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?

> 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.

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.

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

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

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!

[edit: removed semicolon from link!]

I am a huge fan of SmartOS. Back in the 2010s (around 2012), I was advocating its use in production at a small startup I worked. The SunOS kernel, ZFS, zero install, immutable core, convenient way to manage containers and VMs together - all of this looked great on paper, especially containers.

In reality, I ended up running almost everything in VMs. The only thing worked well natively was nginx. MongoDB, Mysql, even our php backend (some libraries) had issues, unfortunately.

A year ago, I considered SmartOS again as a home lab driver, and no success again, Linux just has better support: drivers, pci passthrough, etc... and now with containers+vm through Proxmox or anything else. You can even run a k8s+kubevirt with zfs practically out of the box as a complete overkill though.

Genuine question: in 2026, what does SmartOS (or any other Illumos/Solaris OS) buy you over something like Linux or FreeBSD?