[TUHS] Illumos )

Jacob Ritorto jacob.ritorto at gmail.com
Thu Jan 1 08:19:15 AEST 2015


Wow, Larry, were you one of the guys in Sun who actually lobbied to abandon
Solaris 2 and resurrect SunOS 4.x when Solaris 2.3 flopped?

  Sorry for the late answer to your original question about why we should
care about Illumos, but here's my take and some personal observations /
conclusions to boot:


  With a huge sustained effort by many of the people who wrote and/or
maintained it, Solaris was finally mostly open-sourced just before Sun
died.  There was so much good technology in the OS that it would've been a
real shame to relegate it to the Oracle people who would (did) eventually
close it, effectively killing Solaris.

 Illumos is the OS/net piece, not a distro, and takes the reins from the
moment that Oracle re-closed Solaris as the base and repo-of-record for a
number of distributions, such as the ones mentioned above, OpenIndiana,
OpenSXCE, Tribblix and most importantly to me, SmartOS from Joyent.  I
don't (yet) work for Joyent, so don't take this as a sales spin or anything
-- it's just that the company I worked for last year underwent a rather
amazing and inspirational cultural as well as technology / performance
growth when we switched the stack from CentOS to SmartOS.  It was really
cool to see the eyes opening while working with some pretty brilliant
programmers who effectively 'grew up on linux' when they saw how
engineered, featureful and just generally "sorted out" SmartOS was.  They
started using dtrace to dig into performance problems, smf to manage
services, speed of containers / zones instead of full linux VMs everywhere,
real (not hypervisor-emulated) I/O using zfs straight to SSD arrays, etc.
They saw that, in fact, a well written and architected operating system
actually does matter quite a lot for their day to day work.

  And it's all seriously free and open source.  Like, Real Actual unix, not
a clone.  The way it was meant to be.  They actually really care, not just
about being "good enough", but about continuing to develop the operating
system in an artful, elegantly simple, efficient and practical way.

  This, to me, is the perfect contrast to the Linux culture that seems to
wantonly embrace the 'copy/paste coding' / 'bazaar' / 'good enough'
mentality and seems to do no innovation but just produce knockoff,
un-architected partial functional clones of what the unix people invented.
But they miss the interacting, distributed, tolerant and very polyclutural
computing environment concepts every time.  I think they're effectively
dragging the unix ecosystem into the shitter.  Not that this hasn't been
done before, but at least before it was ill-thought-out litigious zeal, not
junk code and minimum-viable-product quality problems.  This brings to mind
the one major, albeit non-technical, problem I recognize Linux (actually,
perhaps it was just GNU) as having truly solved - they made it really
stinking clear that your license has to be open.  OSI approved open
source.  And that accomplishment, of itself, makes it totally worth
tolerating its existence.

  Please accept my apologies if I've offended you with the opinionated
content there.  These are my honest observations after four decades of
doing this, but may seem like flame bait to many.  I don't write about this
stuff often and I figure: if anyone's going to be able to understand and
respond with constructive input to this train of thought, it's the unix
historians here.

  Anyway, a friend I admire quite a lot took the time to put some of this
Sun history and Illumos fork stuff into a talk at LISA a few years back and
I think he did a really nice job.  Have a look if you like:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

  Some other interesting reading from another brilliant guy I worked with a
little, who got so disheartened about the failure of tech -- partially
Linux monoculture, partially other sad moves -- just walked away from tech
to farming instead: http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/

  Then there's Kamp's recent article:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

Thanks for your time and interest; In earnest,
jake


On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 03:32:07PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 12:42 PM, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Thank you for stressing the importance of Solaris as a Unix descendant
> for
> > > which source code is available.
> > >
> > ???Amen???.   BTW:
> > I really don't consider Solaris a pure System V either.
>
> Nope, not by a long stretch.  System V had an awful VM / file system layer,
> Solaris took the one from SunOS 4 and wedged it in there.
>
> > Larry and his siblings hacked on it pretty heavily.
>
> Not me, man.  I hated Solaris with a passion.  I liked SunOS 4.x, I hacked
> the heck out of that.
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