Solaris 10 Zones on Illumos Tribblix
ptribble.blogspot.com
ptribble.blogspot.com
It's a shame Oracle destroyed it (mostly) and Sun. Though some might argue that Linux taking over played a part in that.
A parallel universe with Sun surviving & properly embracing open source would have been very interesting.
In a more perfect world, Joyent would have become bigger than it was. Alas...
Also, for the record, it is objectively untrue that all new and innovative work stopped. My primary disappointment was the silent discontinuation of the OpenSolaris project.
The delta between what you could get between Solaris 10 and most anything else at the time (free or otherwise) was very impressive. Zones/containers had little equal (maybe FreeBSD jails, but so much nicer to manage), ZFS made me almost cry that I’d never have to deal with veritas again, and DTrace allowed safe, live debugging whenever I felt like it. I’d add SMF there somewhere if it wasn’t configured via XML.
Sure, IPS is technically superior to apt or yum (well, anything is better than yum), but it’s not ground breaking better than what you have elsewhere. 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest.
I was using hyperbole, but the general feeling to those of us that were customers was of a large cutback in work. And that was before oracle jacked up the prices.
I miss Solaris, but there is no reason I would recommend it to anybody today, even if you had to manage your own hardware and not be on a major cloud vendor.
As for 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest. -- that's shortchanging an incredible amount of work that was done that was not related to crossbow at all. Crossbow, while great, was hardly the largest or most important project that was being worked on although it was certainly one of them.
FYI, I’m verbally harsh because as I said I miss Solaris and miss having an economic reason to use it.
Yes I know there's a long time debate about whether the CDDL license is GPL compatible or not. Too bad this came from the Sun era, years before the Oracle acquisition.
The problem was they grew hugely during the dot com bubble - to a size that was never sustainable, and then post bubble, couldn't work out how to make enough money from their offerings in the face of Linux on commodity PC hardware.
Not just OS/hardware either - the Java ecosystem and Libre/Open office still live on.
Some examples include SmartOS (Samsung maintained datacenter centric flavot, lots of tools for rapid/easy deployment of compute nodes and machine images); OmniOS (for laptops); and one I had never heard of until this post, Tribblix.
A common pattern is to run other OSes in some zones via bhyve (linux and bsd) or kvm or lx branded zones (linux). But the native platform can handle many scenarios these days.
Pardon?
If you want to criticize how Slackware does things, there are myriad better points you could've brought up, like:
- The installer being only minimally changed from that of Softlanding Linux System
- The installer still operating under the notion of "disk sets", from back when it was remotely feasible to install Slackware from floppies (which hasn't been the case in multiple decades now)
- The lack of dependency checking (though having been burned by dependency hell multiple times, I'd call this a "feature")
- The lack of PAM, if that matters to you (though the -current branch now includes it, so Slackware 15.0 probably will, too)
And yet, none of these things have prevented me from being happy and productive with Slackware, both at home and at work, on desktops and servers. It's what I'm running on the very laptop on which I'm typing this comment, on my main workstation / gaming rig at home, and previously on my servers (before I acquired a taste for OpenBSD and SmartOS).