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SmartOS

docs.smartos.org

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Re: SmartOS

#51

Post by samtheDamned »

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?

I use it. It's not the most practical I'll admit but I like the simplicity (I'm not super experienced with linux server administration so both of them feel similarly foreign, but SmartOS is pretty minimal and has been pretty straightforward to manage), and I won't lie it's a fun gimmick to be running a descendant of SunOS for random household services.

Re: SmartOS

#52

Post by stonogo »

tylerhillery wrote: post #46
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?

Oxide uses Helios, their own illumos-based distro: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios They’ve written up their reasoning in this RFD: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026#_comparison_illum...

After reading that document twice, I'm still not sure why they based it on Illumos. I strongly suspect it's just down to the personal preference of the founders, which is a perfectly valid reason. This document very much reads like "here are the pieces we will use, let's work our way back to why"

Re: SmartOS

#53

Post by ekropotin »

nZac wrote: post #21
jeffbee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I'm looking to achieve are three identical proxmox host boxes. As soon as you finish the install you now have three snowflakes no matter how hard you try. In the case of smartOS (which I've never used) it would seem like that is achieved in the design because the USB isn't changing. Reboot and you are back to a clean slate. Isn't this how game arcades boot machines? They all netboot from a single image for the g…

It doesn't look like it's achievable with vanilla Proxmox.

I think if you really-really want declaratively for host machines, you'd need to ditch Proxmox in favor of Incur on top of NixOS.

There is also https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos, but it's pretty new and therefore full of rough edges.

Re: SmartOS

#54

Post by DvdGiessen »

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?

Running a number of production services on-premise on a big machine using native zones, a few using LX zones (the built-in Linux compatibilty layer), and a single bhyve zone. Actually, years ago this machine was the very first server we set up when our company was just getting started and for the first few years it ran pretty much everything. Zones were ideal for that, also to allow us to pack more services on less hardware, while having decent separation and everything snapshotting/backupping using ZFS. Nowadays we have a bunch more servers, with varying *nix operating systems (SmartOS, Debian, FreeBSD), as well as macOS and even Windows for some specific CI functions. (:

The global zone works great as a hypervisor if you prefer working over SSH in a real shell, and being able to run a lot of services natively just makes things like memory allocation to VM's and having a birds eye view of performance easier. Being able to CoW cp/mv files between zones because it's actually the same filesystem makes certain operations much easier than with actual VM's. Bhyve works well for the things that need an actual Linux kernel or other OS, at the cost of losing some of the zone benefits mentioned earlier.

Highlighting a few things we today run on SmartOS, grouped by their technology stacks: C (haproxy, nginx, PostgreSQL, MariaDB), PHP (various web apps), Java (Keycloak), Elixir/Phoenix (Plausible, fork of Firezone), Rust (rathole, some internal glue services), Go (Grafana, Consul, Prometheus). Most of those are readily available in the package manager, and a few offer native Solaris binaries which run fine on illumos. Others we do local builds in a utility zone before copying the binary package to the where it actually runs.

On LX zones we also run a number of services without problems, usually because they have Debian packaging available but are not in pkgsrc (for example Consul/Nomad, Fabio, some internal things that was already Linux-specific and we haven't bothered to port yet).

And at home a LX zone also runs Jellyfin just fine. (:

Re: SmartOS

#55

Post by irusensei »

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?

I think the big hit on Solaris and FreeBSD popularity since then was OpenZFS adopting Linux as their main reference operating system.

Re: SmartOS

#56

Post by gr4vityWall »

I know someone who runs SmartOS for their home server. They only had good things to say about it. It's been working well for a few years now.

Re: SmartOS

#57

Post by gr4vityWall »

re-lre-l wrote: post #24

I am a huge fan of SmartOS. Back in the 2010s (around 2012), I was advocating its use in production at a small startup I worked. The SunOS kernel, ZFS, zero install, immutable core, convenient way to manage containers and VMs together - all of this looked great on paper, especially containers. In reality, I ended up running almost everything in VMs. The only thing worked well natively was nginx. MongoDB, Mysql, even…

These days, you're indeed better off using Illumos/SmartOS to run GNU/Linux zones/VMs, rather than native applications, from what I hear.

Re: SmartOS

#58

Post by cyberpunk »

DvdGiessen wrote: post #54
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?

Running a number of production services on-premise on a big machine using native zones, a few using LX zones (the built-in Linux compatibilty layer), and a single bhyve zone. Actually, years ago this machine was the very first server we set up when our company was just getting started and for the first few years it ran pretty much everything. Zones were ideal for that, also to allow us to pack more services on less h…

I used it for smaller scale (low 10s of physical servers) back in the day also. But my problems with that started when i needed a lot more, the sysadmin/devops/whatever story doesn't scale.

Yes, ansible exists but it's actually quite hard to run ansible on a few hundred machines -- you need lots of RAM just to run the playbook and your first hundred or so separate deployments, you do need to reach for something like Kubernetes.

As for LX, why emulate linux when it's .... right there? The linux kernel is not a lot of overhead vs having to justify emulating the linux ABI on an OS the industry has largely abandoned.

Re: SmartOS

#59

Post by eduction »

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?

I use it for a home server. Zones provides a secure way to have (on one physical machine with one physical network interface) some stuff you can only get to on the local network and some things you can get to over the public internet and some things via internet if you have the right ssh key. Each contained natively from each other. Crossbow firewall provides a nice way to contain traffic securely as well. ZFS let me set up two big external usb drives as a raid array, the resulting zvol can (iirc) have multiple filesystems for use by multiple zones although I only use it from one right now for the lan only zone. That zone shares via SMB to my network so I can use it for backups and media streaming.

I’ve been able to do almost everything in native zones. I had a bhyve zone set up to run a photo related GitHub code base that really needed Linux.

SMF is a joy to use for services and package management with pkgsrc is great. The whole thing just feels very thoughtfully put together.

You can probably achieve all this on Linux with docker and the right iptables (or whatever succeeded it) config I imagine? But on smartos I am using facilities that are integrated deeply into the os going back like 20 years now. I also just prefer the old sun stuff.

Re: SmartOS

#60

Post by [deleted] »

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.

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