I’m unfamiliar with illumos so I went to their webpage and the very first thing it says is:
> illumos is a Unix operating system
Is illumos an actual Unix (like macOS) or a Unix-like OS (like GNU/Linux)?
Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
121–130 of 268 posts
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps you could talk a bit about the distributed storage based on Crucible with ZFS as the backing storage tonight. I would really love to hear some of the details and challenges there.
Yes! Crucible[0] is on our list of upcoming episodes. We can touch on it tonight, but it's really deserving of its own deep dive! [0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/crucible
The timing of your podcast is the least convenient thing ever for us poor Europeans. And then the brutal wait the next day until its uploaded.
The only thing I miss about Twitter Spaces is that you could listen the morning after.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#123I’m unfamiliar with illumos so I went to their webpage and the very first thing it says is: > illumos is a Unix operating system Is illumos an actual Unix (like macOS) or a Unix-like OS (like GNU/Linux)?
Actual Unix. I believe it is in the Solaris family.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#124I’m unfamiliar with illumos so I went to their webpage and the very first thing it says is: > illumos is a Unix operating system Is illumos an actual Unix (like macOS) or a Unix-like OS (like GNU/Linux)?
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Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting thanks for the insight. > I will say I am in the minority as a Windows user though, most are on some form of Unix. Now i'm imagining Helios inside WSI - Windows Subsystem for illumos
You're welcome. I will give you one more fun anecdote here: when I came to Oxide, nobody in my corner of the company was using Windows. And hubris and humility almost Just Worked: we had one build system issue that was using strings instead of the path APIs, but as soon as I fixed those, it all worked. bcantrill remarked that if you had gone back in time and told him long ago that some of his code would Just Work on…
> that was using strings instead of the path API
Man you can't let Brain live that one down can you?
:)
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's a VM, running a bhyve-based hypervisor, Propolis.[0] LX branded zones were/are great -- but for absolute fidelity one really needs VMs. [0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis
Do you have a solution for running containers (Kubernetes, etc)? Are you spinning up a Linux VM to run the containers in there, doing VM per container, or something else?
Costumers can decide I would assume. Most likely you install you install some Kubernetes and then just have multible VMs distributed across the rack. And then run multible Pods in each node.
VM per container seems like a waist unless you need that extra isolation.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best elevator pitch I've heard is "AWS APIs for on-prem datacenters". They make turn-key managed racks that behave just like a commercial cloud would with all the APIs for VM, storage, and network provisioning and integration you'd expect from AWS, except made to deploy in your company's datacenter under your control.
That’s the elevator pitch for open stack
You are not wrong that OpenStack is sort of similar in a sense, but the difference is that Oxide is a hardware + software product, and OpenStack is purely software.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#128I’m unfamiliar with illumos so I went to their webpage and the very first thing it says is: > illumos is a Unix operating system Is illumos an actual Unix (like macOS) or a Unix-like OS (like GNU/Linux)?
Actual Unix. Wikipedia is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos
> It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device drivers, system libraries, and utility software for system administration. This core is now the base for many different open-sourced Illumos distributions, in a similar way in which the Linux kernel is used in different Linux distributions.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main drawbacks to me are 1. No support for nested virtualization, so running a vm inside your vm is not available. This prevents use of projects such as kubevirt or firecracker on a Linux guest, and WSL2 on a Windows guest. 2. No GPU support If the base hypervisor was Linux, it would be way more capable for users it seems. I also wonder if internally Linux is used for development of the platform itself so they ca…
> I also wonder if internally Linux is used for development of the platform itself Developers at Oxide work on whatever platform they'd like, as long as they can do their work. I will say I am in the minority as a Windows user though, most are on some form of Unix. > so they can create "virtual" racks to dogfood the product without full blown physical racks. So one of the reasons why Rust is such an advantage for us…
How is Oxide for GPU-heavy workloads?
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're welcome. I will give you one more fun anecdote here: when I came to Oxide, nobody in my corner of the company was using Windows. And hubris and humility almost Just Worked: we had one build system issue that was using strings instead of the path APIs, but as soon as I fixed those, it all worked. bcantrill remarked that if you had gone back in time and told him long ago that some of his code would Just Work on…
> that was using strings instead of the path API Man you can't let Brain live that one down can you? :)
I didn't bother to git blame the code, I myself do this from time to time :)