SmartOS: The illumos Way of Thinking About Servers

As I often say, I like simplicity and predictability. My servers are generally built around that principle: the server itself (physical or virtual) is just a coordinator of containers. When it's based on FreeBSD, those containers take the form of jails and VMs. In case of disaster, restoring is simple, and I talked about it at EuroBSDCon 2026 in Brussels. But there's another operating system that I appreciate and have been using for quite some time, and it's perfect for this purpose: illumos. Born as a fork of OpenSolaris, it incorporates everything the brilliant minds at Sun designed and built. Many of those minds still work on illumos (and its distributions) today, making it a modern and extremely mature operating system. ZFS was born at Sun, and illumos is the proof: it's not just its file system, everything is designed around it, with a level of integration that goes beyond even FreeBSD's. There are also technologies like Crossbow (network virtualization), DTrace, very advanced…