Illumos gave themselves a birthdate today; August 3rd, 2010. Illumos is the first fork of OpenSolaris, aiming to be the first SunOS-compatible, fully open source OS. For those unfamiliar, OpenSolaris is the open source CDDL licensed version of Solaris, the Unix OS of choice for Sun, now Oracle’s hardware since 1983.
This doesn’t mean that end users will be using Illumos—instead, they’ll be using distributions based on the core kernel and libraries that Illumos provides. It’s similar to the Linux kernel; you don’t actually use Linux—you use distributions based on the Linux kernel and a set of C libraries called libc.
Illumos is the first OpenSolaris fork targeting a total replacement of all closed source components, and it has some serious backing. Nexenta is a major player in ZFS, delivering a line of ZFS-based storage appliances. Joyent, a cloud computing provider, has also joined on as a partner. Other commercial partners include EveryCity Managed Hosting. Other announced distribution partners who are expected to build and distribute complete operating system installs based on Illumos include SchilliX, Benelix, and berliOS.
Illumos has also collected a number of former Sun employees who are major players in the OpenSolaris world including Garrett D’Amore, Direct of Engineering at Nexenta and formerly Project Lead at Sun and member of PSARC, who is heading Illumos; Simon Phipps, member of the OSI Board of Directors and a current member of the OpenSolaris Governing Board; and Bryan Cantrill, VP of Engineering at Joyent, formerly Distinguished Engineer at Oracle (previously Sun) and the inventor of DTrace. The total number of active developers is around 12 right now, but Garrett stated that he believes they can quickly add more and achieve “critical mass.”
The relationship between Oracle and OpenSolaris can only be described as acrimonious—if you put on blinders. At their meeting on July 12, the OpenSolaris Governing Board—the folks in charge—only discussed two items, both amounting to “if Oracle doesn’t send someone, we’re quitting because we can’t work.” Oracle representatives have been invited to every meeting of the OGB since they completed the purchase of Sun, and hasn’t communicated with the board in any meaningful way since at least February of this year. Illumos has extended an open invitation to Oracle to join in as a partner or to participate in the project, but has not heard a reply yet either.
If you think OpenSolaris can stand on its own, though, you’d be very wrong. Large portions of OpenSolaris are dependent on binary contributions and technical information that is strictly restricted to Sun (now Oracle). These include core libraries for running on SPARC processors and for interfacing with the Solaris kernel. One of the first things Oracle did was tighten controls on what parts of commercial Solaris were transferred, and if they were to stop providing these pieces, OpenSolaris would no longer function in its current state.
This is where Illumos comes in. Illumos has replaced the closed libc with an open source one which is ABI, or Application Binary Interface, compatible. This is a core piece, allowing binaries from Solaris and OpenSolaris to run on Illumos with no changes. Work on other components is continuing, including numerous closed source drivers and hardware support. As it stands today, Illumos boots and runs on x86/x64 platforms with fairly limited hardware, as well as VMware and VirtualBox, but does not currently run on SPARC hardware, the normal domain of SunOS/Solaris.
The current builds still require a closed source toolchain to build, as well as numerous closed source components such as drivers, NFS framework components, Trusted Solaris Extensions, and cryptographic frameworks to name a few. These closed source components are core to OpenSolaris as it currently sits, and people have begun to compare OpenSolaris to Apple’s MacOS X “Darwin” open source project and predict that it will go the way of OpenDarwin.
Ultimately, Illumos aims to be a community-driven independent SunOS core with fully open licensing. At this time, Illumos is only accepting code licensed under the BSD or MIT licenses, but is investigating other licenses such as Apache. They are seeking independence from Oracle or, in their own words, something that “can’t be ‘shut down’ or subverted by any corporate master.” The key to this will be achieving a critical mass of developers and interest beyond that already announced, as well as maintaining that interest and level of code contributions.
Management of Illumos is currently handled by Garrett personally, but they are working to name a Non-Technical Council for management of assets, mailing lists, and other non-technical issues as well as a Developer Council comprised of technical people. These councils will be based on what Garrett described as a meritocracy, and will be separate so that programmers can focus on technical things while less technical people take care of project management issues. By having two Councils elected by the developers and contributors, it’s hoped that this will drive and encourage community participation and avoid problems like Bikeshedding.
Garrett D’Amore has said he expects the team to have Illumos completely open source and free of closed binary components by the end of this year, and said he hopes to have a public download release available soon. Nexenta has also announced that they will be abandoning OpenSolaris for Illumos under the guidance of Garrett as soon as reasonably possible.
Articles RSS