OpenIndiana Illumos Distro

mbauman 2 years ago |

That website is in desperate need of an about page that doesn’t presume you know what illumos is. The wiki is slightly better:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana

wannacboatmovie 2 years ago |

Serious question, I thought OpenIndiana was dead?

I've tried OmniOS, saw that it had a massive memory leak in the base install, and determined it wasn't for me.

Is there any good alternative of Solaris lineage left? (That doesn't involve selling your soul to Oracle.)

spicykraken 2 years ago | |

SmartOS is still going strong with bi-weekly releases: https://us-central.manta.mnx.io/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/sm...

mgoetzke 2 years ago | | |

And we use it in production for critical workloads and its fantastic :)

jasoneckert 2 years ago | |

I don't think any mainstream OS ever dies - instead, they often enter the hobbyist realm. Amiga OS and VMS are still actively developed this purpose (just not something you'd use in production). I imagine it's the same for OpenIndiana as Solaris had a large user base back in the day.

Aaron2222 2 years ago | | |

OpenVMS[0] is very much primarily a commercial product that people use in production. The hobbyist program is secondary to that.

[0]: https://vmssoftware.com

alberth 2 years ago | |

Oxide Computer uses it, I think

https://oxide.computer/

bri3d 2 years ago | | |

Their distribution is called Helios and is based on OmniOS. I think they were supposed to make it more suitable for consumer use / home install at some point - the package repository is public if you want to try to cobble it together on your own.

g-b-r 2 years ago | | |

Actually several docs in their repositories point to https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios which... doesn't exist??

It does seem derived (rather than based) from OmniOS indeed, so little to do with OpenIndiana (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341193)

steveklabnik 2 years ago | | |

It's still private. I believe this is a case of "just gotta open it," but that takes some work (and I am not sure, I don't know all the details yet, I could be wrong). I have it on my to-do list to try and investigate this and get it done sometime soon, we'll see.

g-b-r 2 years ago | | |

Hmm ok thanks!!

Yes I think a lot of people are very curious to get a peek, especially if they can't afford an actual oxide ;)

hdjrbrbn 2 years ago | | |

Oxide made of ex-joyent (smartos) people, some of which were also ex-sun people (Bryan Cantril for example)

yjftsjthsd-h 2 years ago | |

> Serious question, I thought OpenIndiana was dead?

Commit history says it's alive.

> Is there any good alternative of Solaris lineage left? (That doesn't involve selling your soul to Oracle.)

I mean, this is it I'd think. There are other illumos distros, but this is the one most shaped like Solaris.

LargoLasskhyfv 2 years ago | |

http://tribblix.org/ ?

devaiops9001 2 years ago |

SmartOS illumos Unix Zones for the win. https://wiki.smartos.org/how-to-create-a-zone/

seized 2 years ago |

It's a great OS. I've been running it for 10+ years as my NAS OS and it's been rock solid. Paired with Napp-It as a ZFS management UI.

gtirloni 2 years ago |

I haven't followed OpenSolaris stuff for long time but I suppose they don't depend on proprietary binary blobs from Sun anymore.

yjftsjthsd-h 2 years ago | |

Unfortunately, there are still some proprietary blobs:

https://illumos.org/docs/about/faq/#is-illumos-free-software...

https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close...

unixhero 2 years ago | | |

For who is that unfortunate?

yjftsjthsd-h 2 years ago | | |

Anyone who cares about flexibility or quality? Those blobs can't be audited for bugs, can't get new features from the community, present a pain point for refactors, and I would expect impede porting to new architectures (though the existence of the ARM port makes me less sure of that point).

bsdooby 2 years ago |

What is the “best” (true) successor to Solaris? I want to setup some Sun Rays that I still laying around…

justinsaccount 2 years ago | |

https://github.com/classilla/kopenray

mise_en_place 2 years ago |

Strange that it doesn’t support SPARC. It’s like Linux only supporting ARM64 and not x86.

stonogo 2 years ago | |

There's an effort to support it: https://dlc.openindiana.aurora-opencloud.org/SPARC/

I think it doesn't have much support because the majority of SPARC gear out there runs better with SunOS. Solaris was a big jump up in processing requirements.

tedunangst 2 years ago | | |

Ignoring 20 years of sparc hardware produced after the last sunos release.

rbanffy 2 years ago | | |

Oracle doesn’t help much IIRC. SPARC seems to be a dead-end hardware-wise.

A real shame IMHO.

pjmlp 2 years ago | | |

The improvements regarding memory tagging, the first UNIX architecture to ship memory tagging in production for years, has been done under Oracle management.

palmfacehn 2 years ago | | |

Will they keep the architecture going forward with new chips?

stonogo 2 years ago | | |

Yes, it's pretty clear everyone is. What's your point?

tedunangst 2 years ago | | |

The majority of sparc gear out there doesn't run sunos at all, let alone better.

throwaway0x4 2 years ago |

What are some reasons to use Sloaris based operating systems over Linux these days?

yjftsjthsd-h 2 years ago | |

Any illumos distro will be better at ZFS than anything Linux-based. Granted, the amount will vary by distro; last I saw, Ubuntu had relatively good support. Beyond that, I'm personally quite fond of the overall design and polish of openindiana, at least. One example is how it automatically handles ZFS snapshots and boot environments with the package manager - all the pieces are there to do that on other systems, but setting up the integration is harder.