hey :) I'm interested on what hardware you are using illumos-based operating systems? I am typing this on a T530 (with OpenIndiana) by Lenovo, and the majority works. I've tried to boot OpenIndiana on a computer by Samsung from 2022, but it just freezes. Also I know that those illumos-based OS are suited for server architectures, but I know nearly nothing about this area

I do not know how far I could get to build illumos on new hardware, I never tried it, but I probably will do it in early 2026 I hope

julius_01, what are your needs and use case. illumos distros itself can run on x86_64 hardware on 1GB of RAM onwards.

Distros span from minimalist, hypervisors, general use till full private cloud solutions (tribblix, SmartOS , OmniOSCE , Openindiana, Triton datacenter. There are more and company-specific.

If you want Bhyve and KVM VMs , make sure CPU supports EPT in Intel and with recent AMD it is best with Bhyve. Solaris zones and LX zones will work in any 64-bit x86 .

illumos is also kernel of choice for Oxide computer cloud in a rack hypervisor. On illumos (Open)ZFS is implemented with FMA (fault management architecture) and it is not the case on other platforms.

My current use case is to learn the internals of UNIX operating systems, so I am not familiar with the techniques you mentioned. I have to get trough this first (which is fun); I have a few books from the 90s and I use IO as a reference implementation

*OI

Are there any plans to port illumos to the ARM architecture? (e.g. running illumos on a raspberry pi)

julius_01: I think there's been some effort for illumos on ARM but it's fairly limited in what it can do (I don't think there's any display output - only a serial console)

you'll probably find things have changed a lot since what you might see in books from the 90s

julius_01, illumos as Opensolaris OS/Net continuation is the only System V UNIX that is open source. Sun like spent 20+ million USD in 2000, paying off all licenset that tainted Solaris, to open it up under CDDL license (weak copyleft)

2000s

ZFS and Dtrace and boot environments (separate dataset is separate OS, for ZFS is copy-on-write with snapshots etc) and thin OS-leve virtualization with Zones are actually very powerful development environment.

Basically Linux distros have benn doing catching up to 2008/9 Opensolaris with core tech , for 20 years (including Docker etc.)

@m1ari maybe I have too many books from the 90s but I'm reading the source code of illumos too in order not to learn only outdated techniques used in early versions of UNIX.

Triton datacenter / SmartOS have also Discord server . Oxide computer also does, but they are occupied with their project.

thanks nikolam for the outlook of possible use cases for myself

julius_01, There are like 2 or 3 core books for Solaris that apply plus you can find illumos docs on site. Books, Solaris Performance and Tools , Solaris Internals Brendan Gregg Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud 1st edition and DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD

julius_01: depending on what you're trying to learn I wonder if learning about tools like dtrace / mdb might be more useful then dig into relevant sourcecode if you want to see why things might weork as they do.

julius_01, you can also form some kind of group for learning, subscribe to mailing lists and github for distros . So you won't be alone

rmustacc: do you know offhand if there's a way to determine the tx or rx power of an SFP? I thought it might be in libsff, but didn't see it in there, but not sure if there's somewhere else I should be looking...

I never did a great job of plumbing through the diagnostics, but you can access the data yourself and parse it.

What speed txr is it?

I believe it's a 25Gb port on a mlxcx card -- a customer is saying that their switch is complaining because the receive power (on the switch side) is too low, so was wanting a way to see if the SFP agrees or not

Let me think of the simplest way. It's been a bit.

Since we are only using transceivers in our switches I haven't put as much love into this all.

For this txr, start with /usr/lib/dl/dltraninfo -x

It will include page a2 which will be the SFF-8472 info and you should be able to look at the values that way.

ok.. i'll ask them for that and take a look.. thanks

Optical transceivers usually implement digital diagnostics but aren't required.

or maybe I don't have to set up autojoin at all.

mischan . I'm setting up a new client and it still needs some work.