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Comment by pepijndevos | Hacker News Reader

So what is this SmartOS thing?

From what I understand: KVM is hardware virtualization, SmartOS is(a distro for) OS virtualization and Docker is process virtualization?

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SmartOS is a distant relative of Solaris. It's an alternative to Linux for the server with all the Solaris bells and whistles (zfs, zones, dtrace) and great tooling for virtualization. Unfortunately it's not very widely adopted and to my knowledge is only supported by one start-up (Joyent) which limits its chances of dislodging Linux. So, a very powerful, highly integrated and ultimately niche stack.

It also inherited a subset of the Solaris community which is jaded by the popularity of Linux and its "primitive" toolset. You can often see them rolling their eyes and making condescending comments as the rest of the open-source world moves on.

The huge potential for all this is to contribute these wonderful tools to Linux, but there seems to be reluctance on that front.

The huge potential for all this is to contribute these wonderful tools to Linux, but there seems to be reluctance on that front.

The code is there for the taking. FreeBSD has ported ZFS and DTrace. Guys at LLNL are using illumos ZFS code as upstream for ZFS on Linux. Others are working on DTrace.

One can wait for efforts like that to keep progressing, help in whatever way they can, or just use illumos based distros (e.g. SmartOS) now and not wait around. Choice is a wonderful thing.

Note that I am not complaining or demanding anything. You are right in assuming that I do not miss dtrace and zfs enough on my linux boxes to contribute individually to the porting effort.

I am simply observing that porting these tools to Linux doesn't seem to be a priority for either the Linux community (which is already incubating multiple "home-made" alternatives such as btrfs, lxc userland tools etc.) or the SmartOS community (which can understandably be tempted to keep these tools as proprietary "killer apps").

I believe that, if there had been a more concerted and serious effort to get these tools into linux early on, by people knowledgeable and influential enough to get it done (ie. not me), setting aside platform rivalries and NiH, a lot of sysadmins and developers would be having way more fun at their job right now.

I'm curious about why you don't think DTrace is that important. If dotCloud were running on a bunch of SmartOS boxes, and assuming that SmartOS was running on the metal and only OS virtaulization was used, then you could use DTrace to observe all levels of the stack from the hardware all the way up to the application. That seems like it would be useful for a PaaS company.

I do think dtrace is awesome, and would certainly not make an argument against using it. We may very well use it in the future.

There was no active decision not to use it at dotCloud, our "visibility toolbox" is simply based on other tools - a combination of collectd, nagios, distributed rpc tracing, active and passive checks from the http frontends, and a decent logging setup. I'm sure you could accomplish this with dtrace and probably a dozen other tools, but I guess the same is true for every problem. At some point you just choose a tool that works and move on to the next problem.

The license incompatibility killed off any concerted effort before it could start.

The better question is: what's stopping a concerted effort now - in 2013 - from helping dtrace4linux (or the OEL port) reach completion?

The fact that it will never be upstreamed due to license incompatibility?

I'm using dtrace4linux just fine from another tree, which installs it as an add on, just like a package. It's massively useful for solving customer issues (replicated in the lab, since it isn't production safe yet). Having used it, I don't see a problem with continuing to use it this way, on Linux, forever.

http://www.joyent.com/blog/why-smartos-kvm-dtrace-zones-and-...

SmartOS is something many people overlook. It's an awesome OS. ZFS is IMO enough reason to try it out (no, zfs for linux is not ready). But then zones make it even more awesome (there was a discussion about zones here on HN a few days ago).

This is usually how it is around sysadmins:

Those who know Solaris very well swear by it and implement some awesome very stable running high performance and secure machine setups. Those who don't, hate it because it's not Linux.

It takes a while to become familar with Solaris from a Linux background. But the more you read about it, the more you realize how well designed it actually is.

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