The Future of OmniOS • Hacker News Board

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#11

Post by kasabali » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 7:56 PM UTC

hackbinary wrote: post #9

kasabali wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just an outsider to the Illumos community so take this with a grain of salt, but based on what I gather from checking it time to time I don't think this is the main reason. 11 is just the number of currently active distributions and is not meaningful for getting an idea of where the most stuff happens (By the same logic Distrowatch lists 288 active Linux distributions). There is only few main distributions with m…

I think you nailed my point. Linux (according to Distrowatch) has 288 distros, and there are only 3 large scale commercially supported distros (for linux), so my question is in the world can illumos support more than one? What open source lets competing organisations do is collaborate on shared projects.

What I'm trying to say is there is no 1to1 comparison between a Linux distribution and an Illumos one because of different structuring of upstream base and tighter community. But I don't disagree even when this considered 3 distros still may be significantly more detrimential than 1.

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#12

Post by sciurus » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 8:03 PM UTC

Sounds like tough times for OmniTI. They recently announced they were canceling their Surge conference as well.

https://omniti.com/remembers/2017/every-good-surge-must-come...

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#13

Post by snw » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 8:14 PM UTC

hackbinary wrote: post #9

kasabali wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just an outsider to the Illumos community so take this with a grain of salt, but based on what I gather from checking it time to time I don't think this is the main reason. 11 is just the number of currently active distributions and is not meaningful for getting an idea of where the most stuff happens (By the same logic Distrowatch lists 288 active Linux distributions). There is only few main distributions with m…

I think you nailed my point. Linux (according to Distrowatch) has 288 distros, and there are only 3 large scale commercially supported distros (for linux), so my question is in the world can illumos support more than one? What open source lets competing organisations do is collaborate on shared projects.

Linux distributions are very similar to each other. Having package management as the main thing that sets them apart.

In illumos land these different distributions exist because they have very different design goals and visions.

But I agree that the illumos community is also a lot smaller and maybe (sadly) too small for each distribution to be commercially successfull. I'm extremly sad about this announcement as OmniOS is a great operating system and the team behind it did a fantastic job. As a user I like the minimal setup and clear stable releaes.

From what I've read the community is now thinking of possibly consolidating with OpenIndiana for that usecase. So while having less commercial supporters is a pity the community is determined to keep pushing forward.

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#14

Post by coffeymug » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:00 PM UTC

An unfortunate name. Omnius was one of the thinking machines that grew in strength and size to the point that it nearly wiped out humanity.

http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Omnius

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#15

Post by qaq » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

This is sad who knows what Samsung will do with SmartOS, OmniOS was very solid option.

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#16

Post by tracker1 » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 11:23 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #15

This is sad who knows what Samsung will do with SmartOS, OmniOS was very solid option.

I'm hoping that Samsung will open more of it up to open-source the interesting bits that they don't plan to sell themselves... Not sure where this will go, or if Samsung plans to expand/create their own Joyent based cloud. It does seem to be a great OS combination for Docker containers though.

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#17

Post by brendangregg » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:54 AM UTC

Sad but not surprising. When we created illumos in 2010, the latest version of Linux was 2.6.35, and it did not have an answer to ZFS, DTrace, or Zones. I thought these features were important enough to compete with Linux, and convince people to switch.

Times have changed, and Linux (now at 4.10) now does have an answer to each of these, particularly:

- ZFS: ZFS on Linux, now part of Ubuntu. btrfs has been coming along as well, and I included a couple of btrfs performance analysis screenshots in my DockerCon talk last week, since we're testing it.

- DTrace: enhanced BPF now provides the raw features (as of Linux 4.9), and is merged in the Linux kernel (unlike SystemTap etc).

If illumos were proposed today, I would not get behind it as I no longer think it makes sense when you're comparing it to Linux 4.10. It's no longer 2010.

Good luck to everyone moving on. I've published a lot on debugging and tracing on Linux, which should be helpful.

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#18

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:55 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: The Future of OmniOS

#19

Post by jen20 » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 8:08 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #16

qaq wrote: post #15

This is sad who knows what Samsung will do with SmartOS, OmniOS was very solid option.

I'm hoping that Samsung will open more of it up to open-source the interesting bits that they don't plan to sell themselves... Not sure where this will go, or if Samsung plans to expand/create their own Joyent based cloud. It does seem to be a great OS combination for Docker containers though.

All of the bits with the exception of the customer-facing portal are already open-source:

SmartOS: https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent and https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live

Triton (the orchestration around it): https://github.com/joyent/triton - this is the root repository of the project, there are many services which are linked to here: https://github.com/joyent/triton/blob/master/docs/developer-...