OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

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.

I don't believe these are all forks. Illumos is a fork of OpenSolaris. OpenIndiana was NOT a fork though, instead it was a distribution of first OpenSolaris and now Illumos.

I compare OpenSolaris/Illumos to the Linux kernel. You typically don't just install them just like you typically don't install Linux. Instead you install a Illumos distribution or you install a Linux distribution. Obviously this isn't a perfect comparison since Illumos contains a lot more of the user land than Linux does.

Current distributions of Illumos appear to include: OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Nexenta, and now OmniOS.

Where do you get that we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility?

One of the pressing projects appears to be to make the Sun Compiler optional. Illumos' preferred compiler to be built with is GCC 3.4.3. They do still rely on dmake and the lint from SunStudio though. Hopefully that can be resolved.

I don't know why we need Sun drivers specifically, unless we are using Sun hardware.

I think we can safely assume now that there will be NO future source releases from Oracle.

As to who this is for, I believe other comments do a good job expressing that.

OpenSolaris has been dead for two years. illumos is a fork of the source code repo that made up the OS and Net consolidations from Sun. Oracle closed the gate shortly after the acquisition, with the promise they'd drop code after Solaris 11 was released. This has not happened.

OpenIndiana, SmartOS and OmniOS are all distributions of the illumos kernel and associated libraries and programs.

OpenIndiana is geared more towards desktop users (though it can be used for servers well enough). OI is funded primarily through everycity.co.uk.

SmartOS is a PXE/USB booting server operating system, where all services are meant to be encapsulated in zones and KVM. SmartOS zones use pkgsrc for packaging (via pkgin). SmartOS is useful for building clouds, for instance. It is the core of Joyent's SmartDatacenter product.

OmniOS is a more traditional server operating system in that you install bits on metal, use IPS for packages, and have an upgrade path other. OmniOS has been used in production inside OmniTI for a while (as I understand it), but is the newest player on the block.

As with Linux distributions, each distribution above has different operating and development philosophies, but they all push code back up through the illumos gate.

Sun is dead. Oracle ate Sun, took their ball, and went home. illumos is the successor of the OpenSolaris idea (sans asinine governance model), and the core of open source Solarish distributions.

This talk by ex-Sun kernel engineer (and creator of DTrace) Bryan Cantrill is both instructive and hilarious: http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-develop...

Given the size of the community, it's likely that Illumos will support less and less hardware over time. You may want to stick to whatever's on the Nexenta compatibility list.

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.

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.

FreeBSD will have it's own native type 2 hypervisor soon, BHyVe.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/BHyVe

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

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