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Comment by AlexanderDhoore | Hacker News Reader

The more I look into freebsd, the more I realise how awesome it is. This same thing has been in freebsd for ages: jails.

(maybe not the fancy deployment, but the container technology)

That, together with ZFS turns freebsd into one hell of a server OS. ZFS seriously needs to come to linux. And don't say license problem, "there is nothing in either license that prevents distributing it in the form of a binary module or in the form of source code."[1]

[1] http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

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Several people i know run ZFS very successfully on Funtoo Linux. Funtoo being a Gentoo-Fork lead by Daniel Robbins himself.

--- http://www.funtoo.org/ZFS_Fun

--- http://www.funtoo.org/wiki/ZFS_Install_Guide

I personally haven't used it so far, but i hear good things :)

I agree with your statement though: ZFS + Jails is a killer pro-BSD argument when it comes to servers.

I have been looking more at smartos (and other openindiana derivatives). Zones + KVM + ZFS. Oh my!

You forgot DTrace!

ack! I sure did!

And you are quite right. DTrace is super.

smartos does seem to be missing an X server you can run in the global zone on the physical machine's physical video port(s), though, which makes it pretty useless for a home computer (which otherwise would be a great place to start playing with it before deploying it elsewhere).

SmartOS is definitely not intended to be used as a desktop system, but it can work great as a home server if you have some spare hardware.

OpenIndiana is another Illumos distro that can be used as a desktop. You get all of the core benefits of Illumos (zones, zfs, dtrace). The big downside is that you don't get the nice tools for managing zones/vms that SmartOS provides (vmadm/imgadm).

FreeBSD has ported a lot of the best features from Illumos so it could also work for you.

Just remember that an OS is only worth running if it has DTrace.

Even if it won't make it in any Linux distro officially, there is nothing stopping you from using it.

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