+++ title = "SmartOS - a new Solaris" date = "2011-08-15T20:00:00+00:00" author = "Gibheer" draft = false +++

Some minutes ago I saw on hacker news the following line Joyent Open Sources SmartOS: Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM (smartos.org). Who is behind SmartOS?

What does that mean? I took a look and it seems, that Joyent, the company behind node.js, has released their distribution of Illumos. After the merge of sun and oracle, OpenSolaris as a project was closed in favor of Solaris11. As OpenSolaris was OpenSource the project Illumos emerged from the remains of OpenSolaris, but there was no release of the Illumos kernel in any project till now.

So what is different?

The first things I saw on their page are dtrace zfs and zones. So it's a standard solaris. But there is more: KVM! If the existence of zones means also, that it has crossbow and resource limits, then it would be absolutely gorgeous! It would be possible to build the core services on solaris zones and on top of that multiple dev or production machines with linux, windows or whatever you want.

I will test it first in a virtual box to see, how stable and usable it really is, as there is no documentation on the website yet. After my test I will report back.