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OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

openindiana.org

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Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#71

Post by spauldo »

tgma wrote: post #49

Is there really a valid use case these days if you are not a hobbyist/fanboy or have existing Solaris workload compared to FreeBSD (or Linux if licensing isn't an issue)? ZFS seems quite well-supported on those.

Solaris is an actual System V, not a clone like Linux distros often are or a BSD.

It's got excellent support for compiling software written for different UNIX systems.

It does a lot of things with commands that other systems do with config files.

But no, there really aren't any compelling reasons why a non-hobbyist would be interested. If Oracle had continued development on OpenSolaris then yes, but they have little interest in their own version of Solaris.

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#72

Post by spauldo »

Anyone run this on top of KVM? I tried a while back but I don't know KVM or Qemu well and all the examples were ancient and didn't work for me. I'd love to play around with Solaris again (last I used it was Solaris 8 on an Ultra-1) but I don't have any decent hardware I'm willing to dedicate to the task.

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#73

Post by pjmlp »

fanf2 wrote: post #54
pjmlp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only it is still around from Oracle, it is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging enabled. Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.

Like https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentat... ?

Yeah, except it exists since 2015, and while it is great that macOS is getting them, which I am perfectly aware of, it isn't what I meant as "Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.", because it isn't neither a Linux system, nor a regular BSD.

Apple OSes don't count for the BSD group I was talking about, because they only took whatever NeXT felt like back at the time, and there have been very few updates other than those required for UNIX certification.

While on Linux, you might be tempted to point out Android, however NDK alone hardly makes it a GNU/Linux system.

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#74

Post by jsiepkes »

ubedan wrote: post #56
cnst wrote: post #38

Everything is converging on Linux these days, and even the majority of the people who used to promote Solaris, DTrace and ZFS, have seemingly moved on, mostly to Linux, somewhat to FreeBSD, too, per Brendan Gregg: Solaris to Linux Migration 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 - Sept 2017 (129 comments) In the BSD land, things aren't that much better, either. Netgate, the makers of pfSense, are now us…

"There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ... Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead…well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do." I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and it very well could rise again for those users that want/need robust stability. One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company as their hypervisor. They publ…

Also Oxide just raised a $100 million series B with their illumos based product [1].

While I respect Brendan I think the arguments he makes are kinda weak. For example take OpenZFS. OpenZFS on Linux or FreeBSD isn't that great;

OpenZFS on Linux is only an option if you want to support the compatibility. As long as OpenZFS can't have (parts) inside the main Linux kernel source tree there is going to be breakage on updates. Which means manually testing and maintaining updates. Or you have to confine yourself to Ubuntu because they are of the opinion you can combine the CDDL and GPL. Don't think Ubuntu indemnifies you against an Oracle lawsuit though.

You could use FreeBSD as an alternative. FreeBSD is great, but lacks a lot of functionality. For example a good I/O scheduler is missing in FreeBSD. The FreeBSD I/O scheduler will basically just do what is most advantageous for it. If you have competing I/O workloads which you want to serve "fairly" there is no way to do that on FreeBSD. Basically the load which "pulls the hardest gets the most".

[1] https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#75

Post by rbanffy »

joshuaissac wrote: post #25
mikewarot wrote: post #4

As a Hoosier... I had to check the relevance... and learned it's basically a fork^3 of Solaris, a Sun operating system. OpenIndiana[3] Note: I guessed here at [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris

OpenIndiana is more of a downstream distro than a fork of illumos, much like how Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro. Whereas illumos itself is a fork of OpenSolaris.

Does Illumos have a desktop environment?

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#76

Post by rbanffy »

spauldo wrote: post #72

Anyone run this on top of KVM? I tried a while back but I don't know KVM or Qemu well and all the examples were ancient and didn't work for me. I'd love to play around with Solaris again (last I used it was Solaris 8 on an Ultra-1) but I don't have any decent hardware I'm willing to dedicate to the task.

Last time I tried it worked fine. Didn’t install the GUI environment though as I wanted a headless server environment for some testing.

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#78

Post by ptribble »

rbanffy wrote: post #75
joshuaissac wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenIndiana is more of a downstream distro than a fork of illumos, much like how Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro. Whereas illumos itself is a fork of OpenSolaris.

Does Illumos have a desktop environment?

That's like asking if Linux has a desktop environment. Strictly, no, but Linux distributions do.

So OpenIndiana has MATE and a couple of other options; Tribblix has about 30 desktop options; OmniOS you can install a desktop stack from pkgsrc.

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#79

Post by hulitu »

cnst wrote: post #38

Everything is converging on Linux these days, and even the majority of the people who used to promote Solaris, DTrace and ZFS, have seemingly moved on, mostly to Linux, somewhat to FreeBSD, too, per Brendan Gregg: Solaris to Linux Migration 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 - Sept 2017 (129 comments) In the BSD land, things aren't that much better, either. Netgate, the makers of pfSense, are now us…

> Everything is converging on Linux these days

Linux is too bloated.

Re: OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution

#80

Post by justin66 »

tw04 wrote: post #63
justin66 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solaris was the development OS for Oracle for years. I presume that's now shifted to their own linux distro I wouldn't bet on that. Their Linux distro is a RHEL clone, but they have total control over Solaris.

Given that they killed the roadmap and admitted there will never be a Solaris 12 after laying off 90% of the core developers - I would bet on that. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-set-oracle-closes-down-las...

Not doing another major release of doesn't exactly rule out keeping it as the reference platform for their core database product.

I guess my question - I honestly have no idea and it's been years since I paid attention to Oracle or Sun's inner workings - is whether they're still developing SPARC hardware? The Google seems to say no, they've abandoned that... so I'm inclined to agree with you guys now.

I don't have a ton of nostalgia left for Sun stuff, but still... what a waste.

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