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 the Latin for to light, and OS for Operating System.[8]
History and development
The OpenIndiana operating system is one of many Illumos distributions.
Illumos was announced via webinar on 3 August 2010,[9] as a community effort of a group of 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 is 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 the discontinuation of OpenSolaris, plans were made to fork the final version of the Solaris ON kernel,[a] allowing Illumos to evolve into a kernel of its own.[13] As of 2010[update], 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[update], 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,[clarification needed] 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]
As of 2019 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
ZFS, a combined file system with integrated logical volume management, providing a high level of data integrity for very large storage capacities.
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.
Tribblix, retro style distribution with modern components, available for x86-64 and SPARC.[24]
v9os, a server-only, IPS-based minimal SPARC distribution.[25]
XStreamOS, a distribution for infrastructure, cloud, and web development.[26]
Discontinued:
Dyson, derived from Debian using libc, and SMF init system.
OpenSXCE, distribution for developers and system administrators for IA-32/x86-64 x86 platforms and SPARC.[27]
Illumos Foundation
The Illumos Foundation was incorporated in the State of California in 2012 as a 501(c)6 trade association, with founding board members Jason Hoffman (formerly at Joyent), Evan Powell (Nexenta), and Garrett D'Amore. As of 2024, its status in California is "dissolved".[28]
Notes
^The "OS/Network" consolidation (project), considered the heart of the Solaris kernel
^Clulow, Joshua (25 October 2012). "Raspberry Pi Bring-Up". illumos Foundation. Archived from the original on 13 July 2017. Retrieved 14 November 2013.
