Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
1–10 of 268 posts
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#2I 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 fundamentally not-Linux (yes I know it runs Linux binaries unmodified) would be a reason against buying it, not for.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#3I 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…
In one podcast, the reason given was staff familiarity and owning the full stack, not just the kernel I believe.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#4I 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…
> yes I know it runs Linux binaries unmodified
Is it that it runs Linux binaries unmodified or that it runs vms and manages VMs which run Linux, and as an end-user, that's what you run your software in?
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#5I 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…
Their customers run virtualised OS on top of this.
This is no different from Azure Host OS, Bottlerocket, Flatcar or whatever.
This maters to them, as knowing the whole stack, some of the kernel code is still theirs from Sun days, and making it available matters to the customers that want source code access for security assement reasons.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#6I 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…
It seems healthy to have options, almost like the universe is healing a bit after oracle bought Sun. I can't imagine better hands bringing the oxide system together than that team.
As an engineer who works entirely with Linux anymore, I pine for the days of another strong Unix in the mix to run high value workloads on.
Comparing openvswitch on Linux, to say, the crossbow SDN facility on Solaris, I'd take crossbow any day. Nothing "wrong" with Linux, but it is sorely lacking in "master plan" levels of cohesion with all the tooling taking their own path, often bringing complexity that requires even for abstraction with yet more complicated tooling on top.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#7I 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…
Perhaps Illumos is particularly well suited for a Hypervisor/Cloud platform due to work upstreamed by Joyent originally for SmartOS?
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#8I 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…
As far as performance and feature set, probably not anymore (I would have answered differently 10 years ago, and if I am wrong today would love to be educated about it).
However, if we are considering code quality, which I consider important if you are actually going to be maintaining it yourself as oxide will have to do since they need customizations, then most of the proprietary Unix sources are just superior imo. That is, they have better organization, more consistency in standards, etc. The BSDs are slightly better in this regard as well, it really isn't a proprietary vs open source issue, it's more about the insane size of the Linux kernel project making strict standards enforcement difficult if not impossible the further you get from the very core system components.
Irregardless of them being ex-Sun (and I am not ex Sun), if I needed a custom OS for a product I was working on, Linux would be close to the last Unix based OS source tree I would try to do it with, only after all other options failed for whatever reason. And that's not even taking into account the licensing, which is a whole other can of worms.
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#9I 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…
Keep in mind that Helios is really just an implementation detail of the rack; like Hubris[0], it's not something visible to the user or to applications. (The user of the rack provisions VMs.)
As for why an illumos derivative and not something else, we expanded on this a bit in our Q&A when we shipped our first rack[1] -- and we will expand on it again in the (recorded) discussion that we will have later today.[2]
[0] https://hubris.oxide.computer/
Re: Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack
#10I 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…
Aren't they also ex-Joyent? Joyent ran customer VMs in prod on Illumos for many years so there's a lot of experience there.