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Can anyone ELI5 what Oxide's offer is? I've looked at their website and still got no clue. Is it hardware + software I can purchase and use on-premise? Is it a PaaS / yet another cloud provider?
On-prem, fully-integrated compute and storage solution with cloud-like APIs to provision resources, all with a commitment to open source.
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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.
I agree that VM per container can be wasteful - though something like Firecracker at least helps with start time.
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Can you get me excited? I spent 20 seconds browsing the homepage and walked away with "so the idea is vertical integration for on-premise server purchases? On custom OS? Why? Why would people pay a premium?" But immediately got myself to "what does a server OS do anyway, doesn't it just launch VMs? You don't need Linux, just the ability to launch Linux VMs" Tell me more? :)
It seems like the folks on HN tend to think the world runs on AWS (I'm not trying to say they don't have a huge market share), but many huge enterprises still run their own datacenters and buy ungodly amounts of hardware. The products that are on the market for an AWS-like experience on-prem are still fairly horrible. A lot of times the solutions are collaborations between vendors, which makes support a huge pain (fi…
Took me from "why would people go with this over Dell?" to "holy shit, I'm expecting Dell to do software and make nvidia/red hat/etc/etc etc/etc etc etc help out. lol!"
* also, how destructive it is. never, ever, ever let ppl talk shit about other ppl. There's a difference between "ugh, honestly, it seems like they're focused on release 11.0 this year" and "ughh they're usless idk what they're thinking??? stupid product anyway" and for whatever reason, B made you normal, A made you a tryhard pedant
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I'm excited to see how this compares to SmartOS. I'm pretty heavily invested in SmartOS in my personal infrastructure but its future, post-Joyent acquisition, has been worrying me. I really wish I did work for an org big enough to use Oxide's gear. Not having to futz around with bogus IBM PC AT-type compatibility edifice, janky BMCs and iDRACs, hardware RAID controllers, etc, would be so unbelievably nice.
I had been using SmartOS for a long time but finally had to bite the bullet and give up. I ended up deciding on Proxmox on a ZFS root and am quite happy with it.
At its peak I reached out multiple times to Joyent to fix their EFI support for virtualization. The Danube team had similar experiences with them, working on live migrations for VMs, and a few months back I did a rebase of the platform image to a more recent illumos stack.
Two of the fundamental issues with Illumos is that they don't seem to understand that they need to fix the horrendous platform build to get community support to keep up with the pace of development of other OS's. The platform build is a huge nasty mess of custom shell scripts, file based status snapshots, which includes the entire userspace in the kernel build. Basically if your openssl version is out of wack the entire thing will fail. Not because it has to, but because it was never adapted to modern needs of someone just wanting to hack on a kernel. It's fixable, but I don't see any desire to fix it, and even if that desire eventually shows up it might just be too little, too late.
Not that I'm not rooting for Oxide, but their product is still so niche and early stage that I can't imagine any actual businesses buying their stuff for a long time. They only just shipped their first rack to their first customer at the end of last summer and it's Idaho National Laboratory. State research institutions are basically the only entities positioned to gamble on this right now.
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> Yet most of that stuff is now buried/removed Nothing has changed with regards to our anti-blob and pro-open source stances. I am not sure what you're referring to here. > with unnecessary lock-in. What lock-in are you referring to here? The way that things run on the rack is via virtual machines, you can run virtual machines on many providers. We even have a terraform provider so that you can use familiar tools ins…
I don't expect anyone to see my comments unless they're really looking since I've been shadow banned for many years now - so I appreciate your reply. To be clearer regarding my questions: - What happened to Project X (supposedly coreboot++ for latest AMD CPUs)? It seems dead, despite being more reported on than Oxide's attempts in working with AMD (to achieve the same outcomes, presumably - what's the difference?). L…
> What happened to Project X (supposedly coreboot++ for latest AMD CPUs)?
I don't recall what you're referring to specifically, maybe this was a thing before I started at Oxide. I do know that we deliberately decided to not go with coreboot. I believe the equivalent component would be phbl[1]. It boots illumos directly. Bryan gave a talk about how we boot[1][2] with more reasoning and context.
> Does Oxide attempt to sandbox, completely remove or 'verify as benign' aspects like the PSP?
The general attitude is still "remove or work around every binary blob possible," but the PSP is unfortunately not able to be worked around.
> However, if the hardware platform is FOSS
We fully intend to do this, by the way. Just haven't yet. It'll come.
1: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/phbl
2: https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...
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)?
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
so it can't use the UNIX™ trade mark.
But it's got the AT&T Unix kernel & userland sources contained in it.
PDP-11 Unix System III: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/ut...
IllumOS: https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/b8169dedfa435c0...
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A team should always pick the tools they are most familiar with. They will always have better results with that, than trying to use something they understand less. With this in mind, using their own stack is a perfectly adequate choice. Factors outside their team will determine if that works out in the long term.
A handful of the team are more familiar with Illumos and the next hundred people they hire after that will be more familiar with Linux.
That being the case, knowing yet another UNIX cousin isn't that big deal.
Not that I'm not rooting for Oxide, but their product is still so niche and early stage that I can't imagine any actual businesses buying their stuff for a long time. They only just shipped their first rack to their first customer at the end of last summer and it's Idaho National Laboratory. State research institutions are basically the only entities positioned to gamble on this right now.
I hope they sooner or later release a smaller, cheaper, homelab product for people to learn or for startups that will lead to future rack sales or workers.
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> 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?
We certainly understand that there's space in the market for a GPU-focused product, but that's a different one than the one we're starting the company off with. There's additional challenge with how we as a company desire openness, and GPUs are incredibly proprietary. We'll see what the future brings. Luckily for us many people still desire good old classic CPU compute.