Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 268 posts

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

#211

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

msla wrote: post #208
criddell wrote: post #121

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)?

Legally, NetBSD isn't actually Unix. The brand doesn't mean what people seem to think it means.

Right, "unix" roughly means

- Derived from Bell Labs unix source

- Legally allowed to use the UNIX trademark (AKA certified Unix)

- A unix-shaped OS (similar but not 100% the same as POSIX complacence)

and those things are basically independent. Most GNU/Linux are unix-likes but not derived from original unix code or certified, but there's been 1-2 that did get certified. The BSDs are (now quite distantly ) derived from unix source but not certified (although ex. UnixWare is IIRC). Solaris was all 3 but OpenSolaris and now illumos are obviously unix-like and still based on the original code but not certified UNIX™.

(Take all this with a grain of salt; I'm typing this all from memory and IANAL)

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

#212

Post by mattclarkdotnet »

steveklabnik wrote: post #176
amluto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I certainly understand that strategy generally, see also Adobe giving Photoshop licenses to students back in the day so that they'd be familiar professionally. It's just that doing so amounts to building an entirely new product, and as a relatively young startup, focus is more important. We're going deep, not wide. Someday :) > (Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compu…

See also Cloud Foundry, where the late arrival of something devs could use on a laptop was probably key to its failure to capture the market for PaaS.

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

#213

Post by faitswulff »

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.

We'll have to wait for it to hit Groupon.

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

#214

Post by wmf »

sanderjd wrote: post #199
temptemptemp111 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He is banned; his comments here are only alive because I rescued them.

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

#215

Post by lloydde »

alberth wrote: post #91

License MPL 2.0 is an interesting license choice, for an operating system. EDIT: why the downvotes?

MPL 2.0 has been the preferred license for CTO Bryan Cantrill and crew for more than a decade:

“And because any conversation about open source has to address licensing at some point or another, let’s get that out of the way: we opted for the Mozilla Public License 2.0. While relatively new, there is a lot to like about this license: its file-based copyleft allows it to be proprietary-friendly while also forcing certain kinds of derived work to be contributed back; its explicit patent license discourages litigation, offering some measure of troll protection; its explicit warranting of original work obviates the need for a contributor license agreement (we’re not so into CLAs); and (best of all, in my opinion), it has been explicitly designed to co-exist with other open source licenses in larger derived works. Mozilla did terrific work on MPL 2.0, and we hope to see it adopted by other companies that share our thinking around open source!”

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2014/11/03/smartdatacenter-and-...

Also discussed around 38 minute of https://youtu.be/Zpnncakrelk?si=DkSW6CM_MS-q1Gyd

Although not explicitly stated there are like deeper roots here “The one important exception to these generalizations is Sun Microsystems' CDDL, which was a true improvement on MPL 1.1, and which continues to cover a substantial amount of important open source software. … I encourage Oracle, the current CDDL steward, to consider relicensing its CDDL code under MPL 2.0, which is as worthy a successor to CDDL 1.0 as it is to MPL 1.1.” from Richard Fontana’s article at the time of the MPL 2.0 release, https://opensource.com/law/12/1/the-new-mpl

With its compatibility with strong, older copyright licenses I’m surprised the license has not had more widespread adoption. It is a not too hot, not too cold porridge of a file level copyleft and CYA OSS license with the strong backing of Mozilla.

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

#217

Post by panick21_ »

bpye wrote: post #132
panick21_ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wondered if there was any support for running containers built in - something like EKS/AKS/GKE/Cloud Run/etc - but looking at the docs it appears not. I agree that VM per container can be wasteful - though something like Firecracker at least helps with start time.

From the podcast it seems that they want to deliver a minimal viable product. Their primary costumers already have a lot of their own higher level stack.

They might get into adding more higher level software eventually depending on what costumers want.

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

#219

Post by SirGiggles »

temptemptemp111 wrote: post #159
steveklabnik wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your comment was not dead when I saw it. This reply was, but apparently now has been vouched for. > 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 direct…

To see more on "Project X", see the Phoronix article on it. At the very least, it would be resourceful if the Oxide devs had a chat with the Project X devs who have since given up - learnings can be had and time can be saved. And yes, coreboot itself is now untennable, but is also kind of a slang for the a category of deblobbed software.

Is it possible you're thinking of the more recent AMD OpenSIL initiative?

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

#220

Post by GrilledChips »

msla wrote: post #208
criddell wrote: post #121

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)?

Legally, NetBSD isn't actually Unix. The brand doesn't mean what people seem to think it means.

This isn't NetBSD. NetBSD broke off loooooooong after the release of BSD that Sun used to build this OS.
Post reply on HN