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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

#251

Post by sswezey »

icybox wrote: post #143
_rs wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been running smartos at least since 2015 where I co-located my server. There have been times where I felt like giving up, but people like danmcd, jperkin and others always stepped in and fixed what needed to be fixed for LX to be usable and working. (Keeping java updated and running is hard, uphill battle. Thanks!) I always ran a mixture of OS and LX zones and bcantrill's t-shirt with "Save the whales, kill your…

Do you have a write-up of your SmartOS and/or OpenBSD set up(s)?

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

#252

Post by steveklabnik »

apache8080 wrote: post #244
steveklabnik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes, for sure. We agree there's tons of value there, there's just so much to do it's easy to let things fall through the cracks. This thread has given some renewed energy to work on releasing some of them, so no promises but we'll see :)

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

#253

Post by temptemptemp111 »

mlindner wrote: post #188
temptemptemp111 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're referring to this: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Project-X-AMD-Zen-Coreboot This seems to make no mention of Oxide at all. Perhaps you're connecting two different unrelated organizations together as Oxide appears to have never had any relation to it. I think you're just perhaps confused about what the situation is.

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

#254

Post by temptemptemp111 »

SirGiggles wrote: post #219
temptemptemp111 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#255

Post by temptemptemp111 »

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.

[dead]

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

#256

Post by jjav »

magnawave wrote: post #116
throwup238 wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

I guess the wildcard is price. AWS's pricing model works kinda at their OMG eyewatering scale - aka all the custom hardware they design is highly cost optimized, but just doing custom hardware has a notable cost. This is easily covered by their scale, to make for their famous margins. [during their low scale times, they did use a good bit of HP/Dell, etc] Oxide seems to be no different (super custom hardware) only ma…

> Oxide has to come in a lot cheaper to even compete with AWS

Which should be pretty easy. I don't know the exact costs but in a previous Oxide discussion the number 1M was thrown around. If that's roughly correct, that is comfortably less than a single year of AWS bills at most startups I've been in (except the very tiny ones Haven't seen any performance numbers either so admittely estimating here, but from what I know about building racks of 1U servers and knowing that Oxide is more efficient, I can believe an Oxide rack should handily outperform the AWS VMs we (the startups) were paying >>>100K/mo for.

If these numbers are anywhere in the ballpark, an Oxide rack should easily be saving quite a bit of money already by year two.

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

#257

Post by rbanffy »

pjmlp wrote: post #250
rbanffy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can always install OpenIndiana and use it. It’s been a while I don’t use it, but I gather it’s still a worthy daily driver (plus, Teams, Slack, Outlook, and others simply don’t have installable apps for it.

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

#258

Post by rbanffy »

jjav wrote: post #246
rbanffy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but they are mass-market consumer oriented which is not interesting.

Kind of. Apple focuses their high end gear on creative professionals. Us Unix geeks have much more modest needs, which are often satisfied by the average uninspired Dell design. Still, Apple has a decent Unix underneath all that glitter. At the same time, there are almost no desktop-friendly Unixes besides the free crowd. HP and IBM have given up on the Unix workstation market eons ago. IBM’s POWER gear can crush the best Xeons and Epycs, but they have nothing to compete with the “good enough” low end.

It’s a shame Oracle doesn’t offer Solaris on their cloud the same way IBM offers AIX (and Z, which, surprisingly, is a certified UNIX as well) on theirs.

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

#259

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #257
pjmlp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can always install OpenIndiana and use it. It’s been a while I don’t use it, but I gather it’s still a worthy daily driver (plus, Teams, Slack, Outlook, and others simply don’t have installable apps for it.

It isn't the same thing as running on Sun hardware, specially if one cares about graphics programing.

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

#260

Post by rbanffy »

pjmlp wrote: post #259
rbanffy wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always install OpenIndiana and use it. It’s been a while I don’t use it, but I gather it’s still a worthy daily driver (plus, Teams, Slack, Outlook, and others simply don’t have installable apps for it.

It isn't the same thing as running on Sun hardware, specially if one cares about graphics programing.

I never used Suns that way, but I assume any modern gaming desktop can run rings around their fanciest Ultra.

What they can’t do as well as a deskside Ultra Enterprise is to look impressive.

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