11–20 of 177 posts
I kagi’d Illumos and apparently Bryan Cantrill was a maintainer. Bryan Cantrill is CTO of Oxide [1]. I assume that has no bearing on the choice, otherwise it would be mentioned in the discussion. [1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
> Xen: Large and complicated (by dom0) codebase, discarded for KVM by AMZN 1. Xen Type-1 hypervisor is smaller than KVM/QEMU. 2. Xen "dom0" = Linux/FreeBSD/OpenSolaris. KVM/bhyve also need host OS. 3. AMZN KVM-subset: x86 cpu/mem virt, blk/net via Arm Nitro hardware. 4. bhyve is Type-2. 5. Xen has Type-2 (uXen). 6. Xen dom0/host can be disaggregated (Hyperlaunch), unlike KVM. 7. pKVM (Arm/Android) is smaller than KVM…
I kagi’d Illumos and apparently Bryan Cantrill was a maintainer. Bryan Cantrill is CTO of Oxide [1]. I assume that has no bearing on the choice, otherwise it would be mentioned in the discussion. [1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
@bcantrill is the CTO of Oxide.
> Xen: Large and complicated (by dom0) codebase, discarded for KVM by AMZN 1. Xen Type-1 hypervisor is smaller than KVM/QEMU. 2. Xen "dom0" = Linux/FreeBSD/OpenSolaris. KVM/bhyve also need host OS. 3. AMZN KVM-subset: x86 cpu/mem virt, blk/net via Arm Nitro hardware. 4. bhyve is Type-2. 5. Xen has Type-2 (uXen). 6. Xen dom0/host can be disaggregated (Hyperlaunch), unlike KVM. 7. pKVM (Arm/Android) is smaller than KVM…
Talking about "technological and political issues" without mentioning any, or without mentioning which components would need to be revived, sounds a lot like FUD unfortunately. Mixing and matching traditional and systemd components is super common, for example Fedora and RHEL use chrony instead of timesyncd, and NetworkManager instead of networkd.
Instead of stating more or less irrelevant reasons, I'd prefer to read something like "I am (have been?) one of the core maintainers and know Illumos and Bhyve, so even if there would be 'objectively' better choices, our familiarity with the OS and hypervisor trump that". A "I like $A, always use $A and have experience using $A" is almost always a better argument than "$A is better than $B because $BLA", because that…
Instead of stating more or less irrelevant reasons, I'd prefer to read something like "I am (have been?) one of the core maintainers and know Illumos and Bhyve, so even if there would be 'objectively' better choices, our familiarity with the OS and hypervisor trump that". A "I like $A, always use $A and have experience using $A" is almost always a better argument than "$A is better than $B because $BLA", because that…
But everyone at Oxide already knows that back story. At least if you list some other reasons list you can have a discussion about technical merits if you want to.
The difference between
"Buy our Illumos/Bhye solution! Why? I have been an Illumos/Bhyve Maintainer!"
"Buy our Linux/KVM solution! Why? I have been an Illumos/Bhyve Maintainer!"
Unrelated, but is this a homegrown publishing platform?
[1] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0001#_shared_rfd_rende... [2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd/blob/master/src
I kagi’d Illumos and apparently Bryan Cantrill was a maintainer. Bryan Cantrill is CTO of Oxide [1]. I assume that has no bearing on the choice, otherwise it would be mentioned in the discussion. [1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
Early Oxide founders came from Joyent which was an illumos shop and Cantrill is quite vocal about the history of Solaris, OpenSolaris, and illumos.
And before that, they used to run FreeBSD.
Mentioned for example in this comment by Bryan Cantrill a decade ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6254092
> […] Speaking only for us (I work for Joyent), we have deployed hundreds of thousands of zones into production over the years -- and Joyent was running with FreeBSD jails before that […]
And I’ve seen some other primary sources (people who worked at Joyent) write that online too.
And Bryan Cantrill, and several other people, came from Sun Microsystems to Joyent. Though I’ve never seen it mentioned which order that happened in; was it people from Sun that joined Joyent and then Joyent switched from FreeBSD to Illumos and creating SmartOS? Or had Joyent already switched to Illumos before the people that came from Sun joined?
I would actually really enjoy a long documentary or talk from some people that worked at Joyent about the history of the company, how they were using FreeBSD and when they switched to Illumos and so on.