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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

#241

Post by jclulow »

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…

FWIW, though for historical reasons we use dmake to build the core operating system, I tend to recommend people use GNU make (gmake) for new Makefiles in other consolidations. It's broadly available (including on other platforms) and has more modern features.

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

#242

Post by jclulow »

steveklabnik wrote: post #167
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #147

It is great that the software is open-source, but would be you useful to be deployed on other hardware? And what would happen if, for whatever reason, a company can no longer purchase Oxide racks, will it need to start over its infra, or can it just build around Oxide hardware?

It is not likely that it would be immediately useful outside of our hardware, but the main thing they're doing is deploying virtual machines. If they decided to no longer use the Oxide rack they have purchased, they would move their VMs to whatever infrastructure they choose to succeed it.

Yeah, we definitely only intend Helios to run on either the Oxide rack or in service of software engineering work surrounding the rack (that's what we use the ISO installers and virtual machine images for).

If you're interested in a distribution targeting end user use of illumos on servers, I would absolutely recommend looking at OmniOS! Helios is very closely based on OmniOS r151046 LTS, and we use that LTS of OmniOS release directly for non-Oxide-rack infrastructure systems inside Oxide as well.

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

#243

Post by sanderjd »

wmf wrote: post #214
sanderjd wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for explaining!

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

#244

Post by apache8080 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #14
sneak wrote: post #2

I know they’re ex-Sun, but is there any real technical benefit for choosing not-Linux (for their business value prop)? I know of the technical benefits of illumos over linux, but does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? Aren’t they opening a whole can of worms for ideology/tradition that won’t sell any more computers? As someone who runs Linux container workloads, the fact that this is fundame…

> does that actually matter to the customers who are buying these? It's not like we specifically say "oh btw there's illumos inside and that's why you should buy the rack." It's not a customer-facing detail of the product. I'm sure most will never even know that this is the case. What customers do care about is that the rack is efficient, reliable, suits their needs, etc. Choosing illumos instead of Linux here is a c…

Is there any chance Oxide is going to make more of these RFFs public? I think it would be a useful artifact to see why a company would choose to run a non-Linux OS. I also think there are other Oxide RFDs that would have a similar benefit e.g why Oxide decided to build dropshot instead of using one of the existing rust REST server crates?

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

#245

Post by roland-s »

bbkane wrote: post #224
sunshowers wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Oxide.) Bryan is just one out of several illumos experts here. If none of those were around, sure, maybe we wouldn't have picked illumos -- but then we'd be unrecognizably different. I came into Oxide with a Linux background and zero knowledge of illumos. Learning about DTrace especially has been great.

I'd like to learn DTrace (especially after the recent 20yr podcast episode), but I worry it'll never make into mainstream Linux debugging, and hence only useful for more niche jobs.

Linux now has eBPF, which is essentially a VM running inside the Linux kernel. You can run your own programs on this little VM and extend the kernel to a staggering degree. Some clever folks have used this to build open source tracing tools that rival and even surpass Dtrace in some ways. Brendan Gregg, a Dtrace wizard and old colleague of some of the Oxide team back at Sun and Joyent, has some great resources on the subject

https://www.brendangregg.com/ebpf.html

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for-linu...

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

#246

Post by jjav »

rbanffy wrote: post #234
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I phrase it as "my dream job is systems integration at Sun" (but Oxide is the living equivalent)

Sun had some lovely desktop hardware. They also had SPARC. I really miss Sun.

> I really miss Sun.

There's nothing in the world I miss so much as Sun.

I've done many startups post-Sun and there's been good highs and many lows but, there's nothing like a true hard-core tech company like Sun.

There basically are no tech companies anymore, other than Apple, but they are mass-market consumer oriented which is not interesting.

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

#247

Post by jjav »

milon wrote: post #24

I'm glad this is out, i'm going to deploy this locally and learn as much about it as possible. Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there. Thank you Oxide team!

> Oxide is pretty much the company I dream to work at, both for the tech stack, plus the people working there.

Same for me. Oxide is the only company I know that I'd really love to work for. Similar (I think, observing from the outside) to Sun. That's what I dream about.

Unfortunately their pay structure is such that I can't afford it, with a family to support. Maybe when the kid is out of university, if I don't need much income anymore, I can fulfill the dream.

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

#248

Post by mustache_kimono »

steveklabnik wrote: post #80
mustache_kimono wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so the idea is vertical integration for on-premise server purchases? On custom OS? Why? Why would people pay a premium? As I understand it, re: vertical integration, the term is actually "hyperconverged". Here, that means it's designed at the level of the rack. Like -- there aren't per compute unit redundant power supplies. There is one DC bus bar conversion for the rack. There is an integrated switch designed by O…

The terminology in this space is confusing, but "hyperconverged" isn't really what we're doing. I wrote about the differences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688865 (That said I think other than saying "hyperconverged" your broad points are correct.)

> but "hyperconverged" isn't really what we're doing.

This is fair, especially as it follows a discussion of how you're building at the rack level, which is more like a mainframe than current "hyperconverged" offerings. Recommend others read the linked post.

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

#249

Post by lijok »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #64
lijok wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a "full AWS experience in their datacenter" be AWS Outpost?

> "full AWS experience in their datacenter" ... Including the bill!

Part of AWS managed services offering. AWS Managed Wallet

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

#250

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #234
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I phrase it as "my dream job is systems integration at Sun" (but Oxide is the living equivalent)

Sun had some lovely desktop hardware. They also had SPARC. I really miss Sun.

I can share the feeling, despite my UNIX related rants, there were quite a few I actually enjoyed working on, Solaris was one of them.

Still own several Sun CDs they used to give away to developers.

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