The Future of OmniOS

71 points by raffapen 9 years ago | 17 comments

Sad but not surprising. When we created illumos in 2010, the latest version of Linux was 2.6.35, and it did not have an answer to ZFS, DTrace, or Zones. I thought these features were important enough to compete with Linux, and convince people to switch.

Times have changed, and Linux (now at 4.10) now does have an answer to each of these, particularly:

- ZFS: ZFS on Linux, now part of Ubuntu. btrfs has been coming along as well, and I included a couple of btrfs performance analysis screenshots in my DockerCon talk last week, since we're testing it.

- DTrace: enhanced BPF now provides the raw features (as of Linux 4.9), and is merged in the Linux kernel (unlike SystemTap etc).

If illumos were proposed today, I would not get behind it as I no longer think it makes sense when you're comparing it to Linux 4.10. It's no longer 2010.

Good luck to everyone moving on. I've published a lot on debugging and tracing on Linux, which should be helpful.

hackbinary 9 years ago |

My understanding of what happened to OpenSolaris after Sun/Oracle abandoned/closed the project is: Illumos develops the base/core for open source OpenSolaris based derivative distributions of which OmniOS is one of about 11 or so.

It seems to me, unfortunately, that since there are so many OpenSolaris descendant distros, and that Linux can only barely sustain 3 large commercially supported general purpose distros (Redhat, Ubuntu & Suse, but please correct if I am wrong), that there has to be some amount of consolidation that needs to/will take place if OpenSolaris/Illumon is to survive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Current_distributions

kasabali 9 years ago | |

I'm just an outsider to the Illumos community so take this with a grain of salt, but based on what I gather from checking it time to time I don't think this is the main reason.

11 is just the number of currently active distributions and is not meaningful for getting an idea of where the most stuff happens (By the same logic Distrowatch lists 288 active Linux distributions). There is only few main distributions with most mindshare (SmartOS, OpenIndiana and OmniOS. Nexenta is also a big one but I heard they don't get along well with the upstream).

Illumos is the upstream base and AFAIK Illumos community and distribution communities are indeed in tight relationship where the contributions to individual distributions find their way into the base not a long time later. And as a project it has a larger scope compared say, just the Linux kernel. It is the kernel, drivers, base libraries, core utilities etc. so developers on these different areas still belong to same tight community.

hackbinary 9 years ago | | |

I think you nailed my point. Linux (according to Distrowatch) has 288 distros, and there are only 3 large scale commercially supported distros (for linux), so my question is in the world can illumos support more than one? What open source lets competing organisations do is collaborate on shared projects.

radiowave 9 years ago |

Sad but understandable. I certainly recognise the divergance he mentions between the goal of it being a high-scale web computing platform, versus the ZFS storage server that many people (myself included) actually use it for. I suspect most people using an Illumos distro to do the former are running Joyent's SmartOS instead, and this leaves the OmniTI folks in a difficult position - how much time and resource ought they devote to (for example) integrating Joyent's work on running Linux containers, and to what end?

cthalupa 9 years ago | |

OmniOS currently does support lxzones

https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/LXZones

sciurus 9 years ago |

Sounds like tough times for OmniTI. They recently announced they were canceling their Surge conference as well.

https://omniti.com/remembers/2017/every-good-surge-must-come...

zokier 9 years ago |

> OmniTI will be suspending active development of OmniOS

...

> We still run quite a bit of infrastructure on OmniOS and expect to continue contributing

I'm not sure how to interpret this. They will simultaneously suspend development and continue contributions? That seems contradictory.

daveguy 9 years ago | |

That means it will probably be limited to bugfix/maintenance efforts.

greenyoda 9 years ago |

For those (like me) who have never heard of OmniOS, it's an extension of Illumos (which is a fork of Open Solaris):

https://omnios.omniti.com

qaq 9 years ago |

This is sad who knows what Samsung will do with SmartOS, OmniOS was very solid option.

tracker1 9 years ago | |

I'm hoping that Samsung will open more of it up to open-source the interesting bits that they don't plan to sell themselves... Not sure where this will go, or if Samsung plans to expand/create their own Joyent based cloud. It does seem to be a great OS combination for Docker containers though.

jen20 9 years ago | | |

All of the bits with the exception of the customer-facing portal are already open-source:

SmartOS: https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent and https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live

Triton (the orchestration around it): https://github.com/joyent/triton - this is the root repository of the project, there are many services which are linked to here: https://github.com/joyent/triton/blob/master/docs/developer-...

zdw 9 years ago |

Is the dupe story detector not working? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171295

coffeymug 9 years ago |

An unfortunate name. Omnius was one of the thinking machines that grew in strength and size to the point that it nearly wiped out humanity.

http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Omnius