Red Hat
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2012–2024
40:34 · 9.6K views · Sep 26, 2011
Bryan Cantrill of Joyent describes the experience of porting KVM to SmartOS, an Illumos-based OS, at KVM Forum 2011. He covers the process, the pain points and how DTrace helped.
Cited as evidence that the KVM port was hard work and as background on Cantrill's illumos virtualization experience.
5 comments from Hacker News
From my perspective, if this rumor is true, it's a relief. Solaris died the moment that they made the source proprietary -- a decision so incredibly stupid that it still makes my head hurt six years later. Fortunately, Solaris was open long enough that we in the open source world were able to fork it with illumos[1]. And because illumos became the home for many of us that brought Solaris its most famous innovations (e.g., ZFS, DTrace and zones), it should come as no surprise that we've continued to innovate over the last six years. (Speaking only for Joyent, we added revolutionary debugging support for node.js[2], ported KVM to it[3], completed and productized Linux-branded zones[4], added software-defined networking[5] and developed first-class Docker integration[6] -- among many, many other innovations.) So illumos (and derivatives like SmartOS, OmniOS and DelphixOS) is vibrant and alive -- but one of our biggest challenges has been its association with the name "Solaris": I don't think of our system as Solaris any more than I think of it as "SVR4" or "SunOS" or "7th Edition" or any of its other names -- and the very presence of Solaris has served to confuse. And indeed, it is my good fortune to be working with a new generation of engineers on the operating system -- engineers for whom the term "Solaris" is entirely distant and its presence as an actual (if proprietary) system befuddling. So if the rumor is true (and I suspect that it is), it will allow everyone to know wha
> Like SmartOS not having a large binary footprint, and not having the excellent package repositories. [LINK] > And the fact that KVM is from linux. Actually that's great that it's from Linux, because one major point of embarrassment for Linux is that KVM runs faster and better on SmartOS than it does on Linux, because Joyent engineers systematically used DTrace during the porting effort: this video > Insane, I know, but I can't afford mac Once you're able to afford one, you won't care about the desktop every again, because your desktop will JustWork(SM). > but I'm not gonna care until Illumos and BSD get some love from NVIDIA. NVIDIA provides regular driver updates for both Solaris and BSD. I bought a NVidia GX980TX, downloaded the latest SVR4 package for my Solaris 10 desktop, and one pkgrm && pkgadd later, I was running accelerated 3D graphics on the then latest-and-greatest accelerator NVIDIA had for sale. > By all means continue the holy war. Grab some performance statistics, and hook in the BSDs. They take our code, and we take theirs; they help us with our bugs, and we help them with theirs. BSD's are actually great. BSD's have smart, capable, and competent engineers who care about engineering correct systems and writing high quality code. We love our BSD brethren.
As I said above, OpenSolaris is dead. illumos is a fork. We don't take code from Oracle, because there isn't any. If they'd kept the gate open, a fork probably wouldn't have happened. As for why not to just move from Solaris to FreeBSD... because they're totally different beasts? And we happen to like Solaris? :-) Porting KVM to Solaris was apparently quite non-trivial: this video
Bryan Cantrill also ported KVM to Illumos. At Joyent they had plenty of experience with KVM. See: this video As far as I know, Bryan didn't personally work on the porting of bhyve (this might be wrong). So if anything, that would point to KVM as the 'familiar' thing given how many former Joyant people were there.
Hey now -- I'm not quite that easily impressed! ;) This is a problem domain that I have suffered in[1] -- and we have recently moved from KVM to bhyve[2] for several of the same reasons that motivated Firecracker. Not that it hurt that it was in Rust, of course... ;) [1] this video [2] [LINK]