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Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

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Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#191

Post by mlindner »

threeseed wrote: post #185
adfm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With DHH and others promoting a post-SaaS approach (once.com, etc.) we might see hardware refresh as cost-cutting. Astronomical compute bills and lack of granularity bring all things cloudy into sharp focus.

What they are doing is SaaS by stealth. You buy their product once, but it only has bug and security fixes for 3 years. Which means every business is going to need to upgrade on a cycle anyway.

People don't usually throw out their server hardware after 3 years. After 3 years is up they'll probably sell service plans. And with the code being all open source some owners may go the self-supported route, though probably most will buy service plans.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#192

Post by whalesalad »

newsclues wrote: post #135
busterarm wrote: post #45

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.

can't wait to find liquidated oxide gear on ebay in 2035. all my current homelab gear is "ancient" enterprise gear like R720's etc

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#193

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Sweet:) And a big thanks for writing what appears to be clear and straightforward documentation; IMO that's an area that the illumos community has historically struggled with. And seeing a new source release talking about consolidations gives me the warm fuzzies, even if this does seem to depart from the traditional gate paradigm unless I'm seriously misreading the repo organization here.

Some (mostly tooling) questions:

- Why gmake? Especially since dmake is needed later anyways?

- Instructions say run rustup with bash explicitly; is that a defect in upstream, or is the local sh not completely posix compatible?

- How is this developed internally? Do Oxide folks run illlmos workstations or is this all developed in Virtual machines or SSHed to servers?

- Why MPL? GPL compatibility?

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#195

Post by threeseed »

mlindner wrote: post #191
threeseed wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they are doing is SaaS by stealth. You buy their product once, but it only has bug and security fixes for 3 years. Which means every business is going to need to upgrade on a cycle anyway.

People don't usually throw out their server hardware after 3 years. After 3 years is up they'll probably sell service plans. And with the code being all open source some owners may go the self-supported route, though probably most will buy service plans.

Was actually referring to DHH and the 37signals products.

Whilst I think we will see a trend back towards more on-premise hardware I don't think SaaS is going away anytime soon. And in fact it's arguably better for everyone because the software is being continually maintained.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#196

Post by mbreese »

amluto wrote: post #172
steveklabnik wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common request and we absolutely understand the desire, but I suspect such a thing, if ever, will be a long time off. Given that the product is designed as an entire rack, doing something like this would effectively be a different product for a different vertical, and we have to focus on our current business. Honestly it's kind of frustrating not being able to reciprocate the enthusiasm back in more than ju…

For what it’s worth, there’s a somewhat common view at least in the Linux community that it’s important for hardware vendors to make their tech stack targetable from the office or home. This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales. Some examples: x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the…

> This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales.

I get that in theory… and it makes sense most of the time. I’m not sure it does this time though. You don’t exactly “target” Oxide as an OS or platform. Rather, you use it to run VMs on. Those VMs are whatever you want. Other than that, I’m not sure what else having a home-lab version of Oxide would look like.

A different competitor to Proxmox?

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#197

Post by steveklabnik »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #193

Sweet:) And a big thanks for writing what appears to be clear and straightforward documentation; IMO that's an area that the illumos community has historically struggled with. And seeing a new source release talking about consolidations gives me the warm fuzzies, even if this does seem to depart from the traditional gate paradigm unless I'm seriously misreading the repo organization here. Some (mostly tooling) questi…

I can't answer all your questions, because I don't actually work on helios, but I do have an answer to some of them:

> Do Oxide folks run illlmos workstations or is this all developed in Virtual machines or SSHed to servers?

I wrote about this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39181727

That said, some folks certainly run illumos on a workstation.

> Why MPL? GPL compatibility?

On MPL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39181844

That said in that comment I didn't really speak to the "why." We feel like it's a good compromise in the possibility space: more copyleft than BSD, but also less restrictive than the GPL.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#198

Post by GrumpySloth »

mlindner wrote: post #184
GrumpySloth wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CentOS wasn’t used in embedded systems.

Even Windows was and is used substantially in embedded systems.

I know about that. This is a special edition for embedded though. But CentOS is news to me. CentOS was targeted for servers.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#199

Post by sanderjd »

temptemptemp111 wrote: post #106
steveklabnik wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For what it's worth, you don't seem to be shadowbanned as far as I can tell. Your original post seems to be dead due to downvotes, but this one seems to be in a totally normal non-dead non-shadowbanned state.

Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

#200

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

moondev wrote: post #105
steveklabnik wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

> Now i'm imagining Helios inside WSI - Windows Subsystem for illumos

I mean... WSL2 is just hyperv with some integration glue, and illumos isn't Linux but unix is unix; that might well be doable.

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