OpenIndiana - Illumos future?

[Cthulhux]

I recently decided to move it to Void Linux armv7hl, as I wanted to give musl a try

Void Linux is nice for what it tries to do (mainly, provide a Linux distribution that chooses the best instead of the most commonly used tools). Most of the disadvantages of Linux when compared to BSD and Unix are still there though.

On-topic: Since illumos and its distributions are the only free real Unices (as in: directly derived from SysV) in existence, I admit that I have a soft spot for it. The only problem with it seems to be that every single illumos distribution is tailored for exactly one purpose. SmartOS desktops would not make much sense, neither would OpenIndiana servers, probably. Is there even a way to install OpenIndiana without a GUI?

That said, I really like Tribblix and I can imagine having it as my daily driver soon.

I'm always on the edge of giving OpenIndiana a try on desktop, but this and other thread on FreeBSD forums or Demon Forums dissuade me from doing so

From what I have (read and) seen, Tribblix seems to be "OpenIndiana done right", especially in terms of performance and simplicity. But that is probably a matter of taste.

 

[vermaden]

vermaden Thank you for that great post.

Welcome, just my random thoughts on the topic.

Alpine Linux can do root on ZFS although I am not running it in such configuration.

It would also require beadm rewrite for Linux for Boot Environments

https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine

https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine
If I would be forced to use NFS on Linux, it would probably be clustered Ganesha NFS:
https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/wiki

I am not sure I would retire that FreeNAS box in favor of Alpine Linux.https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine

https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine
If You use FreeNAS instead of plain FreeBSD then You will probably miss that web GUI from FreeNAS

Alpine Xen Dom0 is really where the distro truly shines (firewall and embedded of course if Linux is preferred over OpenBSD).https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine

https://github.com/sjiveson/nfs-server-alpine

For single host for sure, what about highly available Xen on Alpine Linux?

What about web management?
Xen Orchestra?
https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-features/webinterface

We use Oracle's Xen variant - Oracle VM for X86 which is free for both personal and corporate use - of course its not that secure and minimal as Alpine Linux, but it provides clustering (HA) and a web manager (Oracle VM Manager) for 'central' management.

We also tested oVirt recently on 3-node cluster, also worked quite ok with Hosted Engine setup (manager is hosted on any of 3 oVirt hosts).

You asked me about howto. Just download Alpine Linux pre-build Xen Dom0 image

Thank You.

The only gotcha I found is that 256 MB of RAM for default Dom0 is insufficient for the very large installations I am running on the physical server with 80 cores and 1 TB of RAM which hosts more than 10 virtual computing nodes.

Oracle VM by default sets about 10GB if I recall correctly

(...) makes you really wonder why FreeBSD people where wasting time with bhyve . Migrating and backing up DomUs is peace of cake.

Why use OpenBSD why there is Linux? Why use Alpine Linux while there is CentOS? Same for Bhyve or XEN on FreeBSD. I definitely prefer to use Bhyve or Xen (when it will be ready) to ANYTHING on Linux, but first it have to be ready, and to be ready it first need to be 'not ready' and not mature, because its developed from scratch and it also has best license possible - the BSD license. Why OpenBSD created 'vmm'? Probably for the same reasons.

 

[giahung1997]

Why made yourself in trouble when using musl based distro like Alpine but skip Devuan or AntiX? I'm using MXLinux17, it uses OpenRC and works flawlessly.

 

[ronaldlees]

Why made yourself in trouble when using musl based distro like Alpine but skip Devuan or AntiX? I'm using MXLinux17, it uses OpenRC and works flawlessly.

Why fish with a new lure, except to catch different fish? Or more fish? But really, both those distros are pretty thin on the community side, so you're pretty much on your own with any issues. I mean, don't get me wrong - they're trying - and Alpine does have a forum, albeit there's not a lot of activity on it. IMO - there was less activity on the Devuan forum the last time I checked. I have Alpine on one of my setups, and it's OK for what I'm doing, and I haven't been bothered by musl issues too much. I have a Devuan/Pi setup for programming my Photon, and it's OK for that. Each distro has its strengths and weaknesses. Think wide!

 

[aragats]

I'm using MXLinux17, it uses OpenRC and works flawlessly.

Debian still supports OpenRC. Everything depends on your purposes as ronaldlees mentioned above.
At work I have to use Linux in a commercial device we develop. I decided to use Debian with OpenRC: it's much easier to deal with such a popular (in all meanings) and well supported distribution. I tried Apline and found 2 major things I didn't like: (1) I didn't get any responses to my questions posted on their mailing lists regarding ARM, (2) they don't provide certain essential (to me) packages which I don't want to build for a number of reasons, e.g. mono.

 

[giahung1997]

Why fish with a new lure, except to catch different fish? Or more fish? But really, both those distros are pretty thin on the community side, so you're pretty much on your own with any issues. I mean, don't get me wrong - they're trying - and Alpine does have a forum, albeit there's not a lot of activity on it. IMO - there was less activity on the Devuan forum the last time I checked. I have Alpine on one of my setups, and it's OK for what I'm doing, and I haven't been bothered by musl issues too much. I have a Devuan/Pi setup for programming my Photon, and it's OK for that. Each distro has its strengths and weaknesses. Think wide!

I don't use Devuan directly so I don't know, just saw it has a new version on Distrowatch.com some days ago. I use MXLinux17, based on AntiX but use XFCE4.

Debian still supports OpenRC. Everything depends on your purposes as ronaldlees mentioned above.
At work I have to use Linux in a commercial device we develop. I decided to use Debian with OpenRC: it's much easier to deal with such a popular (in all meanings) and well supported distribution. I tried Apline and found 2 major things I didn't like: (1) I didn't get any responses to my questions posted on their mailing lists regarding ARM, (2) they don't provide certain essential (to me) packages which I don't want to build for a number of reasons, e.g. mono.

Debian default to SystemD. It depends on SystemD so much even on MX now I've libsystemD.

 

[Sensucht94]

I may sound crazy, but I dislike OpenRC too; Runit and Busybox-init are much more reasonable, and much more alike BSD/RC-init (in phylosophy and "feel", despite using runlevels like SysV)

 

[giahung1997]

I may sound crazy, but I dislike OpenRC too; Runit and Busybox-init are much more reasonable, and much more alike BSD/RC-init (in phylosophy and "feel", despite using runlevels like SysV)

It's about of taste. TrueOS use OpenRC, too

 

[vermaden]

Looks like Delphix just dumped Illumos in favor of Linux for their OpenZFS appliances:
https://medium.com/@eschrock/kickoff-to-the-future-27331c0ab461

 

[Cthulhux]

Ew.

 

[priyadarshan]

Looks like Delphix just dumped Illumos in favor of Linux for their OpenZFS appliances:

The company I work for has been testing ZfsOnLinux for quite a long time.

We met with some serious bugs, but I guess those are edge cases that are not met in general.

Interestingly, our CTO has been evaluating Illumos, both SmartOS for servers and OpenIndiana as available choice for the engineers.

Some engineeres jumped to OpenIndiana, as it has a very smooth Mate environment.

Time Slider made many smile.

 

[hotaronohanako]

The company I work for has been testing ZFSOnLinux for quite a long time. We met with some very serious bugs, but I guess those are edge cases that are not met in general. Interestingly, our CTO has been evaluating Illumos, both SmartOS for servers and OpenIndiana as available choice for the engineers. Some engineeres jumped to OpenIndiana, as it has a very smooth Mate environment. Time Slider made many smile.

Would you please give some details about the bugs you are refereing to?

 

[priyadarshan]

Would you please give some details about the bugs you are refereing to?

We experienced data corruption on different hardware combinations.

We contributed to this ticket for a while, but, given the fact that the very same hardware with same load and use case was fine with FreeBSD or illumos, we stopped testing Linux.

Currently we are using FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE quite happily. Some servers are being switched over to illumos, due to different kernel features that better meet our company products. SmartOS, by the way, is in the priocess of adopting Bhyve, substituting KVM. That will help too.

 

[danh]

Here Brendan Gregg who was a kernel and performance Solaris engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition by Sun is recommending to all former Solaris users to switch to Linux

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux-2017.html

IIRC vermaden was a serious OpenSolaris user so he probably can shine more lite to the future of Illumos kernel. IMHO as somebody who grow up using Solaris (my third UNIX after Tru64 and short affair with Irix) starting with Solaris nowadays is an example of necrophilia. Illumos kernel IMHO has no future.

Of course one can always decide to purchase NexentaStor if they were previously invested heavily in Solaris but in my experience most companies which have no in house expertise to run vanilla FreeBSD these days will prefer TrueNAS in spite of Corral fiasco and PC-BSD to TrueOS monkey business which affected only IXSystems unpaid customers.

SmartOS is another semi-viable product on that page

https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions

which is a niche virtualization platform. It could be of some interest to people who want something along the lines of Proxmox but are more familiar with Solaris. Due to the fact that these days few interesting applications run on Solaris it would be very hard to take advantage of the most technically appealing things like Solaris zones and Crossbow on SmartOS (I wish Jails and VNET were that good). KVM is a Linux thing and running it on SmartOS sounds dumb to me. The very fact that SmartOS uses NetBSD pkgsrc as the official package management should be a big red flag. There is nothing wrong with pkgsrc on the NetBSD but that thing contrary to NetBSD's PRBS is not portable as marino can attest. That is why DragonFly BSD switched to D-Ports. (Minix and Draco Linux still use pkgsrc).

Personally when it comes to virtualization I am heavily vested in Xen and my choice for Dom0 is Alpine Linux.

OmniOS is dead. As much as I liked Jason Dixon as OpenBSD contributor his OmniIT Labs never produced a useful working open source tool (I hope paid customers did better). Their Rasmon monitoring tool was a joke

http://labs.omniti.com/labs/resmon

I don't see anything on that page that deserves any further comment. By the way Ubuntu 16.04 "ships with ZFS" and due to the fact that most OpenZFS contributors use Linux at work I would not be surprised that ZFS becomes first class citizen on Linux now that Red Hat removed BTRFS vaporware from their OS. Obvious problem is that Oracle owns ZFS but for now all of us who are using it chose to ignore that fact (myself included).

SmartOS is another semi-viable product on that page

That is an ignorant statement. Semi-viable?

OmniOS is dead.

Another ignorant statement that is completely untrue.

Here's a tip: If you don't know what you're talking about, then don't say anything. Not sure how you received all of those "thanks" because if they're anything like the nonsense you posted here, it is probably just a bunch of opinion without any facts to back them up.

Their Rasmon monitoring tool was a joke

You're a joke. Seriously, how can you possibly be taken seriously spewing this?

 

[Crivens]

danh, meet Oko. He may be abrasive at times but also knows some things. Keep it civilized, gentlemen, so there can be some learning along the way.

 

[danh]

Maybe he does have some knowledge, but he should stick to what he knows instead of spreading outright lies.

OmniOS Community Edition

One of the maintainers is Tobias Oetiker who created RRDTool and MRTG. He uses OmniOS in his business. I am very confident that whatever knowledge or skill is possessed by Oko is surpassed tenfold by Tobias. On March 8th a fix for Meltdown was available for testing. This really doesn't appear to be a dead project like Oko says it is. This kind of talk doesn't help the OmniOS CE project, rather it hurts it. So Oko needs to be knowledgeable of the facts before making bold and incorrect statements.

 

[ralphbsz]

Here Brendan Gregg who was a kernel and performance Solaris engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition by Sun is recommending to all former Solaris users to switch to Linux ..

Sorry, that statement is flat out false.

Brendan is not recommending that former Solaris users switch to anything in particular. He points out that switching from Solaris=Illumos to Linux has become easier, and then he goes into the details of how to do it. He does not say that Solaris users *should* switch to Linux, nor does he recommend it. Matter-of-fact, he explicitly mentions BSD, and calls it "another compelling choice".

Please do not put words in people's mouth. If you know a little bit about large commercial users of BSD, you will understand why the wrong statement you made might be very harmful. Please go and edit your post and remove those statements; I will ask the moderators to remove where they were quoted.