# Do you think Illumos is dead now?



## badbrain (Aug 28, 2019)

I tested all of them on VirtualBox, as I didn't want to accidentally destroy my data. I tried the most active developed distros aside from SmartOS, OpenIndiana and OmniOSCE. I'm somewhat disappointed about their performance. They're too slow. OpenIndiana boot up very slow. People suggested there's something to do with kpti, I didn't test with kpti disabled, though. The slowest of all of them is the installation process. It took more than 20 mins on VirtualBox to complete OpenIndiana installation on VirtualBox, I could make it feel a bit faster if I enabled Use host IO cache on VirtualBox, overally, it's still very slow. I didn't want to wrongly blame something so I find a HDD and test OpenIndiana installation on real hardware on it. It's even slower than on VirtualBox, after 30 mins stuck at 99% I decided to cancel the installation. My controller is SATA. The controller of VirtualBox also SATA, I observed it's a bit faster if I use IDE controller. Both IDE and SATA controller can't be unconfigure by cfgadm, only with SCSI controller. OmniOSCE installation also slow when you consider the size of the installed system. I found no way to force 4k sector (ashift 12), the sd.conf hack doesn't work, set minium ashift to 4096 also doesn't work. The OmniOSCE option to force 4k sector also doesn't work, I guessed it use the same hack to set minium ashift. Either way, after tested many time, I stuck with ashift 9.

I think if someone want to use ZFS now, FreeBSD or Linux is the way to go. It's very sad to see the OS where ZFS was invented no longer fit as a ZFS host system anymore. I found the state of Illumos now is frozen in time, they only try to build it with new GCC to keep it alive but don't have the ability to move it ahead.

Disclaimer: I've no relationship with Solaris, though. I've never used it in the past and will not consider using it in the future, given it state now. The system is not difficult to use, though. I could update, search and install packages with pkg after reading OpenIndiana's Wiki and install Joyent's pkgsrc binary packages with pkgin. I don't know how to do other administrative jobs, though. The documentation is severely lacked comparing to FreeBSD, sometime I've to fall back to Oracle's Solaris 10 documents, Oracle's also harder to read and understand for a noob like me, FreeBSD handbook is much easier. Don't get me wrong, I found Linux to be the most user friendly. I would definitely prefer free -m over vmstat.


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## yuripv (Aug 28, 2019)

illumos is surely lacking the manpower, needing a lot of TLC, suffering from dividing (already small) community effort into distros (IMO!), yes, but  is NOT dead at least while there's Joyent (backed by Samsung) actively developing a fork used in their commercial products and sharing the code back to illumos-gate.

That all goes from me being (semi-) active developer (and whiner) since the illumos fork


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## Cthulhux (Aug 28, 2019)

badbrain said:


> They're too slow.



For what?



badbrain said:


> OpenIndiana boot up very slow.



illumos is a system for servers. Nobody cares about boot times on servers. You are not supposed to reboot them every day.



badbrain said:


> The OmniOSCE option to force 4k sector also doesn't work



Have you reported this as a bug? If not, why not?



badbrain said:


> I think if someone want to use ZFS now, FreeBSD or Linux is the way to go.



ZFS on Linux is a license violation.



badbrain said:


> It's very sad to see the OS where ZFS was invented no longer fit as a ZFS host system anymore.



The OS where ZFS was invented was Solaris. You are talking about illumos here.



badbrain said:


> I found the state of Illumos now is frozen in time



Open your eyes and see.



badbrain said:


> I've no relationship with Solaris, though. I've never used it in the past and will not consider using it in the future, given it state now.



You seem to not know anything about the state of Solaris.



badbrain said:


> I found Linux to be the most user friendly.



Eww.


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## xtremae (Aug 28, 2019)

Cthulhux said:


> ZFS on Linux is a license violation.


It is not.


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## Cthulhux (Aug 28, 2019)

It is if it is bundled.


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## xtremae (Aug 28, 2019)

Cthulhux said:


> It is if it is bundled.


The linux kernel does not bundle ZFS, Ubuntu does. This makes the Ubuntu distribution a potential violator, not Linux.


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## Remington (Aug 28, 2019)

xtremae said:


> The linux kernel does not bundle ZFS, Ubuntu does. This makes the Ubuntu distribution a potential violator, not Linux.



It's a matter of time when Oracle will sue Ubuntu on ZFS license violations.  Ubuntu's legal team thinks they're in the clear but that's their opinion.  Oracle got money and army of lawyers to drag this case out for years if they decide to go after Ubuntu.


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## yuripv (Aug 28, 2019)

What exactly does "ubuntu bundles zfs" mean here?


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## kpedersen (Aug 28, 2019)

badbrain said:


> I'm somewhat disappointed about their performance. They're too slow. OpenIndiana boot up very slow.



If you install them on a UFS filesystem (i.e without ZFS), they are pretty nippy; Especially if you don't run the full Gnome-based desktop. Solaris 10 + CDE is still one of the best.

If you like retro UNIX, then Solaris 9 in QEMU with vnc / x11 forwarding (for large screen sizes) is really nice too.


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## Remington (Aug 28, 2019)

yuripv said:


> What exactly does "ubuntu bundles zfs" mean here?



Ubuntu included the ZFS codes in their Linux kernel which is a violation of the license agreement.  It's permissible if ZFS is loaded as module separately from the kernel.


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## yuripv (Aug 28, 2019)

Remington said:


> Ubuntu included the ZFS codes in their Linux kernel which is a violation of the license agreement.  It's permissible if ZFS is loaded as module separately from the kernel.


Got it, sounds bad.

Anyway, this is FreeBSD forums, and this particular (off)topic is about illumos, why are we talking (yet again) about Linux?


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## Cthulhux (Aug 28, 2019)

yuripv said:


> why are we talking (yet again) about Linux?



Software veganism is strong.


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## xtremae (Aug 28, 2019)

Remington said:


> Ubuntu included the ZFS codes in their Linux kernel which is a violation of the license agreement.  It's permissible if ZFS is loaded as module separately from the kernel.


That is incorrect. Ubuntu ships ZFS as a kernel module however, distribution of ZFS binaries (including kernel modules) constitutes a violation of both licenses.


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## Remington (Aug 28, 2019)

xtremae said:


> That is incorrect. Distribution of ZFS binaries (including kernel modules) constitutes a violation of both licenses.



Distros cannot include the ZFS module but it can be downloaded from third-party repository.


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## Remington (Aug 28, 2019)

yuripv said:


> Anyway, this is FreeBSD forums, and this particular (off)topic is about illumos, why are we talking (yet again) about Linux?



Agreed.  I used to work with Solaris for many years until Sun was bought out by Oracle.  Illumos is still alive but its lacking motivated developers just like any other forked OS.


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## Cthulhux (Aug 28, 2019)

Remington said:


> just like any other forked OS



Except FreeBSD which is a fork of 386BSD and OpenBSD which is a fork of NetBSD which is a fork of 386BSD.


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## Remington (Aug 29, 2019)

Cthulhux said:


> Except FreeBSD which is a fork of 386BSD and OpenBSD which is a fork of NetBSD which is a fork of 386BSD.



It all comes down to flavors and needs. FreeBSD has been around for very long time while Illumos is still at its infancy.  As long as Joyent or Samsung continues to support and contribute to Illumos project then it'll survive otherwise it'll fizzle out like many other dead OS.  Sun really did kill Solaris and it was basically dead when Oracle picked it up but most importantly Solaris could have survived if Oracle didn't kill OpenSolaris.  Kinda sad since Solaris was superior OS but badly managed by Sun and Oracle.  Now there are too many Illumos distros and they don't work together to make OpenIndiana better OS.  It would have been different if Sun offered Solaris as open source project when Linux was being developed.

I liked Solaris 10 better than 11 since it was clean and stable.  Solaris 12 will never come so it's perfectly clear that Oracle killed it completely.  Oracle is more focused on their Linux OS so it makes no sense to support two different OS and Linux have many of Solaris characteristics and features as well.


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## Cthulhux (Aug 29, 2019)

Remington said:


> FreeBSD has been around for very long time while Illumos is still at its infancy.



Technically, illumos started in the early 80s, while FreeBSD started in the late 80s.


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## ralphbsz (Aug 29, 2019)

Cthulhux said:


> Technically, illumos started in the early 80s, while FreeBSD started in the late 80s.


Please explain that statement.

Illumos is a fork of (Open-) Solaris. Solaris has only existed since the early 90s, and was derived from SysV. Before that the OS that Sun distributed (on their 68k- and SPARC-based machines) was SunOS, which was derived from BSD.

In the 80s, there was only BSD, which had version numbers like 4.2 through 4.4. The source code that later became Free-, Net- and OpenBSD all comes from Bill Jolitz' 386BSD, which was created in the early 90s, and was in itself a version of the Net/1 and Net/2 versions of BSD, ported to the 386 processor. So it is true that there is a heritage from the late 80s in today's FreeBSD, but the same heritage is in all other versions of *BSD that exist today.


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## Cthulhux (Aug 29, 2019)

The first SunOS version appeared in 1982. Do not assume that Solaris was a complete rewrite. The first modern BSDs (= the code base of FreeBSD) appeared with Net/1 which was later. And I doubt that anything in FreeBSD has any 80s code left.


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## SirDice (Aug 29, 2019)

Cthulhux said:


> And I doubt that anything in FreeBSD has any 80s code left.


You'd be surprised how much of the "old" code is still active. 









						The 25-Year-Old BSD Bug - Slashdot
					

sproketboy writes with news that a developer named Marc Balmer has recently fixed a bug in a bit of BSD code which is roughly 25 years old.  In addition to the OSnews summary, you can read Balmer's comments and a technical description of the bug. "This code will not work as expected when seeking...



					it.slashdot.org


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## vermaden (Aug 29, 2019)

Illumos is not dead (yet) but after Oracle's aquisition of Sun and killing of OpenSolaris the path of Illumos is very hard and descending. Delphix also moves from Illumos to Linux, SmartOS cloud is no more. I haven't heard any good news from Illumos world since quite a long time.
While FreeBSD moved from Forth language based loader to new LUA based one Illumos just ported the old FreeBSD Forth loader to Illumos


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## Cthulhux (Aug 29, 2019)

vermaden said:


> Illumos just ported the old FreeBSD Forth loader to Illumos



Which works well.


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