Illumos at 6 by Peter Tribble

Peter Tribble provides an overview of the illumos project six years after forking from OpenSolaris, detailing its ecosystem and technologies.

An overview of illumos six years later. Just prior to Oracle closing OpenSolaris, the illumos project forked from it, and for six years has carried on the work started with OpenSolaris. In August 2010, Garrett D’Amore and others forked OpenSolaris with the intention of reducing and eliminating its closed-source components. Unknown to them, Oracle was planning to shut off publication of the OS/Net consolidation, which included the OpenSolaris kernel & system-critical user-space. This coincidence propelled the fork, illumos, into the vehicle in which OpenSolaris could continue, albeit under a different name. illumos is now over six years old, and its distributions continue to fulfill the promise of OpenSolaris. illumos is the reference implementation of OpenZFS and DTrace. SmartOS has continued pioneering work in zones, commonly known outside Solarish circles as containers. Both OpenIndiana and OmniOS use the Image Packaging System (IPS) in traditional deployments. OpenIndiana and XStreamOS continue work on an illumos Desktop. DilOS (Debian) and Tribblix (SVr4) use alternative packaging with illumos. Appliance distributions like NexentaStor and Delphix use and innovate with OpenZFS to great effect. About FLOSS Spring Conference: The Spring Conference is the UK’s longest running event supporting systems and network administrators. But as FLOSSUK has evolved to support open networks, software, hardware and data so our primary conference has become open to submissions on these areas. About FLOSSUK: Floss stands for Free and Libre Open Source Software, however as an organisation we also support Open Technology and Open Data so we like to think our name can also mean Free and Libre Open Source Systems. The term Libre is used because the meaning of Free in English is ambiguous. It can mean both free as in gratis – ‘a free lunch’ and the freedom to take what is already known and given and be able to build upon it. Libre means ‘at Liberty’ it means to use, to change, to build upon not to be in receipt without gratis.