Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly[3] free and open-source Unix operating system. It has been developed since 2010 and based on OpenSolaris—after the discontinuation of that product by Oracle—and comprises a kernel, device drivers, system libraries, and utility software for system administration. The core is now the base for many different open-sourced Illumos distributions,[4] in a similar way in which the Linux kernel is used in different Linux distributions.[5]

Illumos
DeveloperIllumos Foundation
Written inC
OS familyUnix (SVR4)[1]
Working stateCurrent
Source modelOpen source with binary blobs
Initial release2010; 14 years ago (2010)
Repository
Available inEnglish
PlatformsIA-32, x86-64, SPARC, ARM (under development),[2] DEC Alpha
Kernel typeMonolithic
LicenseCDDL, BSD, MIT
Preceded byOpenSolaris
Official websiteillumos.org

The Illumos Foundation has been incorporated in the State of California as a 501(c)6 trade association, with founding board members Jason Hoffman (formerly at Joyent), Evan Powell (Nexenta), and Garrett D'Amore.

Name

edit

The maintainers write illumos in lowercase[6] since some computer fonts do not clearly distinguish a lowercase L from an uppercase i: Il (see homoglyph).[7] The project name is a combination of words illuminare from Latin for to light and OS for Operating System.[8]

History and development

edit
 
The OpenIndiana operating system is one of many Illumos distributions

Illumos was announced via webinar[9] on 3 August 2010, as a community effort of some core Solaris engineers to create a truly open source Solaris by swapping closed source bits of OpenSolaris with open implementations.[10][11][12] OpenSolaris itself was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).

The original plan explicitly stated that Illumos would not be a distribution or a fork. However, after Oracle announced discontinuing OpenSolaris, plans were made to fork the final version of the Solaris ON kernel allowing Illumos to evolve into a kernel of its own.[13] As of 2010, efforts focused on libc, the NFS lock manager, the crypto module, and many device drivers to create a Solaris-like OS with no closed, proprietary code. As of 2012, development emphasis includes transitioning from the historical compiler, Studio, to GCC.[14] The "userland" software is now built with GNU make[15] and contains many GNU utilities such as GNU tar. At the time, Illumos had been lightly led by founder Garrett D'Amore and other community members/developers such as Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, via a Developers' Council.[16]

Currently, its primary development project, illumos-gate, derives from OS/Net (aka ON),[17] which is a Solaris kernel with the bulk of the drivers, core libraries, and basic utilities, similar to what is delivered by a BSD "src" tree. It was originally dependent on OpenSolaris OS/Net, but a fork was made after Oracle silently decided to close the development of Solaris and unofficially killed the OpenSolaris project.[18][19][20]

Features

edit
  • ZFS, a combined file system and logical volume manager providing a high level of data integrity for very large storage capacities.
  • Solaris Containers (or Zones), a low overhead implementation of operating-system-level virtualization technology for x86 and SPARC systems.
  • DTrace, a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time.
  • Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), a virtualization infrastructure. KVM supports native virtualization on processors with hardware virtualization extensions.
  • OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control (or Crossbow), a set of features that provides an internal network virtualization and quality of service including: virtual NIC (VNIC) pseudo-network interface technology, exclusive ip zones, bandwidth management, and flow control on a per interface and per VNIC basis.

Distributions

edit

Distributions, at illumos.org[21]

Discontinued:

See also

edit

References

edit
  1. ^ "Open Brand". www.opengroup.org.
  2. ^ Clulow, Joshua (25 October 2012). "Raspberry Pi Bring-Up". illumos Foundation. Archived from the original on 13 July 2017. Retrieved 14 November 2013.
  3. ^ "Building illumos". illumos.org. Retrieved 31 August 2023.
  4. ^ "Distributions".
  5. ^ Blankenhorn, Dana. "What Illumos is and is not". ZDNet.
  6. ^ "FAQ". illumos. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  7. ^ Mustacchi, Robert (5 September 2015). "Linux to SmartOS cheatsheet, after smartos-discuss vetting, sans deritus. by cwvhogue - Pull Request #217". GitHub. Archived from the original on 23 May 2021. Retrieved 23 May 2021.
  8. ^ "Announcement". illumos.org. 15 June 2018.
  9. ^ D'Amore, Garrett (3 August 2010). "illumos - Hope and Light Springs Anew - Presented by Garrett D'Amore" (PDF). illumos.org. Retrieved 3 August 2010.
  10. ^ "Whither OpenSolaris? illumos Takes Up the Mantle". 20 November 2012. Archived from the original on 26 September 2015.
  11. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "OpenIndiana, Illumos, and the OpenSolaris Community (Part 1)" – via YouTube.
  12. ^ D'Amore, Garrett (27 October 2010). "New illumos logo". Retrieved 14 November 2013.
  13. ^ D'Amore, Garrett (13 August 2010). "The Hand May Be Forced". Retrieved 14 November 2013.
  14. ^ https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/faq/#how-does-openindiana-differ-from-opensolaris Archived 13 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine "Oracle’s Sun Studio has been replaced with the open source GNU GCC compiler."
  15. ^ "OpenIndiana/oi-userland". GitHub. 28 October 2021.
  16. ^ Straughan, Deirdré (16 May 2012). "illumos Developers' Council Meeting". illumos.org. Archived from the original on 10 July 2016. Retrieved 13 August 2012.
  17. ^ "os-net-skeleton". bitbucket.org. Archived from the original on 29 July 2019. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  18. ^ "Oracle staff report big layoffs across Solaris, SPARC teams". www.theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  19. ^ "OpenSolaris axed by Ellison". www.theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  20. ^ "illumos sporks OpenSolaris". www.theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 29 July 2019.
  21. ^ "Distributions - illumos". illumos.org.
  22. ^ "DilOS". www.dilos.org. Archived from the original on 21 February 2016. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  23. ^ "OmniOS CE". omniosce.org. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
  24. ^ "Tribblix". www.tribblix.org. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  25. ^ "v9os". milax.fi. Retrieved 13 December 2017.
  26. ^ "XStreamOS". Sonicle. Retrieved 4 March 2021.
  27. ^ "OpenSXCE". www.opensxce.org. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
edit