OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.10 is here – openindiana | Hacker News Reader

OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.10 is here – openindiana

openindiana.org

91 pointsrodrigo97557 comments

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."

Looks like it's a fork of OpenSolaris[1], which is pretty cool - I didn't realize there was a Solaris variant still under active development.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos

"Project Indiana" was Sun's code name for open sourcing Solaris as OpenSolaris.

There are other variants under development. Illumos probably is the largest one, SmartOS another.

Illumos is the kernel, and SmartOS and OpenIndiana are both Illumos distributions.

The OS is packaged the same way Linux is, with different distributions maintained by people outside the kernel devs.

I'd just like to interject for a moment...

Illumos is not just the kernel, it's a complete operating system - as is traditional in UNIX. This idea that you get a kernel from somewhere and a libc from somewhere else and a init from a third place etc. is quite unique to GNU/Linux.

I think it's not ideal to use the term "distribution" for their downstreams like SmartOS etc. because it reminds people of all these GNU/Linux distributions, but a better term doesn't immediately come to mind...

IIRC Project Indiana was mostly about replacing Solaris' SysV packages based packaging system with IPS, so it even originally referred to something that can be considered as "Solaris distribution".

There are Multiple. I run them because it’s the fastest network ZFS device on the hardware I run that I have tested.

How do you define (use?) network zfs device? Nfs3, nfs4, iscsi, something else?

And have you tested recent Linux w/zfs?

It's especially cool because AFAIK the OpenSolaris family is the only current open-source UNIX System V distribution, and it has real AT&T code in it.

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.

> 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.

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

Also, humour.

That's the joke.

10 print "Read it again"

20 goto 10

RUN

> 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.

I think I only knew what it was cause I go on DistroWatch a bit to keep tabs on any new distros. I assume not a looot of people do this.

I am still not over the fact that Oracle ruined Sun. :( I used OpenSolaris for a long time and I liked it!

Me neither. I used to work for Sun, and knowing the culture they destroyed is tragic.

> Few people know the relation of “Indiana” to Solaris.

What's the relation?

"OpenIndiana obtains its name from Project Indiana, an open source effort by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) to produce OpenSolaris, a community developed Unix-like distribution based on Sun Solaris. Project Indiana was led by Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian Linux Distribution."[0]

[0] https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#why-is-it-cal...

I’ve wondered whether the name traces to Ian Murdock. He went to work for Sun, as best I recall, after Progeny closed up shop, and had roots in Indiana (where Progeny was headquartered).

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

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.)

Linux chipkill ECC support is a crapshoot. Intel redesigned it all for Skylake and later CPUs and Linux still hasn't caught up with the changes. Some of it mostly works on pre-Skylake, but often doesn't. I've seen Linux killing processes that have a bad physical page mapped, but the process just gets killed in a loop because the kernel is too stupid to actually take the page offline.

So, does IllumOS support Skylake properly? Anyhow, the implication that it's unique in handling bad memory is unfounded. (I haven't run Skylake or SunOS/Opensolaris at any scale, but I have substantial experience with large Linux-based HPC systems with memory problems and not hit such problems.)

I seriously doubt that illumos has the edac sorted out on newer parts. That's why i recommend running it in a VM.

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.

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

The hardware support is thin, so it makes sense to run it in a VM. I run mine inside VMWare ESXi, which has excellent hardware support. I give all the storage to the OpenSolaris VM, which in turn re-exports iSCSI volumes that are used by the other VMs. Solaris's iSCSI daemon is rock-solid, as is their CIFS server. It's miles ahead of the network storage daemons available for Linux. And of course it's all backed by ZFS.

They have a separate cifs daemon vis à vis samba? Does it run on Linux? :)

It does not run on Linux, because parts of it are implemented in the opensolaris kernel. It is dramatically better than Samba.

For more concrete information on hardware support check out the Illumos hardware compatibility list https://illumos.org/hcl/

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.

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.

I just read the Solaris documentation

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

It is indeed online, sans paywall: 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.

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...

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.

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

http://www.dilos.org

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

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.

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?

I use it daily but I haven't "used it" in about 6 years because it just sits there in the corner serving without me having to touch it. When I needed docs I used to just refer to Oracle's.

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.

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.

It’s basically an open source version of FreeNAS (minus the Corporate backing) as I understand it.

Edit: I'm wrong. It is an Open Source version of Sun/Solaris.

Would love to know how your thought process brought you to that conclusion!

But no it isn’t. It’s more of a Solaris fork ( which I used to run)

Thanks for clarifying. I was mistaken.

Nav bar "openindiana - Community-driven illumos Distribution. Homepage has links to "What is Illumos" and "The Hipster Distribution" which is described as "Hipster is a codename for rapidly moving development branch of OpenIndiana".

The article linked was simply a short list of patch notes, but if you navigate the site it has available information.

https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#what-is-openi...

From what I can tell, OpenIndiana is to Illumos as Fedora is to Linux (GNU/Linux to be pedantic), and Illumos is based on OpenSolaris. So what we have here is essentially a Solaris distribution?

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

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

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?

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

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?

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