
The Future of OmniOS - raffapen
https://lists.omniti.com/pipermail/omnios-discuss/2017-April/008699.html
======
brendangregg
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.

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hackbinary
My understanding of what happened to OpenSolaris after Sun/Oracle
abandoned/closed the project is: Illumos develops the base/core for open
source OpenSolaris based derivative distributions of which OmniOS is one of
about 11 or so.

It seems to me, unfortunately, that since there are so many OpenSolaris
descendant distros, and that Linux can only barely sustain 3 large
commercially supported general purpose distros (Redhat, Ubuntu & Suse, but
please correct if I am wrong), that there has to be some amount of
consolidation that needs to/will take place if OpenSolaris/Illumon is to
survive.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Current_distributions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Current_distributions)

~~~
kasabali
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 most mindshare (SmartOS, OpenIndiana and OmniOS. Nexenta is
also a big one but I heard they don't get along well with the upstream).

Illumos is the upstream base and AFAIK Illumos community and distribution
communities are indeed in tight relationship where the contributions to
individual distributions find their way into the base not a long time later.
And as a project it has a larger scope compared say, just the Linux kernel. It
is the kernel, drivers, base libraries, core utilities etc. so developers on
these different areas still belong to same tight community.

~~~
hackbinary
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.

~~~
snw
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.

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radiowave
Sad but understandable. I certainly recognise the divergance he mentions
between the goal of it being a high-scale web computing platform, versus the
ZFS storage server that many people (myself included) actually use it for. I
suspect most people using an Illumos distro to do the former are running
Joyent's SmartOS instead, and this leaves the OmniTI folks in a difficult
position - how much time and resource ought they devote to (for example)
integrating Joyent's work on running Linux containers, and to what end?

~~~
cthalupa
OmniOS currently does support lxzones

[https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/LXZones](https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/LXZones)

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sciurus
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...](https://omniti.com/remembers/2017/every-good-surge-must-come-to-an-
end)

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zokier
> OmniTI will be suspending active development of OmniOS

...

> We still run quite a bit of infrastructure on OmniOS and expect to continue
> contributing

I'm not sure how to interpret this. They will simultaneously suspend
development and continue contributions? That seems contradictory.

~~~
daveguy
That means it will probably be limited to bugfix/maintenance efforts.

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greenyoda
For those (like me) who have never heard of OmniOS, it's an extension of
Illumos (which is a fork of Open Solaris):

[https://omnios.omniti.com](https://omnios.omniti.com)

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

~~~
tracker1
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.

~~~
jen20
All of the bits with the exception of the customer-facing portal are already
open-source:

SmartOS: [https://github.com/joyent/illumos-
joyent](https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent) and
[https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live](https://github.com/joyent/smartos-
live)

Triton (the orchestration around it):
[https://github.com/joyent/triton](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-...](https://github.com/joyent/triton/blob/master/docs/developer-
guide/repos.md)

------
zdw
Is the dupe story detector not working?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171295)

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coffeymug
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](http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Omnius)

