen filesystems, and also if using a xen paravirt kernel ).

But not being able to distribute binaries is inconvenient http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#25

Post by mkup »

Can anyone elaborate: why all these cloud webhosting people are taking legal risks of Oracle changing license for (Open)Solaris or closing this OS project entirely, legal risks of being sued by Oracle for patent infrigement / whatever else legal bullshit?

They could just port KVM to FreeBSD instead; FreeBSD already has ZFS, DTrace and all other necessary bells and whistles for cloud webhosting infrastructure. But in contrast to (Open)Solaris they have community support for new hardware, a lot of already working drivers for existing hardware and also much safer legal position.

Are there any technical difficulties with porting KVM to FreeBSD? Can anyone elaborate?

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#26

Post by justauser »

mkup wrote: post #25

Can anyone elaborate: why all these cloud webhosting people are taking legal risks of Oracle changing license for (Open)Solaris or closing this OS project entirely, legal risks of being sued by Oracle for patent infrigement / whatever else legal bullshit? They could just port KVM to FreeBSD instead; FreeBSD already has ZFS, DTrace and all other necessary bells and whistles for cloud webhosting infrastructure. But in…

FreeBSD will have it's own native type 2 hypervisor soon, BHyVe.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/BHyVe

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#27

Post by bdha »

hapless wrote: post #10

So we are now nested, what, six deep in forks? I've long since lost track: OpenSolaris => OpenIndiana => Illumos => this new thing ? are there some in-between steps? And we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility. Or a Sun compiler. Or Sun drivers, necessarily. Or a real guarantee of future source releases from Oracle. Who/what is this for?

OpenSolaris has been dead for two years. illumos is a fork of the source code repo that made up the OS and Net consolidations from Sun. Oracle closed the gate shortly after the acquisition, with the promise they'd drop code after Solaris 11 was released. This has not happened.

OpenIndiana, SmartOS and OmniOS are all distributions of the illumos kernel and associated libraries and programs.

OpenIndiana is geared more towards desktop users (though it can be used for servers well enough). OI is funded primarily through everycity.co.uk.

SmartOS is a PXE/USB booting server operating system, where all services are meant to be encapsulated in zones and KVM. SmartOS zones use pkgsrc for packaging (via pkgin). SmartOS is useful for building clouds, for instance. It is the core of Joyent's SmartDatacenter product.

OmniOS is a more traditional server operating system in that you install bits on metal, use IPS for packages, and have an upgrade path other. OmniOS has been used in production inside OmniTI for a while (as I understand it), but is the newest player on the block.

As with Linux distributions, each distribution above has different operating and development philosophies, but they all push code back up through the illumos gate.

Sun is dead. Oracle ate Sun, took their ball, and went home. illumos is the successor of the OpenSolaris idea (sans asinine governance model), and the core of open source Solarish distributions.

This talk by ex-Sun kernel engineer (and creator of DTrace) Bryan Cantrill is both instructive and hilarious: http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-develop...

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#28

Post by bdha »

mkup wrote: post #25

Can anyone elaborate: why all these cloud webhosting people are taking legal risks of Oracle changing license for (Open)Solaris or closing this OS project entirely, legal risks of being sued by Oracle for patent infrigement / whatever else legal bullshit? They could just port KVM to FreeBSD instead; FreeBSD already has ZFS, DTrace and all other necessary bells and whistles for cloud webhosting infrastructure. But in…

As I said above, OpenSolaris is dead. illumos is a fork. We don't take code from Oracle, because there isn't any. If they'd kept the gate open, a fork probably wouldn't have happened.

As for why not to just move from Solaris to FreeBSD... because they're totally different beasts? And we happen to like Solaris? :-)

Porting KVM to Solaris was apparently quite non-trivial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#29

Post by bdha »

wmf wrote: post #8
justauser wrote: post #7

My understanding of hardware support from SmartOS and Illumos was that it only worked on Intel hardware and not AMD. Is this still the case? Relevant to this discussion : Joyent releasing SmartOS http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2887170 AMD support from SmartOS wiki: http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Technical+FAQs#S...

Given the size of the community, it's likely that Illumos will support less and less hardware over time. You may want to stick to whatever's on the Nexenta compatibility list.

Nexenta is based on illumos now. They just published their gate on GitHub. Presumably we'll be seeing pull requests from them. :-)

Re: OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

#30

Post by stock_toaster »

bdha wrote: post #27
hapless wrote: post #10

So we are now nested, what, six deep in forks? I've long since lost track: OpenSolaris => OpenIndiana => Illumos => this new thing ? are there some in-between steps? And we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility. Or a Sun compiler. Or Sun drivers, necessarily. Or a real guarantee of future source releases from Oracle. Who/what is this for?

OpenSolaris has been dead for two years. illumos is a fork of the source code repo that made up the OS and Net consolidations from Sun. Oracle closed the gate shortly after the acquisition, with the promise they'd drop code after Solaris 11 was released. This has not happened. OpenIndiana, SmartOS and OmniOS are all distributions of the illumos kernel and associated libraries and programs. OpenIndiana is geared more…

Thanks for the link to that talk. Took the time to watch the whole thing, and very much enjoyed it!
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