

OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI - vgnet
http://omnios.omniti.com/

======
hapless
So we are now nested, what, six deep in forks? I've long since lost track:
OpenSolaris => OpenIndiana => Illumos => this new thing ? are there some in-
between steps?

And we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility.

Or a Sun compiler.

Or Sun drivers, necessarily.

Or a real guarantee of future source releases from Oracle.

Who/what is this for?

~~~
patrickgzill
Who is it for? My view:

People who want to run ZFS for storage usage. ZFS is still better than Linux
alternatives like LVM, BTRFS etc. To be picky, there is not an exact
counterpart to ZFS under Linux.

And with clones etc. you can set up 1 master KVM image and then clone it 10 or
100 times, saving a lot of disk space in the process (ZFS clones only use the
amount of space that is different from the original).

People who have a lot of Solaris experience or have to maintain a lot of
Solaris systems already. Also people who are using Solaris zones.

People who are building backend systems that require or can use any/all of the
above. Right now, no one cares what your Web SaaS service runs on, as long as
it stays up and doesn't lose their data.

Solaris still has a better VM subsystem, IMHO, than Linux does, and performs
very well under heavy loads that include disk activity.

~~~
wmf
You've explained who _Solaris_ is for, but if you want Solaris why would you
want to run a fork of a fork of Solaris? It's still not clear what value this
adds _relative to Illumos_.

~~~
patrickgzill
For one, KVM virtualization does not run on Illumos, nor Solaris.

Second, Oracle is encumbering Solaris with a not-nice license. I haven't
followed the latest developments because I no longer care, since I will never
use a non-free OS.

Whether you meant to ask, "Why Illumos over Solaris" or "Why SmartOS or OmniOS
over Illumos?" I think I have answered your question :-)

~~~
X-Istence
KVM virtualization has been added back to Illumos and is also available from
Joyent as SmartOS:

<http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2011/08/15/kvm-on-illumos/>

Hopefully the next release of OpenIndiana will add support for it as well,
seeing how they also use the Illumos kernel.

------
justauser
My understanding of hardware support from SmartOS and Illumos was that it only
worked on Intel hardware and not AMD. Is this still the case?

Relevant to this discussion : Joyent releasing SmartOS
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2887170>

AMD support from SmartOS wiki:
[http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Technical+FAQs#S...](http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Technical+FAQs#SmartOSTechnicalFAQs-
WhataboutAMDsupport%3F)

~~~
jdboyd
Most things work on AMD64. In SmartOS, KVM was the major feature that didn't
work on AMD64, but as they said in the faq, the community has been working on
that. I can't currently find the testing ISO builds with that support, but
here is at least one repo with KVM on AMD support:
<https://github.com/jclulow/illumos-kvm>

Joyent's original work is worse than just Intel only, it requires features
found in Core iX and relate Xeon CPUs. This means it doesn't work on Xeon 5xxx
chips that are getting affordable and it doesn't work on C2D chips that
support VT-x. It sounds like AMD support is further along than supporting
older Intel chips.

~~~
jclulow
That's my repo! The "pre-ept" branch contains experimental support for both
AMD CPUs with AMD-V support, and Intel CPUs lacking the EPT feature (Joyent
targeted EPT support with their initial port.)

I have a hacked up SmartOS ISO from a month ago with a build of the "pre-ept"
KVM module replacing the stock module. If you'd like to test it out, with the
disclaimer that it might not work for you, it's here:
<http://alpha.sysmgr.org/smartos-20120223-jmc2.iso>

If it works for you I'd love to hear about it. If it doesn't work and you can
provide crash dumps or even remote console access to the machine for me to
debug the problem then I'll try and help out. My goal is to get the new
support tested and working on as many different bits of hardware as possible
and then get it integrated into Joyent's repo once cleaned up and proven.

A lot of us hang out in #illumos on freenode (IRC) if you'd like to chat --
I'm LeftWing.

------
petedoyle
I gotta say, ZFS+KVM sure seems like an awesome combo. Any ideas how this is
different than SmartOS?

~~~
patrickgzill
The SmartOS ISO I downloaded, did not have an installer to help you install
the OS to disk.

This one does, according to release notes.

Looks like they have tweaked some of the libraries and they provide both 32
and 64bit versions of Python also (this can be a pain to build sometimes as
the configure tools don't always pull in the right libs, so you end up with
mixed 32 and 64bit objects or other weirdness).

Also, the installer is minimal, basically just asks you what disk to install
on. You do all other configuration after you have booted it for the first
time.

~~~
dmpk2k
Just to be clear to any readers: SmartOS is not meant to be installed on disk,
ergo no installer.

------
mkup
Can anyone elaborate: why all these cloud webhosting people are taking legal
risks of Oracle changing license for (Open)Solaris or closing this OS project
entirely, legal risks of being sued by Oracle for patent infrigement /
whatever else legal bullshit?

They could just port KVM to FreeBSD instead; FreeBSD already has ZFS, DTrace
and all other necessary bells and whistles for cloud webhosting
infrastructure. But in contrast to (Open)Solaris they have community support
for new hardware, a lot of already working drivers for existing hardware and
also much safer legal position.

Are there any technical difficulties with porting KVM to FreeBSD? Can anyone
elaborate?

~~~
bdha
As I said above, OpenSolaris is dead. illumos is a fork. We don't take code
from Oracle, because there isn't any. If they'd kept the gate open, a fork
probably wouldn't have happened.

As for why not to just move from Solaris to FreeBSD... because they're totally
different beasts? And we happen to like Solaris? :-)

Porting KVM to Solaris was apparently quite non-trivial:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o>

------
stefanve
I would love to have a special laptop edition of a OS like this.

Some nice features:

A nice VM overview/start/manage screen A way to group VM's so it starts
multiple VM's with a single "click" (in a pre defined order).

Switching between VM's with a shortcut and/or alt-tab/expose visual style.

Host menu to openen up new VM's, looking at stats etc. maybe a fold down over
the current VM

------
cwp
I'm not to familiar with the Illumos world. Would this be the equivalent of a
new Linux distribution?

~~~
petedoyle
Yes, I think so, except its the equivalent of a new Solaris/OpenSolaris
distribution (from which Illumos derives).

~~~
rollypolly
That's very ambitious. Do you know who they're targeting with this? Legacy
systems perhaps?

~~~
nosequel
Honestly, more and more people with big data problems are turning back to
solaris kernels over linux because of how many issues there are with linux
when you are really running it hard. ZFS, dtrace, and the Solaris kernel on
new hardware is really a compelling argument over Linux.

~~~
justauser
I hate to be the one asking for a citation but can you share some examples of
"more people" who have moved from Linux back to Solaris? I agree about
excellence of Dtrace and ZFS but I'm just curious about your kernel comment.

