[illumos-gate] 17786 loader: allow slash in variable names -- Toomas Soome <tsoome⊙mc>

[illumos-gate] 17785 loader: console list should use commas -- Toomas Soome <tsoome⊙mc>

[illumos-gate] 17624 vioif: panic on attach failure -- Hans Rosenfeld <rosenfeld⊙gho>

hi all, looking to upgrade my homeserver (currently running proxmox with 20+ services, mainly private + some p2p but looking to host more public services in the future) and came across illumos. as I understand it, SmartOS is a hypervisor while OmniOS is more of a server OS. They both have features I would use (bhyve, lxzones, zfs etc) so Im struggling to understand which is better suited for my

needs. Is SmartOS better suited for enterprise/cloud? Is Omni more of a competitor to NAS? Do people run OmniOS on SmartOS? Any assistance here would be much appreciated

guest88: The biggest difference is really whether you want to boot an immutable system from a ramdisk image (SmartOS) or have a traditional install-to-disk mutable root UNIX system (OmniOS)

It can be harder to do some things on SmartOS, if they are things that were not considered in the architecture of the ramdisk image; e.g., useradd(8) will add a user to /etc/passwd, but /etc/passwd is not persistent so if you reboot it's gone, etc. You would need instead to add a boot-time service that re-adds the users each boot, or change the way it works a bit.

On OmniOS, things work the traditional way.

There isn't really a right answer, it just depends on how you personally want to maintain and operate your computer.

@jclulow I like how SmartOS handles updates. Besides booting from a PXE, are there any other main differences I should know about? Which tends to be more popular amongst homelabbers?

SmartOS can also boot from local disk as well, FWIW, it doesn't have to be PXE.

When I worked at Joyent long ago, we booted systems from USB sticks

at least to get to the iPXE loader

and for the main server in a DC (the "head node") we would boot the actual SmartOS ramdisk image off the stick, so that it could boot on its own

I'm not sure about popularity. Really, the choice is about the administrative model you're looking for, for the most part, I feel. Which is ultimately a personal choice -- so I would say, pick one and give it a try!

USB sounds ideal

Think I will try them both and see

I also came accross OmniTribblix but couldn't find much information on this. I know Tribblix is a desktop os but Im not sure how this variant relates to OmniOS?