Submitted by The OpenIndiana project is pleased to announce the next development release of the open source, enterprise operating system. OpenIndiana build 151a is now available for 32 and 64-bit x86 architecture systems. We hope you’re as excited as we are for the first complete platform for servers and desktops that offers the full power of the virtualisation, observability, management, networking, and storage technologies from the illumos project. Please see the release notes for full details of what’s new. This milestone also marks the one year anniversary of our first release. Look for our first stable release in the near future!
As soon as auto snapshots is fixed I will be using this to take advantage of KVM. Right now, I’ll stick to Solaris 11 Express.
From the brief time I tried it it was noticeable faster.
Good quality OS.
For me, it is always good to see this kind of solaris news.
I still use my openindiana system at home as a jack-of-all-trades server, but it has been upgraded so many times it is beginning to show its age (many devel upgrades in the last 3 years).
However, I think I’ll also wait until snapshots are fixed to spend time on the upgrade.
Also, why the switch to KVM? I rather liked zones, but maybe the implementation was too difficult to maintain? Or are there actually features in KVM that people prefer?
KVM so that you can run Windows or Linux in a vm. Zones did not allow this.
Well you could run Linux in a zone before, but only very old distributions would work.
Have been using OpenIndiana for my dev box for a while now and it’s a very solid OS.
@Jondice
The KVM implentation is aimed at multi OS virtualization, zones only handle solaris branded zones currently as the lx brand was stopped. Although.. http://alexeremin.blogspot.com/2011/06/bring-back-lx-brand.html
I concur with the previous comments about having kvm and zfs available in (open)solaris/illumos. I cringed when the xen/xvm development went stale after the Oracle acquisition. Looking forward to a stable solaris-based os with zfs + dtrace + kvm + zones! Thanks to Joyent for their work on the kvm port ( and their illumos-based smartos – http://smartos.org ). Only wished this kvm port supported amd cpu’s, maybe in the future?
I never understood KVM.
So, does this allow me to run Windows in KVM, exactly like bare bone, i.e. I get full 3D graphics and can run all games?
VirtualBox 3D support is so-so. Older games works excellent like Quake2, Quake3 etc – whereas newer games doesnt really work.
The two things are completely separated.
kvm is the virtualization technology.
OpenGL (or Direct3D) is dependent on the virtualized display driver built on top of KVM, soft-Qemu or Xen.
In reality, non of the currently existing virtualization technologies are capable of giving host like performance when it comes to 3D.
The only possible route is using IO virtualization – giving the guest full access to the graphics card – at the price of having VT-d capable machine and supported drivers. (As far as I know, only Xen support this configuration)
– Gilboa
I think KVM does too, but I’ve never tried it.
I know.
However, as far as I remember the KVM PCI-E front/back-end support is not mainline and doesn’t support VGA bypass.
Hopefully by the time F16 will be released, I’ll be able to test VGA bypass using both Xen and KVM
– Gilboa
I’ll definitely install it. What I would really like to see is the integration+maintainance of the userspace Bluetooth stack.
http://sites.google.com/site/anandbheemaraju/
Does anyone know the difference between SmartOS and OpenIndiana? Are there any major differences?
As I have understood it, SmartOS is just a minimal OS. Basically, only the kernel and KVM. Then you can virtualize client OSes and use ZFS and Zones with them. Perfect if you want Solaris features as a backend, and virtualized OSes as clients. Actually, I am considering this. Install virtualized OSes in Zones with KVM and then do all front end work in the OSes. Use StormOS as a secure backend.
OpenIndiana is a full fledged distro, quite similar to Ubuntu, with Gnome, lots of software, etc.
Hmmm… It seems StormOS is debian + Illumos?
http://stormos.org/node/4