OpenIndiana is more of a downstream distro than a fork of illumos, much like how Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro. Whereas illumos itself is a fork of OpenSolaris.
If we are going to talk about 35 years of illumos linkage, we as well go all the way. Using you notation: Solaris <—- SVR4 [0] <—- AT&T System III [1] <—- Bell Labs Version 7 Unix [2] <—- the birth of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969 [3].
Besides the direct lineage, it’s interesting to see cross pollination between different operating systems over the years. Like BSD’s socket interface spreading everywhere (including Windows), ZFS from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD & Linux, then bhyve from FreeBSD to illumos.
I think a lot of decisions that eventually lead to the Oracle buyout were all pretty bad and Oracle itself being where good ideas go to die. As bad as MS is at extracting value out of its windows users, Oracle seems to fleece it's enterprise customers far, far worse. I don't think I would ever choose Oracle or IBM for anything.
It would be interesting to see a little more diversity in common operating systems in the wild though. Linux has pretty much taken over the server space, and iOS/Android have split the more common usage outside that, with what's left of desktop still mostly Windows.
I still think there's opportunity for something like Flutter as a cross-platform library that actually works with multiple backing languages.
At Oxide, we have our own illumos (in my understanding, you're supposed to lowercase the i) distribution, discussed on HN a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178521
It still is, but at this point I'm not sure why anyone would pick it over Linux for something new. All the killer Solaris features (ZFS, dtrace, zones, SMF) have good enough Linux equivalents (OpenZFS, eBPF, containers, systemd) and I'm not aware of any usecases where illumos outperforms Linux anymore.
OpenIndiana also has the problem that every commercial illumos user is using it for some niche purpose (networking infrastructure, storage appliance, that sort of thing) so it's basically up to a few unpaid volunteers working in their free time to adapt it for general desktop use. I'm not sure what the state of stuff like audio support or accelerated graphics looks like if you're on modern hardware.
I'm really disappointed that Solaris picked a "let's screw Linux" license, relegating some otherwise interesting technologies to only run on Solaris, on permissive OSes like BSD, and on systems that don't care about license compliance.
OI uses IPS packaging, which is the same packaging used by Solaris 11 (some find it over engineered). Tribblix, on the other hand, is also an illumos-based distro but is based on Solaris 10 (and prior’s) SVR4 packaging which is managed via a utility called “zap”.
Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.
> There are a small handful of illumos components for which source code is not available. Over time, we have replaced most of the closed source components from the Sun era with new open source versions. This work is ongoing
I've been using OpenIndiana for a file server in my homelab since it came out and it's been quietly doing its job ever since without much issues. Coming from Linux it's not easy to find the equivalent commands of what I do on my other servers but it's also what I like about this project, it's another flavor of Unix to learn.
I don't know about Illumos but setting up a Solaris 10 machine to provide block devices through multi path iSCSI was a breeze with all the tooling it had. No config files needed it was all command line.
It was for a university lab and it was the only ever contact I had with Solaris 10 and later versions or forks. I was mildly interested once since it had KVM but support was Intel only so that kept me away.
I remember some hypervisor and storage products based on Illumos like Nexenta and Soylent OS. I'm guessing those projects faded into obscurity.
Which is a shame. A lot of people was optimistic about OpenSolaris when it came out but Oracle gutted it.
Everything is converging on Linux these days, and even the majority of the people who used to promote Solaris, DTrace and ZFS, have seemingly moved on, mostly to Linux, somewhat to FreeBSD, too, per Brendan Gregg:
In the BSD land, things aren't that much better, either.
Netgate, the makers of pfSense, are now using Ubuntu for Netgate TNSR product.
iXsystems, the descendants of BSDi, have moved FreeNAS / TrueNAS from FreeBSD to Linux. They're basically d/b/a TrueNAS now, and it's all Linux now.
You used to need Solaris or illimos or FreeBSD for production-ready ZFS support, but now OpenZFS is provided exclusively for Linux and FreeBSD; note that Linux already comes first in the title; it would seem like it's only a matter of time before FreeBSD support may follow Solaris and illumos.
Joyent, the commercial shepherds of OpenSolaris descendants like SmartOS, were acquired by Samsung, but the entire Solaris part of the equation, including Triton DataCenter orchestration, were subsequently offloaded to mnx.io, a tiny cloud hosting provider based out of a small town in Michigan. (Frankly, without Triton, I don't even understand what remains of Joyent at Samsung? Just the physical servers with the third-party software? It's basically just a name for Samsung's data centre ops and their presumably-Linux-based Private Cloud?)
Apple used to use NetBSD for AirPort WiFi routers, but the whole router line has been discontinued. (I thought Apple actually already dropped NetBSD but couldn't find a source right now.)
Last not least, DJB used to run OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, but then switched to Ubuntu after possibly being annoyed that too many steps were required to make FreeBSD work as a desktop: http://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html (my fav is that in FreeBSD the audio doesn't work unless you recompile the kernel). I think he initially may have abandoned OpenBSD because it was crashing too often for undetermined causes: http://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html.
FreeBSD is still used by Netflix OpenConnect Appliance, which is a huge win, but feels like too many eggs in a single basket:
Mature industries tend to converge to relatively few standardized solutions. So this was all predictable already back in early 00s when Linux has clearly won on adoption.
Is there really a valid use case these days if you are not a hobbyist/fanboy or have existing Solaris workload compared to FreeBSD (or Linux if licensing isn't an issue)? ZFS seems quite well-supported on those.
AFAIK the interesting thing about these Illumos Forks is ZFS support together with a kernel based SMB server ability using it as file server.
After enabling a share, connect as root and set NTFS alike ACL via Windows.
The SMB server is using Windows SID (not uid/gid) as ACL and Windows-ish SMB groups on Illumos (not Unix groups)
Anyone run this on top of KVM? I tried a while back but I don't know KVM or Qemu well and all the examples were ancient and didn't work for me. I'd love to play around with Solaris again (last I used it was Solaris 8 on an Ultra-1) but I don't have any decent hardware I'm willing to dedicate to the task.
25 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 50.9 ms ] threadOpenIndiana[3] <-- Illumos[2] <-- OpenSolaris[1] <-- Solaris[0]
Note: I guessed here at <-- meaning fork of... any other options I should have used instead?
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris
Besides the direct lineage, it’s interesting to see cross pollination between different operating systems over the years. Like BSD’s socket interface spreading everywhere (including Windows), ZFS from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD & Linux, then bhyve from FreeBSD to illumos.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V#SVR4
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_III
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_7_Unix
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
Not sure if characterizing this as a fork is right. OpenSolaris (aka project Indiana) was the development version for Solaris 11.
Really too bad Solaris didn’t stick around and was so horribly mismanaged by Sun.
Solaris and Vax/VMS is where I started my career decades ago, and still brings back memories.
It would be interesting to see a little more diversity in common operating systems in the wild though. Linux has pretty much taken over the server space, and iOS/Android have split the more common usage outside that, with what's left of desktop still mostly Windows.
I still think there's opportunity for something like Flutter as a cross-platform library that actually works with multiple backing languages.
At Oxide, we have our own illumos (in my understanding, you're supposed to lowercase the i) distribution, discussed on HN a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178521
OpenIndiana also has the problem that every commercial illumos user is using it for some niche purpose (networking infrastructure, storage appliance, that sort of thing) so it's basically up to a few unpaid volunteers working in their free time to adapt it for general desktop use. I'm not sure what the state of stuff like audio support or accelerated graphics looks like if you're on modern hardware.
Sadly it is still years away on ARM and x86, Linux and BSD systems.
Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.
To be short, it is opensource implementation of SUN Solaris OS. I don't know if it is already developed much.
I did a sort of review 3Y ago. It may throw some light:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/07/new_version_of_openin...
https://docs.openindiana.org/release-notes/2016.10-release-n...
> There are a small handful of illumos components for which source code is not available. Over time, we have replaced most of the closed source components from the Sun era with new open source versions. This work is ongoing
https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close...
> From this, however, project founder Garrett D'Amore took the last drop of the gate and announced illumos in mid-2010.
https://illumos.org/docs/about/history/
It was for a university lab and it was the only ever contact I had with Solaris 10 and later versions or forks. I was mildly interested once since it had KVM but support was Intel only so that kept me away.
I remember some hypervisor and storage products based on Illumos like Nexenta and Soylent OS. I'm guessing those projects faded into obscurity.
Which is a shame. A lot of people was optimistic about OpenSolaris when it came out but Oracle gutted it.
Solaris to Linux Migration 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15177118 - Sept 2017 (129 comments)
In the BSD land, things aren't that much better, either.
Netgate, the makers of pfSense, are now using Ubuntu for Netgate TNSR product.
iXsystems, the descendants of BSDi, have moved FreeNAS / TrueNAS from FreeBSD to Linux. They're basically d/b/a TrueNAS now, and it's all Linux now.
You used to need Solaris or illimos or FreeBSD for production-ready ZFS support, but now OpenZFS is provided exclusively for Linux and FreeBSD; note that Linux already comes first in the title; it would seem like it's only a matter of time before FreeBSD support may follow Solaris and illumos.
Joyent, the commercial shepherds of OpenSolaris descendants like SmartOS, were acquired by Samsung, but the entire Solaris part of the equation, including Triton DataCenter orchestration, were subsequently offloaded to mnx.io, a tiny cloud hosting provider based out of a small town in Michigan. (Frankly, without Triton, I don't even understand what remains of Joyent at Samsung? Just the physical servers with the third-party software? It's basically just a name for Samsung's data centre ops and their presumably-Linux-based Private Cloud?)
Apple used to use NetBSD for AirPort WiFi routers, but the whole router line has been discontinued. (I thought Apple actually already dropped NetBSD but couldn't find a source right now.)
Last not least, DJB used to run OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, but then switched to Ubuntu after possibly being annoyed that too many steps were required to make FreeBSD work as a desktop: http://cr.yp.to/unix/feedme.html (my fav is that in FreeBSD the audio doesn't work unless you recompile the kernel). I think he initially may have abandoned OpenBSD because it was crashing too often for undetermined causes: http://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html.
FreeBSD is still used by Netflix OpenConnect Appliance, which is a huge win, but feels like too many eggs in a single basket:
Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584738 - Sept 2021 (293 comments)
But that's about it. Linux has won.
After enabling a share, connect as root and set NTFS alike ACL via Windows. The SMB server is using Windows SID (not uid/gid) as ACL and Windows-ish SMB groups on Illumos (not Unix groups)
See https://illumos.org/man/8/smbadm