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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious: what kind of workload would companies want to run on a custom Unix that isn't Linux/Mac/BSD?

I'm rooting for more mature OS diversity, I just have no idea who the end users would be and what their needs would look like.

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The compute you'd provision on the Oxide rack are virtual machines, they've ported bhyve from FreeBSD and added live migration. I'm pretty sure you could even boot Windows Server on it if you were being held hostage.

As for why they used Illumos, many of the people came from Sun, Joyent, etc. so there's an obvious bias. However they do have a compelling reason that this is not an IBM compatible x86 personal computer, there's no BIOS, no UEFI, no traditional BMC, as far as I can tell they've removed as much proprietary firmware and binary blobs as they could possibly remove, while still using modern x86.

Each sled has a service processor and a hardware root of trust that directly boots the CPU, loads the AMD training blob, and boots the OS. It would be difficult to upstream the changes required to do that into a Linux or BSD for a computer only you currently have. So you'd have to maintain your own downstream fork, there is no one else responsible for the robustness of the OS, so it might as well be OS that you have had to support and develop for years.

This is not a user-facing detail of the product. Customers run VMs on the rack, they do not build their applications for illumos. They're gonna run whatever operating system in those VMs that they need to accomplish their goals.

That being said - there's something to be said for enterprise support. Are there plans to support importing/converting/running third party OVAs? Many vendors will support something running in KVM, I can't recall the last time I saw b-hyve as a supported hypervisor.

I'd imagine as broadcom slowly destroys vmware's market share vendors will look to alternatives, but I doubt b-hyve is even a blip on their radar at this point.

I don't know the status of supporting OVA as a file format, but we absolutely support creating and uploading your own images. Here are the current docs on how to do so: https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/creating-and-sharing-imag...

OVAs are basically ZIP files with some XML. If you want, you can convert an OVA to RAW image or VMDK or whatever the latest fancy format is, and bhyve can boot that for you. Better to use Raw.

bhyve, unlike other "famous" hypervisors is pretty stable, has good enough virtualized drivers (altho I'm sure Oxide has made it better) and can boot a VM with 1.5 TB of RAM and 240 vCPU[1]. Something I was not able to do with anything other than bhyve.

I know this is HackerNews, so I have to say it, marketing != engineering. Just because the FreeBSD project's marketing suck, doesn't mean engineering is bad. usually it better than the mainstream ones.

1: https://antranigv.am/posts/2023/10/bhyve-cpu-allocation-256/

There's two parts to the question. There's the file itself and the underlying hardware. The wiki is pretty light on details, does it actually support emulating the same hardware as vmware? I'd assume no to the vmxnet devices but Intel E1000? Adaptec SCSI adapters? Similar USB and VGA?

A lot of the vendor-provided OVAs cut out a bunch of hardware support with the assumption that they only need to support vmware emulated hardware.

ZFS is native on illumos, and the containerization equivalent, etc, is pretty great.

There's a good argument that your servers in the cloud don't need to be on the same OS, as long as you can hire enough talent to work on them.

You'd have no idea that it isn't Linux. You don't run code on this OS, you run code on VMs that it provides.

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