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taspeotis

I kagi’d Illumos and apparently Bryan Cantrill was a maintainer.

Bryan Cantrill is CTO of Oxide [1].

I assume that has no bearing on the choice, otherwise it would be mentioned in the discussion.

[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...

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Early Oxide founders came from Joyent which was an illumos shop and Cantrill is quite vocal about the history of Solaris, OpenSolaris, and illumos.

> Joyent which was an illumos shop

And before that, they used to run FreeBSD.

Mentioned for example in this comment by Bryan Cantrill a decade ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6254092

> […] Speaking only for us (I work for Joyent), we have deployed hundreds of thousands of zones into production over the years -- and Joyent was running with FreeBSD jails before that […]

And I’ve seen some other primary sources (people who worked at Joyent) write that online too.

And Bryan Cantrill, and several other people, came from Sun Microsystems to Joyent. Though I’ve never seen it mentioned which order that happened in; was it people from Sun that joined Joyent and then Joyent switched from FreeBSD to Illumos and creating SmartOS? Or had Joyent already switched to Illumos before the people that came from Sun joined?

I would actually really enjoy a long documentary or talk from some people that worked at Joyent about the history of the company, how they were using FreeBSD and when they switched to Illumos and so on.

Joyent was using Solaris before Bryan worked there. Listen to the this podcast with Bryan and his co-founder about their origin story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY

This is about as good as you are gone get on the topic of Joyant history.

Thank you, I will watch that right away :)

Joyent also merged with TextDrive, which is where the FreeBSD part came from. TextDrive was an early Rails host, and could even do it in a shared hosting environment, which is where I think a lot of the original user base came from (also TextPattern)

As I recall they were also the original host of Twitter, which if I recall was Rails back in the day.

> As I recall [Joyent] were also the original host of Twitter, which if I recall was Rails back in the day.

Up until 2008:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20080201142828/http://www.joyeur...

Bryan Cantrill also ported KVM to Illumos. At Joyent they had plenty of experience with KVM. See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o

As far as I know, Bryan didn't personally work on the porting of bhyve (this might be wrong).

So if anything, that would point to KVM as the 'familiar' thing given how many former Joyant people were there.

KVM got more and more integrated with the rest of Linux as more virtualization features became general system features (e.g. posted interrupts). Also Google and Amazon are working more upstream and the pace of development increased a lot.

Keeping a KVM port up to date is a huge effort compared to bhyve, and they probably had learnt that in the years between the porting of KVM and the founding of Oxide.

Where is Max Bruning these days?

@bcantrill is the CTO of Oxide.

Yup, thanks

Yeah I came here to say that Bryan worked at Sun so why do they even need to write this post (yes, I appreciate the techinical reasons, just wanted to highlight the fact via a subtle dig :-))

This isn't a blog post from an Oxide, it's a link to their internal RFD which they use to make decisions.

I never said it was a post by Oxide.

Might want to re-read your initial comment, then.

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