While I respect that this forum is called UnitedBSD and this may be borderline... I wonder if anyone here has dabbled in other Unix derivatives such as Illumos, based on distributions such as OpenSolaris etc. (which I believe was based on System V and BSD originally).

A little while back I tested out Tribblix, "an open source operating system created by Peter Tribble. Derived from OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and illumos, it blends a retro style with modern components."

I would just be interested to hear people's opinions on Illumos and any experience people have had using it as a desktop operating system.

pfr@sdf.org | https://social.sdf.org/@pfr | https://matrix.to/#/@pfr:bsd.cafe

    While I have some experience running FreeBSD and OpenBSD on my desktops and laptops over the years, I have mainly been on Linux. However since the early 2000s I tested Solaris 8 and 9 in virtual machines and eventually started using Solaris 10, Opensolaris and eventually Openindiana on my desktops, usually dual booting with Linux.

    For the past few years I was mostly limited to running Openindiana on older hardware or in QEMU, but more recently I have been able to install it on my relatively modern laptop from 2016 with 32 GB of RAM. I think the performance is generally fine, even though some of the hardware support could still be improved.

    I also have OmniosCE, Debian and NetBSD running in QEMU/KVM on Openindiana, so I basically have everything I need to be productive. I will have more machines running OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD in the future, but that will mostly be on ARM SBCs as more powerful ones will become available in the future.

    pfr Before exploring BSD, 10 years ago I was an happy OpenSolaris user.
    I always loved it. Everything just worked out of the box, it had a good subpixel rendering inherited from Ubuntu, ZFS was integrated in the OS: TimeSlider in Nautilus was fantastic and the Boot Environments capability integrated in IPS was incredible.
    If you run (Open)SUSE you'll notice their snapper tool. Well, OpenSolaris did even better by integrating the ZFS APIs into the package manager, instead of running a separate daemon. And they did it when the Linux community didn't even know what a CoW FS could do. They were dealing with the joke called BTRFS.
    The only bad part of OpenSolaris was that IPS was really slow. But since Sun was tuning every part of the OS, I'm sure that they would deal with that as well.
    Then Oracle bought Sun and the dream ended suddenly.

    Illumos to be honest was always a joke.
    Sun had the best engineers around but without a management with a clear focus and without visionary people in the team everything will stagnate soon or later. Engineers are often too busy to fix or to make small improvements to what they had instead of thinking what people want.
    And that was just how things screwed in there. People were just too busy to destroy what Project Indiana was trying to do. "Desktop is not our focus. Servers are." But no one is going to run a server OS they don't know about.
    People run Linux because they know it. They use it at their home and since it is good enough for servers, they started to use it there as well.
    But how many people know illumos? They didn't advertise it. They just worked with small companies with enterprise focus and made tiny improvements.
    Userland is rotting. They are still using the old plain sucky Sun userland, instead of modernizing it.
    The kernel saw no improvements at all.

    They are just doing what OpenBSD guys often do: pushing a normal commit to master and advertising it as an innovation.
    Oracle released Solaris 11 with ZFS encryption. illumos had a PR opened but no one worked on it. For years.

    Then when it was becoming clear that illumos was taking the path of the zombies, OpenZFS was born, in a tentative of separate it from the fate of the illumos-gate.
    And now ZFS is mostly developed on Linux. OpenZFS reference implementation is not illumos-gate's implementation anymore. It is ZOL's (ZFS on Linux).
    FreeBSD are rebasing their ZFS on ZOL. OpenZFS on Mac and Windows did the same.

    And while illumos was stagnating, Linux integrated eBPF for DTrace-like capabilities, runs pretty well in the same workloads, has one of the best hypervisor and network virtualization capabilities out there, it integrated systemd for SMF-like capabilities (and it is way better than SMF) etc.
    Many Sun engineers are working on Linux now. Adam Leventhal is working at Delphix, a company that joined illumos for their database solutions. Now Delphix is running Linux, leaving illumos on its own fate.
    Joyent, the biggest contributor of illumos, was acquired by Samsung, and their Manta project died. Bryan Cantrill, its CTO and another ex-Sun, left the company.
    Brendan Gregg, a famous DTrace expert and another ex-Sun and ex-Joyent, is now working on Linux performance at Netflix and he's one of the most known evangelist of eBPF.

    The last nail in the coffin was the discontinuation of Unleashed, a fork of illumos that was trying to improve it by removing old crap and by replacing a lot of old and useless Sun userland with a FreeBSD-based one.
    But the complaining of the community and their refusing to accept patches in the upstream was what caused the discontinuation of Unleashed.
    Now its dev is working with FreeBSD, or at least that was what he said.

    illumos died for lack of vision.
    Its community was just a nostalgic group of people that still wanted to run Solaris, and yet they tried to tell people that illumos was not Solaris.
    They didn't want to going forward, and the project payed the consequences.

    If you want to run a Solaris 11-like environments, nowadays your best move is running some Linux enterprise distributions like RHEL or running FreeBSD.

    illumos is no more.

        pfr If you want to try something obscure and less talked about have a look at Genode's SculptOS, it has some really interesting features.
        Also, you can run/install on an usb and play with it as much as you want, it will keep you busy for sometime 😉

        Yes, I've tried it a year or so ago.

            Sam
            Thank you for your comment.
            I shared it im my illumos group on telegram (@illumosdistroes) and a dev replied with good news!
            It ain't dead! (Just smells like it)

            They recently started a new company to bring the cloud on premise:

            https://oxide.computer/blog/introducing-the-oxide-computer-company/

            Including a podcast with Cantrill!
            Many of you would find these interviews interesting (and highly technical).

            On the metal

            I, for one, love Bryans highly entertaining and insightful talks on YouTube - so looking forward tobdive into lots of audio content!

            Don't ignore illumos just yet 😉

                11 days later

                neb

                They recently started a new company to bring the cloud on premise:

                Another "private cloud" thing? Please, neb.
                Private cloud never existed in the first place. It was always a buzzword that was liked to the managers for identifying the classic on premise deployment with a tenant-like management of the resources. Just like the new trend called hybrid cloud.
                That's why the private cloud concept, aka OpenStack, was a failure, that is now being abandoned from the same vendors that back then supported it. First from NASA, then from Mirantis and SUSE. Red Hat is still supporting it due to the existing contracts with telcos, but they are not suggesting it to new clients anymore.

                Also, even then, the reason of my post is not about being "death" in a technical sense (0 commits). It's about being death from a relevance point of view.
                The main problem is: why bothers with illumos anymore? It's just like using Solaris ONNV 146 with some fixes.
                Solaris went further from that, but illumos did not do the same. They are still trying to be compatible with a platform that deviated from what was in the source tree back in 2010.
                That's why illumos is almost the only ex-SUN project that never became successful. LibreOffice deviated from OpenOffice, Jenkins did the same from Hudson etc.
                But not illumos. They are still attached to SUN Solaris, even when Solaris itself does not exist anymore since it is in maintainance mode until 2034.

                You're talking about OmniOS, and yet it is just one of the most prominent examples that investing in illumos is a waste of time.
                OmniTI, the company behind OmniOS, stopped working on it years ago because of the lack of interest of the community, and now it became a few people maintained project that is trying to offer some enterprise-level of support in a best effort way. Come on, how many enterprises are going to pay for a best effort support? If something goes wrong who will become the responsible of the damage? That's why enterprises are paying for in the first place.

                Just read those comments from people who worked in illumos from the early days:

                EDIT: I forgot this:

                There is no reason to run illumos instead of RHEL or FreeBSD, nowadays. Not anymore.
                Ten years ago Solaris was far ahead and Linux was a toy. Now, things are changed too much.

                neb

                Another good read is this thread on r/illumos

                Yes, but even there: a company that uses illumos and where Peter Tribble is working with?
                Come on, Peter Tribble is an outstanding hacker but it is a Solaris/illumos guy. This has the same credibility of Facebook using BTRFS in production due to have hired Chris Mason.

                OK, you're using illumos in production because you hired an illumos engineer? How many companies are going to do that? That's why illumos is irrelevant. No one besides enthustiasts and their engineers know anything about it.

                      Sam Everything except Linux and Windows is "irrelevant", is it not? Judging things by market acceptance or whatever is shockingly narrow-minded, especially on a BSD forum...

                          nia No, I don't agree with that.
                          BSDs are trying to be something. Every of them are innovating in their own way. Every of them has set their own goals.

                          We're not talking about market perspective or the size of the project itself, we're talking about the project identity.

                          illumos lacked all of these. It was just a project that tried to be Solaris 11 even when nothing could be Solaris 11, since it was made proprietary again by Oracle.
                          It lacked vision and identity. What you want to be in the future? What are you trying to achieve in the future?
                          This is not a marketing thing.
                          What achieved illumos in these 10 years? Even its own major selling features are now developed separately and without any consideration for it.
                          Just look at OpenZFS: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs

                          OpenZFS is an advanced file system and volume manager which was originally developed for Solaris and is now maintained by the OpenZFS community. This repository contains the code for running OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD.

                          No citing illumos anywhere. They jumped directly from Solaris to OpenZFS, as illumos was never existed in the first place. And they are citing just Linux and FreeBSD as the target of the project.
                          For me this is a bad sign. A sign that is trying to say that illumos was just a dream of some people and nothing more.

                          Just a stupid example. You type "uname -a" and what you're going to see is:
                          "SunOS 5.11....Solaris"
                          Seriously? illumos is NOT Solaris. Also, what is going to represent "5.11"? Is it Solaris 11? Give me a break.
                          And then, the same people who didn't even have the courage to fix the uname output were the one who were infuriated with people who couldn't distinguish illumos from Solaris. The same.

                          The reason behind the zombie status of illumos is that the people who run the project were not willing to accept the fact that Solaris was gone and that from then on the project should walk by its own legs, even by leaving behind some Solaris legacy things kept around for political reasons, just like LibreOffice and the other ex-SUN projects did.

                          I think the post of Jeff Sipek (and the examples that he provided in that post) are the best example of what was the problem with illumos.

                          • pfr likes this.
                            3 years later