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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Can SmartOS / Illumos run on Xen/AWS? OpenSolaris had Xen support at one point.

The Xen support was opensolaris running a Xen Hypervisor. That was reverted from opensolaris, but later added to DilOS [1].

See OmniOS[2] - an Illumos distro that provides AMIs [3].

BTW, SmartOS and OmniOS both have support for Linux binaries within Zones, a superior Container technology.

[1] http://www.dilos.org

[2] https://omnios.omniti.com

[3] https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/Installation

The Omni folks got this working for OmniOS[1]; we would love SmartOS support on AWS, but (as one might imagine) we at Joyent don't have an immediate commercial interest in it. That said, we do have a clear indirect commercial interest in it, and we would happily engage/encourage any effort for SmartOS on AWS. Given that it's been done for OmniOS, it shouldn't be difficult...

[1] https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/Ec2Ami

I got SmartOS running on EC2 back in 2015 as an exercise.

https://twitter.com/aszeszo/status/658115638683115521

The details below may be useful for whoever wants to get the latest images running on EC2 again. Unfortunately, I don't have time to tinker with this stuff after-hours anymore:

Required patches from Delphix illumos tree (at the time):

58b782ef6ec93fef26ab349aff81e8748f673b24 32722 Xen PV disks don't have properties set 09846dfe2cfc30fe54d80637aea0aa38b64127ed 33942 Creating xdf.conf file causes the kernel to panic on boot 2c4f787714ba44c84b8ed4dfb7ad05288c942a0e 34224 Xen HVM VM with 32 VCPUs hangs on boot 1fc3b35c42d5aeadb1e9c8b7308f3c33cfba00ac 34424 Some PV devices should not be configured in HVM mode 91f305d4c307729116dfa89022334083bf817058 34508 Expose xdf minor nodes when in PV-HVM mode 718bba6535f2a3423643aede0067775730a15a23 35310 Fix iostat on the EC2 instances

Files that had to be updated in the the vanilla SmartOS image after building the smartos-live tree:

platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/cmdk platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/rtls platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/sd platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xdf platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xnf platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xpv platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xpvd platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/xpvd.conf platform/i86hvm/kernel/misc/amd64/hvm_bootstrap platform/i86hvm/kernel/misc/amd64/hvm_cmdk platform/i86hvm/kernel/misc/amd64/hvm_sd

I would be cool to see official SmartOS images on EC2!

Microsoft supports Windows on multiple cloud providers, while competing vigorously to be the "best cloud" for running Windows.

Joyent's business team surely knows the difference between demand generation for SmartOS (anywhere) and a marketing pitch for Joyent as the "best cloud for running SmartOS at scale".

There is nothing indirect about a marketing funnel that makes it easy for the largest developer community to evaluate your operating system.

SmartOS can run under Xen.

The version I am running doesn't work with more than one CPU (SmartOS Live Image v0.147+ build: 20160622T220759Z), and I think the network interface defaults to using the realtek 8139 driver.

This was enough for my situation, but not optimal for heavy use.

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