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Comment by rednaught | Hacker News Reader

I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. If Joyent wanted to stick with a UNIX then why not FreeBSD and help implement KVM there? Wasn't XEN already available for Dom0? I just don't see much mindshare in Illumos/SmartOS for keeping up with current server hardware drivers. I really would have liked to see one of the existing BSDs benefit from the time they've put into this project.

Obviously Linux already has KVM, and there are new implmentations of DTrace and ZFS. Btrfs is not too many more kernel releases away from being considered stable(fsck being a glaring problem) and if you want container-based virtualization you've got LXC(some prefer OpenVZ).

With that said, who is their target audience?

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The Linux implementations of ZFS are dog slow, and for the last few weeks I've been evaluating btrfs as a possibility for my home storage server, and I've ruled it out completely.

btrfs has been "Close to a stable release" for years now, but if you follow their mailing list there are still people reporting total loss of large filesystems once or twice a week (This week I saw filesystem corruption from an unexpected power outtage, and last week there was a data loss/corruption bug caused by a pool of drives with different sector sizes), I desperately want btrfs to be mature but it's more than a few releases away from being stable.

You're suggesting Joyent should have finished porting DTrace, ZFS, and Zones to FreeBSD, and then port KVM to FreeBSD, instead of just porting KVM to Illumos?

FreeBSD has already had ZFS and DTrace for years. They have Jails which would have benefited from Solaris' stronger Zones/Containers.

There are already a lot of BSD users. Where are the Illumos users? Are you suggesting that all BSD users go to SmartOS? I used HP-UX and AIX for many years...the one off UNIX systems just end up recreating each other due to fragmentation. They are not the way forward. The smaller mind share/usage of OpenSolaris/Illumos isn't helping. Wouldn't contribution to a BSD have strengthened the community?

Not at all. The beauty of KVM on SmartOS is that Joyent's customers can run BSD, or Linux, or Windows, or whatever they want without even knowing it's running on top of Illumos. That's why the user base isn't as much an issue. But the underlying foundation is critical. I'm actually really glad BSD is adopting DTrace and I'm sure it will be successful, but the BSD documentation says that it's experimental and not yet production ready (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dt...). Solaris DTrace has been in production since at least 2005.

Disclaimer: I work for Joyent, but I do not speak for them.

I agree the foundation is critical. So would you say that the extensive community use of KVM on SmartOS has decided it is production quality compared to use on Linux?

without even knowing it's running on top of Illumos

What's the advantage of running Linux->KVM->Illumos instead of Linux->KVM->Linux?

DTrace and ZFS are both great and lack competitive alternatives on Linux. For years, the horrid state of Solaris' userland made it hard to justify order-of-magnitude support increases but this lets you use the best parts without having to suffer through things like a system-destroying package updater[1] simply to get a reliable filesystem.

1. At a previous employer, we bought Sun compute nodes. Nice hardware, arrived with Solaris 10 preinstalled. Each time we got a new shipment I'd get them racked and see if the updater wouldn't render the system unbootable after the first run. Second reboot was always to the Debian installer.

Well, pretty much the same here. We ran linux on xfires until recently because we loved the hardware, but wouldn't touch solaris with a 10ft pole.

I'm skeptical DTrace and ZFS can justify the risk to invest in a niche platform. Personally I'm holding out for the linux alternatives (btrfs, ceph) to mature.

There's been a FreeBSD KVM port for years too, albeit more a proof of concept than anything: http://retis.sssup.it/~fabio/freebsd/lkvm/

They have a lot of investment around Solaris (let's not argue about Solaris, OpenSolaris, Illumos) since a few years ago. Brought a lot of ex-SUN engineers, hired open source activist around OpenSolaris, probably built their infrastructure around it as well.

Thanks. But didn't they also have a lot of FreeBSD such as during the TextDrive days?

Probably customer + talent acquisition as opposed to technology/infrastructure.

last I looked, xen was culled from openindiana (then the only functional Illumos based distro) - this was back in the days when we thought xen was dying, back before it was pushed upstream in Linux.

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