Oxide RFD 26: Host Operating System and Hypervisor

I'll admit, I've only read a few passages, but I think I would have felt more comforted if they just said "We know and love illumos, and for many of these close calls that's enough." Because this RFD can sometimes feel like Linus's half-bigoted comments re: ZFS.[0]

For example, the systemd section especially could have been stolen from a Reddit thread of 5 years ago. I'm also willing to bet, simply because of its breadth of use, systemd is faster, as, if not more, stable, and much better documented than SMF. Linux's procfs and sysfs are similarly pretty great these days, and are also slagged nonetheless.

But my point was -- familiarity isn't a bad thing when you're building a cloud computer, and you've already built a cloud on illumos. Deep knowledge of dtrace should make you choose it over eBPF, and deep knowledge of FMA/SMF should make you choose them over systemd, especially if you're not confident in the alternatives.

Notwithstanding, since I'm not buying a $1 million rack, I'm actually much more interested what, if any, portable OSS tooling will be built around this computer. Because IMHO if anything was wrong re: Joyent, it was that not much of its OSS technology saw wider purchase, and one reason was -- it was and is exclusive to illumos. My (backseat QB) fear is Oxide may have fallen into the same trap. As mobilizing as a Cantrill-ian presentation may be, (again I'd bet) `ripgrep` created thousands upon thousands more Rust programmers and 100x the mindshare. illumos may be a perfect fit for this rack scale computer, but can you imagine the mindshare gained by simply having all your cool new tooling work on Linux? As we know re: an exciting new company, mindshare means a lot, so ... `statemaps` for everyone?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181