SmartOS

https://docs.smartos.org/

50•ofrzeta•1h ago

Comments

QuantumNomad_•44m ago

I remember several years ago, SmartOS was being mentioned many times on HN.

Joyent, the company behind SmartOS, was since acquired, and I don’t usually see anyone talking about SmartOS nowadays.

Is anyone on HN using SmartOS these days?

EvanAnderson•35m ago

I have a personal box I keep updated running some utility zones and a couple VMs. I enjoy the tooling very much but it's so niche that I'm wary of using it for Customer engagements.

I never used Solaris in my real life but I can understand the appeal for people who did.

rjzzleep•35m ago

It was acquired by Samsung, which is notoriously bad at open source. But the reason why it quietly faded into the background wasn't that. It was that Joyent's ex Sun people had an annoying elitism that made them not care about working with the community.

boricj•28m ago

It was acquired again in 2022 by MNX [1].

[1] https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-f...

ofrzeta•16m ago

Thanks, I missed that one.

linksnapzz•23m ago

(citation needed)

ofrzeta•10m ago

Many/Some of them are now working at https://oxide.computer

https://oxide.computer/blog/engineering-culture

mirashii•33m ago

Certainly Oxide computer company has some use of illumos still, which is strongly related to SmartOS

nZac•36m ago

> SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS.

Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox? I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead of manually setting PVE on each. Ansible or salt is an option but that tends to degrade over time.

xenophonf•17m ago

You can boot ProxMox VMs via PXE:

https://blog.kail.io/pxe-booting-on-proxmox.html

But why bother? A read-only disk image would be simpler.

jeffbee•9m ago

It depends on what "this" you meant, but in general the ways of netbooting an OS are many and varied. You'd have to declare what kind of root device you ultimately want, such as root on iSCSI.

Personally, I feel that "smartOS does not support booting from a local block device like a normal, sane operating system" might be a drawback and is a peculiar thing to brag about.

cyberpunk•5m ago

There was a brilliant incident back in the joyent days where they accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter and ended up dossing their dhcp server ;)

keeganpoppen•31m ago

wait this seems totally awesome? i hadnt remembered until reading the comments now that this was a joyent thing, and that somehow it has largely disappeared despite seeming like an awesome way to do all sorts of things.

ofrzeta•12m ago

I was intrigued by the idea that in the Manta object store you could schedule computations on the storage nodes. However I am not sure how much improvement that brings in practice. Any practical experience with this?

https://apidocs.tritondatacenter.com/manta/index.html

cyberpunk•6m ago

I did use it on a project, it was meh, alright? In the end the main cost of our processing wasn’t storage latency but code, and this quite arcane scheduler was a barrier too much for most of our team.

I believe it was removed shortly after i left the project..

sneak•10m ago

So, Solaris > OpenSolaris > Illumos > SmartOS? Do I have that right?

nwilkens•8m ago

SmartOS is the core operating system for Triton datacenter -- https://www.tritondatacenter.com; Triton is the orchestration of SmartOS compute nodes.

Code + issues are active under https://github.com/TritonDataCenter (smartos-live, illumos-joyent, triton, etc.), and docs are at https://docs.smartos.org/.

SmartOS is released every two weeks, and Triton is released every 8 weeks -- see https://www.tritondatacenter.com/downloads

And Triton object storage will have S3 support in the next release!

nwilkens•53s ago

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