OpenIndiana Illumos Distro | Hacker News Reader

OpenIndiana Illumos Distro

openindiana.org

87 pointsplaguna37 comments

That website is in desperate need of an about page that doesn’t presume you know what illumos is. The wiki is slightly better:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana

Serious question, I thought OpenIndiana was dead?

I've tried OmniOS, saw that it had a massive memory leak in the base install, and determined it wasn't for me.

Is there any good alternative of Solaris lineage left? (That doesn't involve selling your soul to Oracle.)

SmartOS is still going strong with bi-weekly releases: https://us-central.manta.mnx.io/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/sm...

And we use it in production for critical workloads and its fantastic :)

I don't think any mainstream OS ever dies - instead, they often enter the hobbyist realm. Amiga OS and VMS are still actively developed this purpose (just not something you'd use in production). I imagine it's the same for OpenIndiana as Solaris had a large user base back in the day.

OpenVMS[0] is very much primarily a commercial product that people use in production. The hobbyist program is secondary to that.

[0]: https://vmssoftware.com

Oxide Computer uses it, I think

https://oxide.computer/

Their distribution is called Helios and is based on OmniOS. I think they were supposed to make it more suitable for consumer use / home install at some point - the package repository is public if you want to try to cobble it together on your own.

Actually several docs in their repositories point to https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios which... doesn't exist??

It does seem derived (rather than based) from OmniOS indeed, so little to do with OpenIndiana (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341193)

It's still private. I believe this is a case of "just gotta open it," but that takes some work (and I am not sure, I don't know all the details yet, I could be wrong). I have it on my to-do list to try and investigate this and get it done sometime soon, we'll see.

Hmm ok thanks!!

Yes I think a lot of people are very curious to get a peek, especially if they can't afford an actual oxide ;)

Oxide made of ex-joyent (smartos) people, some of which were also ex-sun people (Bryan Cantril for example)

> Serious question, I thought OpenIndiana was dead?

Commit history says it's alive.

> Is there any good alternative of Solaris lineage left? (That doesn't involve selling your soul to Oracle.)

I mean, this is it I'd think. There are other illumos distros, but this is the one most shaped like Solaris.

http://tribblix.org/ ?

SmartOS illumos Unix Zones for the win. https://wiki.smartos.org/how-to-create-a-zone/

It's a great OS. I've been running it for 10+ years as my NAS OS and it's been rock solid. Paired with Napp-It as a ZFS management UI.

I haven't followed OpenSolaris stuff for long time but I suppose they don't depend on proprietary binary blobs from Sun anymore.

Unfortunately, there are still some proprietary blobs:

https://illumos.org/docs/about/faq/#is-illumos-free-software...

https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close...

For who is that unfortunate?

Anyone who cares about flexibility or quality? Those blobs can't be audited for bugs, can't get new features from the community, present a pain point for refactors, and I would expect impede porting to new architectures (though the existence of the ARM port makes me less sure of that point).

What is the “best” (true) successor to Solaris? I want to setup some Sun Rays that I still laying around…

https://github.com/classilla/kopenray

Strange that it doesn’t support SPARC. It’s like Linux only supporting ARM64 and not x86.

There's an effort to support it: https://dlc.openindiana.aurora-opencloud.org/SPARC/

I think it doesn't have much support because the majority of SPARC gear out there runs better with SunOS. Solaris was a big jump up in processing requirements.

Ignoring 20 years of sparc hardware produced after the last sunos release.

Oracle doesn’t help much IIRC. SPARC seems to be a dead-end hardware-wise.

A real shame IMHO.

The improvements regarding memory tagging, the first UNIX architecture to ship memory tagging in production for years, has been done under Oracle management.

Will they keep the architecture going forward with new chips?

SPARC is doing just fine for the context of existing Solaris customers.

ARM, RISC-V and CHERI have similar memory tagging capabilities for Linux/Windows users.

The elephant in the room are Intel/AMD not being able to deliver on that front, after several failed attempts.

> SPARC is doing just fine for the context of existing Solaris customers.

In other words, it's a legacy product. There's no future roadmap for SPARC, unlike ARM, x86, POWER, and Z.

From my limited reading on the topic, even Fujitsu has moved on to ARM. Maybe someone can pop in here with a correction to that?

Yes, it's pretty clear everyone is. What's your point?

The majority of sparc gear out there doesn't run sunos at all, let alone better.

What are some reasons to use Sloaris based operating systems over Linux these days?

Any illumos distro will be better at ZFS than anything Linux-based. Granted, the amount will vary by distro; last I saw, Ubuntu had relatively good support. Beyond that, I'm personally quite fond of the overall design and polish of openindiana, at least. One example is how it automatically handles ZFS snapshots and boot environments with the package manager - all the pieces are there to do that on other systems, but setting up the integration is harder.

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