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

81–90 of 94 posts

Re: SmartOS

#81

Post by benmmurphy »

simeonmiteff wrote: post #79
stonogo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did indeed read your document (twice, as I explicitly reported). I didn't address those parts because I found them better-supported. Instead, I addressed the parts I found confusing, and since your rebuttal here is just whining about what you think my behavior is, I continue to be mystified. That's okay; nobody expects you to explain yourself to me. If I thought it would help, I would suggest that perhaps a more ef…

There is a reasonable explanation for the "foregone conclusion" flavour of the RFD that doesn't cast aspersions (quite as much as you are) on the authors: It is simultaneously an assertion of the culturally determined preferences of a group of people steeped in Sun Microsystems engineering culture (and Joyent trauma?), and a clinical assessment of the technology. The key is that technology options are evaluated again…

i'm not sure if Dtrace interpreter was safer than EBPF. I guess in theory it should be because a JIT is just extra surface area but I'm not sure in practice. Both EBPF and DTrace had bugs. Also, I always thought EBPF JIT was just a translation to machine code and it didn't do any kind of optimization pass so should be very similar to how DTrace works. They both ship byte code to the kernel. But I guess the big difference is EBPF relies more on a verification pass while I think most of DTrace safety verification was performed while executing the bytecode. I remember there was a lot of stuff in EBPF where the verifier was meant to be able statically determine you were only accessing memory you were able to. I think there was a lot of bugs around this because the verifier would assume slightly different behaviour than what the runtime was producing. But this is also not necessarily a JIT problem you could have an interpreter that relied on a static safety pass as well.

Re: SmartOS

#82

Post by gr4vityWall »

gertrunde wrote: post #64
ptribble wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not dead, still going strong under new ownership (MNX).

Nice to hear it's not dead, as the website and github repos do give that impression. I'll have to give it a spin.

Their Github repos seem fairly active, from a quick look: https://github.com/TritonDataCenter

Their website is indeed out of date. Reminds me of Haxe in that aspect. The language itself is receiving significant development, but the website looks abandoned, and no new blog posts have been posted in a while.

Re: SmartOS

#83

Post by jama211 »

zja wrote: post #36
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.

Fair enough

Re: SmartOS

#84

Post by solaris2007 »

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

SmartOS was Joyent's distribution of illumos, like how RedHat Linux is a distribution of Linux. Oxide's rack-scale compute is powered by Oxide's illumos build named Helios.

  https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026

  https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios

Re: SmartOS

#85

Post by solaris2007 »

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?

I am on a team that runs database services (mostly Postgres and DuckDB) on an internally maintained illumos branch that runs in VMs on the client's Oxide racks.

Dtrace, Zones, and an "untainted branch" of ZFS are the main reasons given when I asked why illumos and not Linux. I did later see the light (heh) with the Dtrace part for sure.

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

Pretty much any workload that runs on Linux or BSD. The exceptions that are notable are Ceph and "big network" applications like XDP/VPP/DPDK centric stuff like edge router or DDoS protection.

Zones provide full security isolation. A downstream user can have root in an illumos Zone and there isn't anything to worry about other than CPU side-channel flaws (which are or are not a problem depending on use case). FreeBSD's Jails, as shown by a 39C3 talk given this winter showed that the FreeBSD kernel is highly vulnerable to processes running as root within a Jail. Security isolation that can be relied on for untrusted workloads in Linux, in the form of containers at least, never really materialized.

Re: SmartOS

#86

Post by solaris2007 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #5
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?

It was acquired by Samsung, which is notoriously bad at open source. But the reason why it quietly faded into the background wasn't that. It was that Joyent's ex Sun people had an annoying elitism that made them not care about working with the community.

In 2014 and 2015 I was able to make some great things happen because of the people (mostly former Sun people) in the #smartos and #illumos IRC channels on Freenode. They were very helpful. Maybe this is because I put actual thought and effort into my questions and didn't waste their time with stupid questions (ones already answered in documentation or found in mailing lists).

  https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Re: SmartOS

#87

Post by stonogo »

linksnapzz wrote: post #77
stonogo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did indeed read your document (twice, as I explicitly reported). I didn't address those parts because I found them better-supported. Instead, I addressed the parts I found confusing, and since your rebuttal here is just whining about what you think my behavior is, I continue to be mystified. That's okay; nobody expects you to explain yourself to me. If I thought it would help, I would suggest that perhaps a more ef…

...but your top post didn't ask any questions; certainly not ones that would justify a detailed answer. It was several assertions, plus your admission of confusion. I mean, there are no stupid questions, but there wasn't even a question there, so I don't blame anyone for thinking you're communicating poorly.

I wasn't accused of communicating poorly. I was accused of lying about reading a text file and having some kind of ulterior motive for my own opinions.

Furthermore, advanced readers are generally able to infer from "I am not sure why x" that a similar flow of discussion might be as feasible as if it were phrased "why x?".

Re: SmartOS

#88

Post by rufugee »

abrookewood wrote: post #74
rufugee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using incus heavily on Omarchy here and love it. I created a script to read yaml configs and create ephemeral incus containers with certain capabilities and certain directories mounted within. It's a wonderful experience for sandboxing Claude Code.

Interesting idea. How short lived are the containers?

As short-lived as I want them. Recreating them is one command and about 10 seconds (I have scripted apt/gem/etc installs as a part of the recreation).

I tend to use them for a bit, and then destroy/rebuild. Think days, not weeks.

Re: SmartOS

#89

Post by lazylizard »

nZac wrote: post #3

> SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS. Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox? I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead of manually se…

rather deeper rabbit hole than installing 3 x proxmox, i think..but it exists...https://warewulf.org/

lots of other stuff will do the "boot from single image" part...say...https://fogproject.org/

Re: SmartOS

#90

Post by linksnapzz »

stonogo wrote: post #87
linksnapzz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but your top post didn't ask any questions; certainly not ones that would justify a detailed answer. It was several assertions, plus your admission of confusion. I mean, there are no stupid questions, but there wasn't even a question there, so I don't blame anyone for thinking you're communicating poorly.

I wasn't accused of communicating poorly. I was accused of lying about reading a text file and having some kind of ulterior motive for my own opinions. Furthermore, advanced readers are generally able to infer from "I am not sure why x" that a similar flow of discussion might be as feasible as if it were phrased "why x?".

As though that were necessary. There's plenty of room in this comment box for questions better fleshed out than "why x?". Are you expecting advanced readers, or clairvoyant ones?
Post reply on HN