OmniOS, one of the illumos distributions also had a release today: https://github.com/omniosorg/omnios-build/blob/r151032/doc/R...
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The illumos RTI (request to integrate) process is designed to ensure a certain quality of contributions. The downside of this is that it sometimes takes a long time to contribute a change.
For illumos there is also pretty high expectation of backwards compatibility. What unleashed now offers is a place to do more radical changes and quickly iterate on new ideas.
While the small illumos community is already pretty fragmented my personal hope is that in the future work done by both projects keeps getting merged from time to time. Maybe this also serves as a wakeup call to the illumos project to make some improvements to the contribution process itself.
And the CDDL is actually fine. Give it a try :)
A lot more of activity is going on in irc on freenode, so if you start playing with your lab server or are just interested in general you might want to drop by in #illumos or #smartos.
- zones allowed for a much higher deployment density and better utilisation of our hardware than other virtualization technology would have.
- zfs snapshots. We've integrated those into our product and when a customer messes up they now have button to instantly restore to a known good state.
Doing both of these things would have been a lot harder on another os.
You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already.
As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions:
- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1]
- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2]
- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3]
- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]
Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine.
[1] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS
In illumos land these different distributions exist because they have very different design goals and visions.
But I agree that the illumos community is also a lot smaller and maybe (sadly) too small for each distribution to be commercially successfull. I'm extremly sad about this announcement as OmniOS is a great operating system and the team behind it did a fantastic job. As a user I like the minimal setup and clear stable releaes.
From what I've read the community is now thinking of possibly consolidating with OpenIndiana for that usecase. So while having less commercial supporters is a pity the community is determined to keep pushing forward.
The real reference docs are the man pages [1]. Depending on the illumos distribution there are more task-oriented guides for OmniOS [2], OpenIndiana [3] or the SmartOS Wiki [4]. In-depth information (driver development, MDB, DTrace) is written down in the "illumos books" [5]. These are not in danger from oracle.
Sadly a lot of good historical documentation is already gone since oracle broke all the sun.com links and not even archive.org has those. :(
[2] https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration
[3] http://docs.openindiana.org/handbook/getting-started/
[4] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Users+Guide
If you enjoyed ZFS, Zones, DTrace and so on in the past there is a good chance that you'd like OmniOS, one of the illumos distributions for classic server environments.
There are more distributions like SmartOS that tkae a more innovative approach as cloud-hypervisor that is just a slim live system.
Most of the original ZFS Developers are now working on OpenZFS in illumos. Beeing open source also means collaborations with other OS projects like FreeBSD (bootloader and more), NetBSD (pkgsrc) is happening.
This is all independent of Oracle.
I wonder how one would deal with "trusting trust" in such a system.
To give a quick overview on the ecosystem: everything is based around illumos as the upstream repository. There are different distributions similar what you have with linux on kernel.org and distros like ubuntu, suse, rhel, slackware. Instead of just the kernel the illumos repository also includes some libs and core system tools for userspace. The illumos distributions differentiate a bit more on use case than the linux ones.
- SmartOS is designed as a cloud hypervisor. It is probably the most radical distribution in that it is a complete live system that boots from usb/network and runs in ram. With traditional zones, KVM and lx-branded zones it's a great system for virtualization.
- OmniOS is a minimalistic server distribution. It best fits for bare metal installations.
- NexentaStor is a storage appliance built on ZFS delivering unified file (NFS and SMB) and block (FC and iSCSI) storage
- OpenIndiana continuation in the spirit of the original OpenSolaris, including a full GNOME desktop environment
- tribblix gives you "retro style and modern components"
There are a few more but these should give you a good intro.
Besides a variety of community contributors there are some bigger companies involved. Joyent, a cloud provider, is doing most work on SmartOS. Nexenta has NexentaStor, OmniOS is build by OmniTI which does consulting. Delphix is a database company that mostly contributes to ZFS parts. Pluribus has a SDN product based on illumos. Lucera, financial service provider also runs on illumos and contributes.
So even without oracle there is a very healthy mix of different commercial and community contributors.
Features like advanced filesystem support (ZFS), systems tracing (dtrace), fully fledged containers (Zones), and software defined networking (Crossbow) make it a very interesting system.
New drivers are developed and many features evolve in illumos. The focus is mostly on x86 server hardware but I know folks also using openindiana on laptops.
The hardest part seems to be training people. IPv6 is different - it is more than just "longer addresses". It is a newer protocol that fixes many more problems with IPv4 than just address exhaustion. So this "ipv6 migration" is actually an opportunity to leverage those new features.
Designing IT infrastructure IPv6 first and IPv4 second allows for so much simpler designs. You can have your complete network IPv6 only and do IPv4 on the edge for legacy clients. (Maybe doing outgoing NAT for v4 where required) The results are a much cleaner layout (because of the larger address space), simpler firewall rules, and so on.
It is not complicated or hard to do (in contrary I think that e.g. just setting up SLAAC is much simpler than managing DHCP) but the engineers need to know how it is different. They need training for that. People are often used to the old ways, once they have seen and worked with IPv6 it is no problem.
I've helped larger and smaller companies since ~2004 with those migrations. One observation I've made is that here in europe IPv6 is a basic fact of networking where as in the US it appears as if many companies are in denial. That cloud providers like AWS don't do native v6 is absolutely ridiculous.
When you write code or security rules today that is not designed with IPv6 in mind they are outdated today. Don't do it ;-)
In that sense it is practical, not sure if "notable" as there are many other more popular distributions these days.
Not using docker but zones as a container solution here, but what we do is bake images containing: pkgsrc + static config files + small scripts.
To provision we take the image + metadata containing dynamic configuration values (network details, keys & certs, etc.) and execute that.
This allows us to make very stable releases containig all our software. Pkgsrc is the most important part of this. It already contains very recent versions of packages as it is released quarterly. But sometimes we need to run a very specific version in production, or maybe add a patch to fix some bugs. This is super easy with pkgsrc.
I've given a talk last year about some parts of this at a local meetup: http://up.frubar.net/3165/deploy-zone.pdf
I agree that you need a community of users and developers for a successful open-source project. Luckily in addition to the companies like Joyent, OmniTI, Nexenta, Lucera, Delphix (who all actually do a lot of drivers development) there is a friendly and growing community of volunteers that contribute.
What is sadly sometimes lacking a bit is marketing. After oracle went closed again many assumed opensolaris died, but in fact a lot of interesting systems development is happening in illumos land. Of course all open source. I wish a few more people would recognize what a great system and community SmartOS and OmniOS have.
This event will be a weekend of fun around making open-source software work across platforms. I look forward to meeting other pkgsrc enthusiasts there!
At least for illumos (SmartOS and OmniOS, ...) there is a lot of work happening for web services.
So zones make running nested SmartOS with KVM a bit uncommen. While possible there are not that many use cases besides development on the system itself.
I know others are joining the community as well as hanging around on irc shows. It definitly is a smaller community than linux or the BSDs but it is growing.
Also a lot of interesting systems development is happening (lx-branded zones, overlay networking, ...) in illumos and it is the upstream of openzfs.
Besides SmartOS a more classical server distribution to consider would be OmniOS [1]. For a storage appliance one might want nexentastor.
Distributions of illumos are more purpose-built than linux distributions. They differentiate more by use-case than by package management. Yet they all consume and contribute to illumos and what might look fragemented is not much of an issue for the community itself.
Watchable online: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2014/11/shoul...