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

SmartOS

docs.smartos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 94 posts

Re: SmartOS

#32

Post by mbreese »

mirashii wrote: post #6
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #2

I remember several years ago, SmartOS was being mentioned many times on HN. Joyent, the company behind SmartOS, was since acquired, and I don’t usually see anyone talking about SmartOS nowadays. Is anyone on HN using SmartOS these days?

Certainly Oxide computer company has some use of illumos still, which is strongly related to SmartOS

But isn't the end goal with Oxide to run primarily Linux(/Windows?) VMs on an Illumos host?

Are there any workloads (other than as a VM host) that run on SunOS derived OSes?

Re: SmartOS

#33

Post by jama211 »

I’m confused by the wording “without wasting disks for the base OS” - I wouldn’t normally consider this a “waste”, would anyone else? There are big downsides to running off of a USB key all the time unless I’m missing something

Re: SmartOS

#34

Post by linksnapzz »

tombert wrote: post #28

Genuine question: in 2026, what does SmartOS (or any other Illumos/Solaris OS) buy you over something like Linux or FreeBSD?

I prefer SMF to systemd, mdb is pretty nice, and Real Actual RBAC, and in-kernel smb service.

Re: SmartOS

#36

Post by zja »

jama211 wrote: post #33

I’m confused by the wording “without wasting disks for the base OS” - I wouldn’t normally consider this a “waste”, would anyone else? There are big downsides to running off of a USB key all the time unless I’m missing something

> This architecture has a variety of advantages including increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and recovery.

SmartOS was developed by Joyent for their cloud computing product, it's primary use case isn't desktop computing. I think the advantages mentioned above were probably a bigger factor than the disk space. I would also guess that PXE would be the standard way to boot in a datacenter, not USB.

Re: SmartOS

#37

Post by znpy »

linksnapzz wrote: post #34
tombert wrote: post #28

Genuine question: in 2026, what does SmartOS (or any other Illumos/Solaris OS) buy you over something like Linux or FreeBSD?

I prefer SMF to systemd, mdb is pretty nice, and Real Actual RBAC, and in-kernel smb service.

> and in-kernel smb service

Doesn't linux have that as well? https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/filesystems/smb/ksmbd.h...

Re: SmartOS

#39

Post by linksnapzz »

znpy wrote: post #37
linksnapzz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer SMF to systemd, mdb is pretty nice, and Real Actual RBAC, and in-kernel smb service.

> and in-kernel smb service Doesn't linux have that as well? https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/filesystems/smb/ksmbd.h...

shrug maybe; I've just been using the Solaris one for 15-20 years now in lieu of samba.

Re: SmartOS

#40

Post by panick21_ »

mbreese wrote: post #32
mirashii wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly Oxide computer company has some use of illumos still, which is strongly related to SmartOS

But isn't the end goal with Oxide to run primarily Linux(/Windows?) VMs on an Illumos host? Are there any workloads (other than as a VM host) that run on SunOS derived OSes?

The whole cloud orchidtration platform and all you need for that.

But that is the same for most server images nowdays.

What in portend is that Oxide upstreams all their work so 'traditional' users should get benefit from it too.

Post reply on HN