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…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town