[HN Gopher] SmartOS
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SmartOS
Author : ofrzeta
Score : 159 points
Date : 2026-01-21 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.smartos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.smartos.org)
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| I remember several years ago, SmartOS was being mentioned many
| times on HN.
|
| Joyent, the company behind SmartOS, was since acquired, and I
| don't usually see anyone talking about SmartOS nowadays.
|
| Is anyone on HN using SmartOS these days?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I have a personal box I keep updated running some utility zones
| and a couple VMs. I enjoy the tooling very much but it's so
| niche that I'm wary of using it for Customer engagements.
|
| I never used Solaris in my real life but I can understand the
| appeal for people who did.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| It was acquired by Samsung, which is notoriously bad at open
| source. But the reason why it quietly faded into the background
| wasn't that. It was that Joyent's ex Sun people had an annoying
| elitism that made them not care about working with the
| community.
| boricj wrote:
| It was acquired again in 2022 by MNX [1].
|
| [1] https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-
| begins-f...
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Thanks, I missed that one.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| (citation needed)
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Many/Some of them are now working at https://oxide.computer
|
| https://oxide.computer/blog/engineering-culture
| itsanaccount wrote:
| I mean when you're that far ahead of the class is it any
| wonder?
| mirashii wrote:
| Certainly Oxide computer company has some use of illumos still,
| which is strongly related to SmartOS
| mbreese wrote:
| But isn't the end goal with Oxide to run primarily
| Linux(/Windows?) VMs on an Illumos host?
|
| Are there any workloads (other than as a VM host) that run on
| SunOS derived OSes?
| panick21_ wrote:
| The whole cloud orchidtration platform and all you need for
| that.
|
| But that is the same for most server images nowdays.
|
| What in portend is that Oxide upstreams all their work so
| 'traditional' users should get benefit from it too.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Home stuff was the last holdout for me, but even that has been
| replaced by Proxmox these days. I used SmartOS for a solid 7-8
| years, though, and like it for most of that time.
|
| I couldn't point to any one single major reason that prompted
| the switch - just lots of small annoyances stemming from the
| world expecting you to be running Linux instead of Solaris, and
| once you move away from zones, you lose one of the most
| compelling reasons for being on SmartOS
| samtheDamned wrote:
| I use it. It's not the most practical I'll admit but I like the
| simplicity (I'm not super experienced with linux server
| administration so both of them feel similarly foreign, but
| SmartOS is pretty minimal and has been pretty straightforward
| to manage), and I won't lie it's a fun gimmick to be running a
| descendant of SunOS for random household services.
| DvdGiessen wrote:
| Running a number of production services on-premise on a big
| machine using native zones, a few using LX zones (the built-in
| Linux compatibilty layer), and a single bhyve zone. Actually,
| years ago this machine was the very first server we set up when
| our company was just getting started and for the first few
| years it ran pretty much everything. Zones were ideal for that,
| also to allow us to pack more services on less hardware, while
| having decent separation and everything snapshotting/backupping
| using ZFS. Nowadays we have a bunch more servers, with varying
| *nix operating systems (SmartOS, Debian, FreeBSD), as well as
| macOS and even Windows for some specific CI functions. (:
|
| The global zone works great as a hypervisor if you prefer
| working over SSH in a real shell, and being able to run a lot
| of services natively just makes things like memory allocation
| to VM's and having a birds eye view of performance easier.
| Being able to CoW cp/mv files between zones because it's
| actually the same filesystem makes certain operations much
| easier than with actual VM's. Bhyve works well for the things
| that need an actual Linux kernel or other OS, at the cost of
| losing some of the zone benefits mentioned earlier.
|
| Highlighting a few things we today run on SmartOS, grouped by
| their technology stacks: C (haproxy, nginx, PostgreSQL,
| MariaDB), PHP (various web apps), Java (Keycloak),
| Elixir/Phoenix (Plausible, fork of Firezone), Rust (rathole,
| some internal glue services), Go (Grafana, Consul, Prometheus).
| Most of those are readily available in the package manager, and
| a few offer native Solaris binaries which run fine on illumos.
| Others we do local builds in a utility zone before copying the
| binary package to the where it actually runs.
|
| On LX zones we also run a number of services without problems,
| usually because they have Debian packaging available but are
| not in pkgsrc (for example Consul/Nomad, Fabio, some internal
| things that was already Linux-specific and we haven't bothered
| to port yet).
|
| And at home a LX zone also runs Jellyfin just fine. (:
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I used it for smaller scale (low 10s of physical servers)
| back in the day also. But my problems with that started when
| i needed a lot more, the sysadmin/devops/whatever story
| doesn't scale.
|
| Yes, ansible exists but it's actually quite hard to run
| ansible on a few hundred machines -- you need lots of RAM
| just to run the playbook and your first hundred or so
| separate deployments, you do need to reach for something like
| Kubernetes.
|
| As for LX, why emulate linux when it's .... right there? The
| linux kernel is not a lot of overhead vs having to justify
| emulating the linux ABI on an OS the industry has largely
| abandoned.
| irusensei wrote:
| I think the big hit on Solaris and FreeBSD popularity since
| then was OpenZFS adopting Linux as their main reference
| operating system.
| eduction wrote:
| I use it for a home server. Zones provides a secure way to have
| (on one physical machine with one physical network interface)
| some stuff you can only get to on the local network and some
| things you can get to over the public internet and some things
| via internet if you have the right ssh key. Each contained
| natively from each other. Crossbow firewall provides a nice way
| to contain traffic securely as well. ZFS let me set up two big
| external usb drives as a raid array, the resulting zvol can
| (iirc) have multiple filesystems for use by multiple zones
| although I only use it from one right now for the lan only
| zone. That zone shares via SMB to my network so I can use it
| for backups and media streaming.
|
| I've been able to do almost everything in native zones. I had a
| bhyve zone set up to run a photo related GitHub code base that
| really needed Linux.
|
| SMF is a joy to use for services and package management with
| pkgsrc is great. The whole thing just feels very thoughtfully
| put together.
|
| You can probably achieve all this on Linux with docker and the
| right iptables (or whatever succeeded it) config I imagine? But
| on smartos I am using facilities that are integrated deeply
| into the os going back like 20 years now. I also just prefer
| the old sun stuff.
| nZac wrote:
| > SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or
| USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks
| to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting
| disks for the root OS.
|
| Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox?
| I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small
| cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead
| of manually setting PVE on each. Ansible or salt is an option but
| that tends to degrade over time.
| xenophonf wrote:
| You can boot ProxMox VMs via PXE:
|
| https://blog.kail.io/pxe-booting-on-proxmox.html
|
| But why bother? A read-only disk image would be simpler.
| ktm5j wrote:
| Pretty sure they want to boot the hypervisor itself via PXE,
| not the VMs.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It depends on what "this" you meant, but in general the ways of
| netbooting an OS are many and varied. You'd have to declare
| what kind of root device you ultimately want, such as root on
| iSCSI.
|
| Personally, I feel that "smartOS does not support booting from
| a local block device like a normal, sane operating system"
| might be a drawback and is a peculiar thing to brag about.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| There was a brilliant incident back in the joyent days where
| they accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter and ended up
| dossing their dhcp server ;)
| nZac wrote:
| What I'm looking to achieve are three identical proxmox host
| boxes. As soon as you finish the install you now have three
| snowflakes no matter how hard you try.
|
| In the case of smartOS (which I've never used) it would seem
| like that is achieved in the design because the USB isn't
| changing. Reboot and you are back to a clean slate.
|
| Isn't this how game arcades boot machines? They all netboot
| from a single image for the game you have selected? That is
| what it seems smartOS is doing but maybe I'm missing the
| point.
| ekropotin wrote:
| It doesn't look like it's achievable with vanilla Proxmox.
|
| I think if you really-really want declaratively for host
| machines, you'd need to ditch Proxmox in favor of Incur on
| top of NixOS.
|
| There is also https://github.com/SaumonNet/proxmox-nixos,
| but it's pretty new and therefore full of rough edges.
| ptribble wrote:
| SmartOS can, of course, boot from a local zfs pool, but it
| treats it logically as just another source for the bootable
| image. See the piadm(8) command.
| ktm5j wrote:
| It's close, but there are some missing pieces I think. The way
| it manages storage pools would fit your use case, if you import
| a zpool, for example, it will scan the datasets and can figure
| out what zvols should be attached to which VMs..
|
| but there's also VM config info under `/etc/pve` or something
| similar. I'm pretty sure that's some kind of FUSE filesystem,
| it's supposed to be synchronized between cluster members.. you
| might be able to host that externally somehow. But that'll
| probably take some effort.
|
| You'll also need to figure out how to configure
| `/etc/network/interfaces` on boot for your network config. But
| that's doable.
|
| Would be pretty neat.
| oooyay wrote:
| Kind of. You can run Talos on Proxmox so I don't see why you
| couldn't run this, but frankly I'd just install Talos or
| SmartOS on the metal like god intended.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| wait this seems totally awesome? i hadnt remembered until reading
| the comments now that this was a joyent thing, and that somehow
| it has largely disappeared despite seeming like an awesome way to
| do all sorts of things.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| I was intrigued by the idea that in the Manta object store you
| could schedule computations on the storage nodes. However I am
| not sure how much improvement that brings in practice. Any
| practical experience with this?
|
| https://apidocs.tritondatacenter.com/manta/index.html
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I did use it on a project, it was meh, alright? In the end the
| main cost of our processing wasn't storage latency but code,
| and this quite arcane scheduler was a barrier too much for most
| of our team.
|
| I believe it was removed shortly after i left the project..
| cmdrk wrote:
| bcantrill gave a great talk many years ago about compute-data
| locality. would be nice to know if those ideas panned out for
| some customers, but it seems the world has by-and-large
| continued to schlep data back and forth.
|
| it's too bad too. The concepts behind Manta were such a great
| idea. I still want tools that combine traditional unix pipes
| with services that can map-reduce over a big farm of
| hyperconverged compute/storage. I'm somewhat surprised that the
| kubernetes/cncf-adjacent world didn't reinvent it.
| sneak wrote:
| So, Solaris > OpenSolaris > Illumos > SmartOS? Do I have that
| right?
| linolevan wrote:
| I believe SmartOS is a distro of Illumos (in the same way that
| debian is a distro of linux).
| 0x457 wrote:
| OpenSolaris was an official OSS version of Solaris which was
| essentially Solaris, but developed in the open by Sun.
|
| Illumos started as "remove all close source bits and replace
| with OSS", after Oracle closed down OpenSolaris, Illumos became
| a full-on fork and Solaris-like rather than another version of
| Solaris.
|
| From there, multiple distros were born (because Illumos didn't
| want to be distro), notably OpenIndiana and SmartOS.
| OpenIndiana being a general purpose distro of Illumos. While
| SmartOS went with something like "OS for HCI datacenters"
|
| So it's Solaris > OpenSolaris > Illumos.
| nwilkens wrote:
| SmartOS is the core operating system for Triton datacenter --
| https://www.tritondatacenter.com Triton is the orchestration of
| SmartOS compute nodes.
|
| Code + issues are active under
| https://github.com/TritonDataCenter (smartos-live, illumos-
| joyent, triton, etc.), and docs are at https://docs.smartos.org/.
|
| SmartOS is released every two weeks, and Triton is released every
| 8 weeks -- see https://www.tritondatacenter.com/downloads
|
| And Triton object storage will have S3 support in the next
| release!
|
| [edit: removed semicolon from link!]
| nwilkens wrote:
| The SmartOS release changelog for reference: https://us-
| central.manta.mnx.io/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/sm...
| effdee wrote:
| The first link's broken as it includes the semicolon.
| re-lre-l wrote:
| I am a huge fan of SmartOS. Back in the 2010s (around 2012), I
| was advocating its use in production at a small startup I worked.
| The SunOS kernel, ZFS, zero install, immutable core, convenient
| way to manage containers and VMs together - all of this looked
| great on paper, especially containers.
|
| In reality, I ended up running almost everything in VMs. The only
| thing worked well natively was nginx. MongoDB, Mysql, even our
| php backend (some libraries) had issues, unfortunately.
|
| A year ago, I considered SmartOS again as a home lab driver, and
| no success again, Linux just has better support: drivers, pci
| passthrough, etc... and now with containers+vm through Proxmox or
| anything else. You can even run a k8s+kubevirt with zfs
| practically out of the box as a complete overkill though.
| fridder wrote:
| not sure if you have given FreeBSD a chance yet and it has an
| in-progress jail/vm frontend:
| https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| Ah, very cool. Thanks for sharing; will try it out
| Zaskoda wrote:
| So many PHP libraries are just wrappers for some other library.
| I think that's mostly a strength, but in this case it was
| clearly a weakness.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| These days, you're indeed better off using Illumos/SmartOS to
| run GNU/Linux zones/VMs, rather than native applications, from
| what I hear.
| gigatexal wrote:
| If you're just going to run things in VMs then QubesOS one
| might as well
| tombert wrote:
| Genuine question: in 2026, what does SmartOS (or any other
| Illumos/Solaris OS) buy you over something like Linux or FreeBSD?
| linksnapzz wrote:
| I prefer SMF to systemd, mdb is pretty nice, and Real Actual
| RBAC, and in-kernel smb service.
| znpy wrote:
| > and in-kernel smb service
|
| Doesn't linux have that as well? https://www.kernel.org/doc/h
| tml/next/filesystems/smb/ksmbd.h...
| linksnapzz wrote:
| _shrug_ maybe; I 've just been using the Solaris one for
| 15-20 years now in lieu of samba.
| __tyler__ wrote:
| Oxide uses Helios, their own illumos-based distro:
| https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios
|
| They've written up their reasoning in this RFD:
| https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026#_comparison_illum...
| stonogo wrote:
| After reading that document twice, I'm still not sure why
| they based it on Illumos. I strongly suspect it's just down
| to the personal preference of the founders, which is a
| perfectly valid reason. This document very much reads like
| "here are the pieces we will use, let's work our way back to
| why"
| ironhaven wrote:
| The reasoning can be simplified to two things. 1. Linux
| does not have the bhyve hypervisor ported 2. Maintaining a
| Linux distribution will require more effort and have more
| churn than illumos.
|
| Because Linux is just a kernel and users have to provide
| all of their own user space and system services there is a
| lot of opportunity for churn. Illumos is a traditional
| operating system that goes from the kernel to the systemd
| layer. Illumos is also very stable at this point so most of
| the churn is managed up front
|
| The choice is between porting a handful of apps to illumos
| or jumping on to the Debian treadmill while pioneering a
| new to Linux hypervisor. Would Linux have enabled a faster
| development cycle or just a easier MVP?
| stonogo wrote:
| There's no churn in a graveyard, either. Debian's not
| much of a treadmill on stable; it's famous for it.
|
| The justifications for bhyve over kvm are similarly
| inscrutable; you can simply not build the code you don't
| want. Nobody's forcing you to use shadow paging. Comments
| like "reportedly iffy on AMD" are bizarre. What does
| "iffy" mean? This wasn't worth testing? Why should I, a
| potential customer, believe that these people are better
| at this than the established companies who have been
| producing nearly-identical products for twenty years? At
| the domain of development they're discussing why bother
| using an x86_64 processor from a manufacturer who does
| not bother to push code into the kernel you've chosen?
|
| Again, it's their company, and if they (as I suspect)
| chose these tools because they're familiar, that's a
| totally supportable position. I just can't understand why
| we get handwaving and assurances instead of any meat.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| great product. sadly dead! bought up by Samsung and now the
| briantrust has left to go work at a much cooler place
| ptribble wrote:
| Not dead, still going strong under new ownership (MNX).
| gertrunde wrote:
| Nice to hear it's not dead, as the website and github repos
| do give that impression.
|
| I'll have to give it a spin.
| nicolasjungers wrote:
| An opportunity for a SmartOS successor is IncusOS.
| ekropotin wrote:
| Curious why the separate OS should exist. NixOS + Incus sounds
| like a good solution for declarative provisioning of hypervisor
| machines.
| jama211 wrote:
| I'm confused by the wording "without wasting disks for the base
| OS" - I wouldn't normally consider this a "waste", would anyone
| else? There are big downsides to running off of a USB key all the
| time unless I'm missing something
| zja wrote:
| > This architecture has a variety of advantages including
| increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and
| recovery.
|
| SmartOS was developed by Joyent for their cloud computing
| product, it's primary use case isn't desktop computing. I think
| the advantages mentioned above were probably a bigger factor
| than the disk space. I would also guess that PXE would be the
| standard way to boot in a datacenter, not USB.
| fsflover wrote:
| See also: Qubes OS, which is a desktop OS based on
| virtualization, https://qubes-os.org
| znpy wrote:
| This looks OT?
|
| judging by https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/_images/qubes-
| trust-level... it looks very linux-centered.
| eduction wrote:
| No it's a very similar idea, just on workstations instead of
| servers. Qubes is built around "do everything in VMs" as
| SmartOS is "do everything in zones."
|
| It's just a usage detail that Qubes may have a slightly
| higher percentage of linux containers vs smartos - at this
| point both are probably mostly linux containers on both OSes
| in terms of usage. (Qubes can also do Windows vms and they
| amped up support for this in the latest release, while
| smartOS has native zones and i believe you can do freebsd and
| maybe others on bhyve.)
|
| Differences are many, including that Qubes has no concept of
| a "native" VM (dom0 is just a thin fedora wrapper around Xen)
| and that the global zone in SmartOS is significantly beefier
| than dom0 in Qubes, since Qubes offloads networking and usb
| io and bluetooth and sound to independent service qubes
| (VMs). And their development has been entirely separate. But
| they are spiritually siblings. I think it's an inspired
| comparison.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| SmartOS has grown a web UI in the last couple years, too. I
| haven't gotten around to trying it out on my last remaining
| SmartOS homelab box. I enjoy the CLI tooling very much. For some,
| though, the web UI might be worthwhile:
| https://docs.smartos.org/web-interface/
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| I know someone who runs SmartOS for their home server. They only
| had good things to say about it. It's been working well for a few
| years now.
| fennec-posix wrote:
| Glad to see SunOS/Solaris still alive in some form in the Open
| Source space. Had heard of Illumos and OpenIndiana, but didn't
| know about SmartOS. It's definitely won me over with the NetBSD
| pkgsrc package manager... Very nice.
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