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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

Illumos is a fork of OpenSolaris that's under active development, and the last Unix based on AT&T Unix System V. It's features have been around forever, and have been ported to Linux and BSD (with various levels of success). So "next-gen" is a strange way to describe it...

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HP-UX 11 is also based on System V [1], and that had a release as recently as 6 months ago [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#/media/File:Unix_history-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX

I wonder what letter hides behind the ‘-‘?

Probably the worst ever OS to develop against. I worked for almost 10 years with a product codebase that was maintained on Solaris (really nice), Linux (nice), AIX (not so nice) and HP-UX (not at all nice).

The longstanding joke is to substitute 'S' for the '-'.

Around 2000 I briefly worked at a telco equipment manufacturer that shipped for Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. Back then the hierarchy was already as you described.

That was true in the mid-90's as well, although I remember hating AIX and HP-UX about equally.

HP-UX always felt old. It was like everything stopped at some point and they didn't keep going. Did they decide if they would port it (again) to x86 from Itanium. I know they ported NonStop already.

I loved using it and porting software to it. It was really cool to make such a fast yet exotic OS and CPU (PA-RISC) usable and comfortable. Really cool OS. Excellent, high quality hardware.

HPUX is effectively dead/zombie. It only runs on Itanium and hasn't been ported to x86_64 last I checked.

Illumos is hardly kicking it in the mainstream either. I'm just saying it can't really claim to be the last descendant of legit System V.

There is a world of difference between an OS which last major release was well over a decade ago and now only receives patches every 12 months; and an OS that was released several years latter, is still under heavy active development and has several commercial distributions.

Just because something isn't "mainstream" it doesn't mean it's equivalent to a deprecated platform that's only supported on legacy iron.

HP-UX is EOL. I use both Redhat and HP-UX at work. HPE's plan is to containerize the OS (an X86 container, not a HP-UX container), to help with migrations. Although some people have replied with less then positive things to say about HP-UX, there are a several features in Linux that stem from HP-UX, such as LVM. I'm hoping HP-UX gets open sourced so the good parts can be learned from and be used in other projects.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-it...

I ran HP-UX at home for a very long time. Loved the OS and that it's SVR4, but if one didn't have connections to get the special media, one lacked software mirroring and the compilers, which made running HP-UX a non-starter after a while. I even went so far and deep to port quite a bit of open source software to it and learned how to create PSF's, its native (and quite advanced) packaging format packages and bundles.

https://www.openindiana.org/ - Community-driven Illumos Distribution (OpenSolaris -> OpenIndiana)

And several others of varying popularity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Current_distributions

I was under the impression that zones were still significantly more powerful than containers.

A good contrast between zones, jails, containers in linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsA4DcX47E0

ZFS is still a pain to use for your root filesystem not because zfs on linux doesn't work but because its been legally questionable due to license constraints.

> ZFS is still a pain to use for your root filesystem not because zfs on linux doesn't work but because its been legally questionable due to license constraints.

There are also technical reasons. ZFS is designed for Solaris' virtual filesystem (VFS) so every other operating system has to wrap some sort of Solaris Porting Layer ("SPL") on top to integrate it into their system. These are not insurmountable (clearly, it works well now).

As an OS person, I found this summary on the subject pretty interesting: https://wiki.freebsd.org/AndriyGapon/AvgVfsSolarisVsFreeBSD

AFAIK, nothing else has a concept quite like Zones. Jails are a subset. Containers in the Linux sense are made from pieces that are small subsets.

It's also useful to know that SmartOS, the Joyent product, is based on Illumos.

It might have been around the block a few(?) times but it’s good to know that OpenSolaris is still being worked on.

I think part of the reason for not mentioning OpenSolaris in the main page is because it, in fact, isn't really being worked on... it's effectively dead, and Illumos really isn't the same as it was a decade ago.

> It's features have been around forever, and have been ported to Linux and BSD (with various levels of success).

And Windows, apparently, at least for DTrace.

Also (Open)ZFS on Windows:

* https://openzfsonwindows.org

* https://twitter.com/openzfsonwindow

What makes it the last?

Solaris, HP-UX, AIX are all in hard maintenance mode as far as I can tell. Illumos seems to be the last System V still being actively worked on.

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