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

11–20 of 94 posts

Re: SmartOS

#11

Post by xenophonf »

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…

You can boot ProxMox VMs via PXE:

https://blog.kail.io/pxe-booting-on-proxmox.html

But why bother? A read-only disk image would be simpler.

Re: SmartOS

#12

Post by ofrzeta »

boricj wrote: post #9
rjzzleep wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was acquired again in 2022 by MNX [1]. [1] https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-f...

Thanks, I missed that one.

Re: SmartOS

#15

Post by ofrzeta »

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.

Many/Some of them are now working at https://oxide.computer

https://oxide.computer/blog/engineering-culture

Re: SmartOS

#16

Post by jeffbee »

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…

It depends on what "this" you meant, but in general the ways of netbooting an OS are many and varied. You'd have to declare what kind of root device you ultimately want, such as root on iSCSI.

Personally, I feel that "smartOS does not support booting from a local block device like a normal, sane operating system" might be a drawback and is a peculiar thing to brag about.

Re: SmartOS

#17

Post by nwilkens »

SmartOS is the core operating system for Triton datacenter -- https://www.tritondatacenter.com Triton is the orchestration of SmartOS compute nodes.

Code + issues are active under https://github.com/TritonDataCenter (smartos-live, illumos-joyent, triton, etc.), and docs are at https://docs.smartos.org/.

SmartOS is released every two weeks, and Triton is released every 8 weeks -- see https://www.tritondatacenter.com/downloads

And Triton object storage will have S3 support in the next release!

[edit: removed semicolon from link!]

Re: SmartOS

#18

Post by cyberpunk »

ofrzeta wrote: post #13

I was intrigued by the idea that in the Manta object store you could schedule computations on the storage nodes. However I am not sure how much improvement that brings in practice. Any practical experience with this? https://apidocs.tritondatacenter.com/manta/index.html

I did use it on a project, it was meh, alright? In the end the main cost of our processing wasn’t storage latency but code, and this quite arcane scheduler was a barrier too much for most of our team.

I believe it was removed shortly after i left the project..

Re: SmartOS

#19

Post by cyberpunk »

jeffbee wrote: post #16
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…

It depends on what "this" you meant, but in general the ways of netbooting an OS are many and varied. You'd have to declare what kind of root device you ultimately want, such as root on iSCSI. Personally, I feel that "smartOS does not support booting from a local block device like a normal, sane operating system" might be a drawback and is a peculiar thing to brag about.

There was a brilliant incident back in the joyent days where they accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter and ended up dossing their dhcp server ;)

Re: SmartOS

#20

Post by nwilkens »

nwilkens wrote: post #17

SmartOS is the core operating system for Triton datacenter -- https://www.tritondatacenter.com Triton is the orchestration of SmartOS compute nodes. Code + issues are active under https://github.com/TritonDataCenter (smartos-live, illumos-joyent, triton, etc.), and docs are at https://docs.smartos.org/ . SmartOS is released every two weeks, and Triton is released every 8 weeks -- see https://www.tritondatacenter.com/…

The SmartOS release changelog for reference: https://us-central.manta.mnx.io/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/sm...
Post reply on HN