Share your illumOS experience for FreeBSD users

sidetone

sidetone

Share your illumOS experience for FreeBSD users. This includes illumOS based distributions which would otherwise be derivatives. illumOS was the successor project of OpenSolaris. Solaris evolved from SunOS, which was a BSD based operating system. Solaris changed its system initialization which made it no longer a BSD, yet it's a derivative, and perhaps in the extended BSD family, like a BSD cousin due to its BSD origins. SunOS was renamed to Solaris 1.x, and Solaris itself started as named as version 2.0.

OpenZFS, CTF (Compact C Type Format) and Dtrace on FreeBSD come from illumOS/Solaris. IPFilter is used on illumOS distributions as well.

Keep in mind, that not everything in illumOS is open source, while it's allowed for use in illumOS. They haven't been able to replace those parts. Also, illumOS is behind BSD's on open source technology. They could simply borrow from BSD's.

I'm unsure if I used SunOS in the past. There was an operating system I once downloaded and used from Sun MicroSystems website in the early 2000's. I'm not sure if this was Suzie Linux or SunOS. It was stable though. If it was Suzie Linux, they offered it through their website, from a link from Solaris website.

You could share Solaris/OpenSolaris/SunOS experiences too. However, illumOS is now the current bearer of its family of open source operating systems. OpenIndianna and OmniOS are two examples of illumOS distributions. Maybe there's something to learn from users sharing their experiences of illumOS.

Also: Thread freebsd-vs-illumos.92010.
 
sidetone said:
I'm unsure if I used SunOS in the past.
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But I.

I used both, SunOS and Solaris, and the differences are big, so as between *BSD and Linux.

But at that time I was more a user of a computer administered by someone else.
The OS was not at the center, but it came always more to the center.
Today I waste too much time with the OS ...
 
I've use both solaris and sunos on sun hardware. good stuff. Solaris had a lot of advances in the kernel (fully preemptible, allowing for realtime stuff, VM stuff) that I think other OS have used as inspiration.
But as for running IllumOS and distros based on it, it worked fine for me on the same HW I run FreeBSD on. I think the biggest differences are related to "sysadmin tasks".
 
sidetone said:
Solaris evolved from SunOS, which was a BSD based operating system. Solaris changed its system initialization which made it no longer a BSD, yet it's a derivative, and perhaps in the extended BSD family, like a BSD cousin due to its BSD origins. SunOS was renamed to Solaris 1.x, and Solaris itself started as named as version 2.0.
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SunOS & Solaris version history is a bit more complicated. First Solaris (2.0) which appeared in June '92, was supposed to be SunOS 5, but my guess is that someone insisted that first version based on SVR4 should have a different name.

SunOS continued until November '94 with SunOS 4.1.4 which was last SunOS release, but SunOS 4.1.1 (Nov '90) and all later versions up to the 4.1.4 were retroactively rebranded as Solaris 1.0, just to confuse us who care about Unix history in the future (is that now? I bet that this is what Lynch had in mind with his famous 'Twin Peaks: The Return' question "Is it future or is it past?" 🤪) In reality, they choose first release that shipped with OpenWindows to call it Solaris 1.

SunOS was the first Unix I had contact with, somewhere in summer || autumn '92; Can't remember exact version, but I think that it was SunOS 4.1.2 (Dec '91), because that was the first version that supported multiprocessor SPARCserver systems.

I had no hands-on experience with later Solaris nor with illumos.
 
So, SMB works well with illumOS, when FreeBSD hasn't at times? https://illumos.org/books/smb-admin/smbservertasks.html#migratingfromsamba says that Samba and SMB can't be run on the same illumOS computer. illumOS uses its own SMB implementation which is under CDDL1.0 (https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src, https://www.illumos.org/license/). Their book for SMB is at https://illumos.org/books/. For note, Samba is an SMB implementation as well, and it's under GPL.

I wonder why FreeBSD doesn't use illumOS implementation? Theirs is integrated in their kernel, and it's made for ZFS, as most illumOS derivatives use that. Needs to also work with native UFS2.
 
This thread has made me wonder how much the concepts of Solaris/IllumOS, Mach and other OSes have migrated into the BSDs? Not line for line, but the concepts. Example: jemalloc in FreeBSD that was a pretty drastic/comprehensive rewrite of kernel memory management. Looking at design, one can see family resemblence. Not siblings, but perhaps second cousins.
Kernel preemptible: heck the concept is in Linux even if they won't admit it.

So beyond have you run IllumOS/IllumOS distributions on your hardware, I think a different question is how much has *BSD benefited from IllumOS.
 
vmisev said:
my guess is that someone insisted that first version based on SVR4 should have a different name.
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I didn't realize that, this makes illumOS more Unix like due to SysV.

SunOS was a BSD. Then, Solaris was a direct descendent of SunOS, which has a Unix' initialization system.
 
My recollection, which could be faulty is that "SunOS was very much BSD, including the init system" "Solaris was initially call SunOS 5 and brought in a SysV init system". There were obviously other changes, but I think that was the biggest difference between SunOS and Solaris at least in the beginning.

I'm not sure that a SysV init is "more Unix" than older BSD init system.
But honestly, my opinion, an init system is not really a discriminator; all init systems goal is to "get to a running system". I've been talking about everything below an init system.
 
sidetone said:
I didn't realize that, this makes illumOS more Unix like due to SysV.

SunOS was a BSD. Then, Solaris was a direct descendent of SunOS, which has a Unix' initialization system.
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AFAIK traditional (BSD based) SunOS had much simpler init system, with only 3 runlevels and no inittab.

SVR4 (System V Release 4) based Solaris changed init to SysV-style (please see Solaris 1.x to 2.x Transition Guide).

In Solaris 10, Sun introduced SMF (Service Management Facility), that went into OpenSolaris and that's what illumos still uses.

BTW, illumos is always written in lowercase.
 
cracauer@ said:
The SVR4 change was a disaster for several of these commercial Unixens. Took years to make things functional again.
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I started my unix career with AT&T-NCR which was basically the prototype SVR4. I wasn't impressed to say the least (it was 1997, before that that for me there was only Linux Slackware and whatever unix machine we had at uni).

In late 1999 I moved to a Solaris based company and it was love at first sight. My first Solaris machine ran 2.5.1, the latest 11.4 covering a 20 year period. I still miss some SPARC hardware, the best I've worked with by a country mile.
 
fmc000 said:
I started my unix career with AT&T-NCR which was basically the prototype SVR4. I wasn't impressed to say the least (it was 1997, before that that for me there was only Linux Slackware and whatever unix machine we had at uni).

In late 1999 I moved to a Solaris based company and it was love at first sight. My first Solaris machine ran 2.5.1, the latest 11.4 covering a 20 year period. I still miss some SPARC hardware, the best I've worked with by a country mile.
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Wasn't this SVR4 based Unix/NS released back in '91? I'm just curious, why they didn't go with SVR4.2 / UnixWare (first released in '92) later, and what was their upgrade path?

Honest question from armchair Unix archaeologist 😎
 
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