
OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.10 is here – openindiana - rodrigo975
https://www.openindiana.org/2019/11/07/openindiana-hipster-2019-10-is-here/
======
mikestew
I guess it's an OS? And this is what I got from poking around, which I only
did because Indiana is where I grew up. I would have otherwise quickly given
up and moved onto the next item on HN.

 _" illumos is a consolidation of software that forms the core of an Operating
System. It includes the kernel, device drivers, core system libraries, and
utilities. It is the home of many technologies include ZFS, DTrace, Zones,
ctf, FMA, and more. We pride ourselves on having a stable, highly observable,
and technologically different system. In addition, illumos traces it roots
back through Sun Microsystems to the original releases of UNIX and BSD."_

~~~
SkyMarshal
Its convoluted history looks like this:

Solaris (proprietary) -> Open Solaris -> Illumos -> Open Indiana.

Sun open sourced Solaris, then Oracle bought them and closed sourced it again.
But several forks remain of the open-sourced version.

They didn’t help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name
either. Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris. But naming
things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

~~~
npongratz
> But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

Naming things is indeed one of the exactly two hard things in computer
science, the others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.

I'll see myself out.

~~~
LiquidInsect
Three! The three hard things are naming things, cache invaliCONCURRENCYdation,
and off by one errors!

~~~
soperj
That's the joke.

~~~
nullsmack
10 print "Read it again"

20 goto 10

RUN

------
shrubble
Good things in open source Solaris:

ZFS implementation is rock solid

Excellent fault isolation - even on x64, I had some ECC ram that went bad; it
isolated the bad bank, stopped using it, and continued. RAM showed as total
minus the amount.

Zones as containers, great for many purposes

Excellent performance under memory pressure

Bad: documentation on some things, less hardware support, some aspects are
quite different from Linux/BSD way

~~~
gnufx
Is ZFS more solid than in Linux?

Linux does the same with bad RAM, and you'll often see that in large
installations. (Monitoring should check you have the number of DIMMs and CPUs
expected, modulo a fiddle factor for reported memory size, which depends on
BIOS.)

~~~
hylaride
_Is ZFS more solid than in Linux?_

Yes, considering ZFS was originally developed by Sun for Solaris. It's been 8
years since I've been a Solaris admin, but we ran production DB workloads on
JBODs with ZFS with no problems.

Though I've not run ZFS on linux myself, I've heard that many of its issues
stemmed around the fact that due to CDDL/GPL incompatibilities, they couldn't
have ZFS in the kernel until very recently.

~~~
JackRabbitSlim
potato potato. They are using (some of) the ZFS on Linux code at this point
anyway.

------
kitotik
For me, OpenSolaris and it’s offshoots are much like BeOS in that they felt
“right” from the first moment. Of course followed by great sadness from the
lack of mass adoption.

------
unethical_ban
OpenIndiana/Illumos/SmartOS documentation is pretty rough - when I last looked
about two years ago, the docs were all a hodgepodge of old wikis and few
videos.

If you want widespread understanding and adoption, beginner docs need to be
available and up to date.

~~~
timc3
I just read the Solaris documentation

~~~
user5994461
Is there a solaris documentation online? I would expect Oracle to have put it
behind a paywall.

~~~
yellowapple
It is indeed online, sans paywall: [https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-
systems/solaris.html](https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-
systems/solaris.html)

Of course, with some Illumos distributions/derivatives/whatever-we're-calling-
them, things are different due to using different tools or otherwise deviating
from upstream Solaris. Better to start with your specific distro's
documentation and use Oracle's Solaris docs to fill in the gaps, adjusting as
necessary.

------
ktm5j
I have some old SPARC hardware that I'd love to get OI running on.. so
personally I'm excited about the imminent SPARC support that seems to be just
around the corner.

Someone posted to their dev mailing list with links to working install images
for SPARC!! [https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-
discuss/2019-N...](https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-
discuss/2019-November/022822.html)

edit: whoops that's the wrong link.. and I can't seem to find the right one...
perhaps it's too new for the message thread to be in the archives, or maybe it
was taken down for some reason.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
There's also DilOS which is OpenIndiana + apt that is built for both sparc and
intel

[http://www.dilos.org](http://www.dilos.org)

~~~
ktm5j
Oh very cool! Thanks for sharing, I'll have to take a look at this

------
mlacks
My first deep dive into the open source contribution community was Open
Indiana in 2017. I really love how welcoming this community is to newcomers,
and how well the communication is between members.

------
rubyn00bie
I tried Illumos a while ago, and was pretty stoked for Solaris in general
because it was where ZFS performed the best but at the time it was pretty darn
hard to use because of the extremely scattered documentation (this was before
ZFS on Linux even close to ready).

Any using OpenIndiana on the daily for anything? If so, what? You have any
pro-tips or tricks for folks looking to dig in?

~~~
seized
I "use it" daily but it runs on my Supermicro NAS. Has 30+ drives attached to
it in several pools. Its fast and stable and just... Sits there working.
Currently its at 75 days uptime but it did a year at one point.

Asides from some tinkering getting bonding working the way I wanted it to on
two NICs I never have to screw with it or worry about it at an OS level.

Note that I dont like the "all in one" approach to storage or running anything
but the bare minimum on my storage itself. So the fact that docker/etc/etc
isnt available is fine. All this thing runs is NappIT (ZFS management, like
FreeNAS), Monit and Smartd.

It has a bunch of things that are just so far ahead of Linux/ZoL. Big one is
timeslider (auto snapshot management) and the sheer glory that is boot
environments. Once you have those its hard to downgrade. Upgrade went bad/not
working? Reboot to previous boot environment and done. Back to the previous
version/working state. Like VMware snapshots but on the bare metal boot
drives.

My one wish is for it to be more current with ZFS features. It was ahead of
ZoL for so long... Now I just want ZFS encryption to make it to OpenIndiana so
I can use that without changing away from OpenIndiana.

------
mylons
it’s pretty hard to tell what openindiana does. seems like they develop
Hipster but what is that? there wasn’t any clear info after spending a few
minutes on the site.

~~~
dehrmann
It's a marketing and naming failure that people are asking what this is.

~~~
ktm5j
If you go to their main page (the post link is just an announcement) then you
can't miss the big print "What is Illumos" etc. You're failing to look ;P

------
e12e
So, is it alive? I had the impression joyent gave up on solaris/smartos - are
there still any serious support from companies using Solaris in anger?

~~~
neilalexander
SmartOS is still very much alive and it's a solid platform.

------
coat
According to the Solaris wikipedia article, it looks like Oracle has added
major features/enhancements since going back to closed source. Do any of those
features make it back to illumos/Open Indiana?

