Oxide and Friends 7/3/2023 -- Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as Oxide's own explanation of how they ship hardware as a startup and why they picked illumos.
What it is
A two-hour Oxide and Friends session answering questions after shipping the first Oxide rack. Topics include making hardware as a startup and why Oxide chose illumos.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends faitswulff · 2023-07 · on “Oxide Computer, an efficient rack-scale computing system”
One benefit is that they're competing in an industry where the time to get a sled up and running for compute can be measured in weeks (they say they've heard up to 90 days) whereas their solution is basically plug and play - Bryan was trying to get Steve to admit set up took "hours" whereas Steve was hedging and saying customers could get started "within a week." They go into more details on their podcast, and this section in particular covers the bootstrap time: [this video] Pretty fascinating stuff.
Recommends cnst · 2025-08 · on “OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution”
> [this video] Great episode! The Dell PERC "parity issue" "you're the only customer having this issue" story is hilarious, reminds me of my own experience getting support over the years as a non-Windows user! Sadly, today, "non-Windows" is simply being replaced with "non-Linux", so, if you run BSD or Illumos, it's still the same issues. Oxide Computer is great, I really do hope they succeed, because it does seem like an uphill battle!
Cites bcantrill · 2023-07 · on “Ask HN: Any Hardware Startups Here?”
We have talked quite a bit about what it's like to be making hardware as a startup in our Oxide and Friends podcast[0] -- and one might be especially interested in the Q&A we did on Monday[1] after our launch got quite a bit of attention here on HN.[2] [0] [LINK] [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]
Cites bcantrill · 2023-07 · on “The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives”
Yes! There are lots of ways in which we are nothing like these big IBM systems (we are, for example, entirely open -- like POWER, but very unlike AS/400 or Z series machines), but we definitely admire the robustness of these machines! Indeed, arguably to a fault, as I likened us to the AS/400 in a VC pitch[0] -- which (despite the potential accuracy of the historical analogue) is as ill-advised as it sounds... [0] [this video]
Cites bcantrill · 2023-07 · on “A Day in the Life of an IPv6 Packet on Illumos”
Not unrelated, of course -- but it was certainly not the foregone conclusion that you might expect![0] [0] [this video]
Cites bcantrill · 2024-01 · on “Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack”
Keep in mind that Helios is really just an implementation detail of the rack; like Hubris[0], it's not something visible to the user or to applications. (The user of the rack provisions VMs.) As for why an illumos derivative and not something else, we expanded on this a bit in our Q&A when we shipped our first rack[1] -- and we will expand on it again in the (recorded) discussion that we will have later today.[2] [0] [LINK] [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]
Cites ubedan · 2025-08 · on “OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution”
"There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ... Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead…well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do." I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and it very well could rise again for those users that want/need robust stability. One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company as their hypervisor. They published their reasoning for choosing illumos here: [LINK] [this video]