Porting KVM to SmartOS - Brian Cantrill, Joyent, KVM Forum 2011
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as evidence that the KVM port was hard work and as background on Cantrill's illumos virtualization experience.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2012 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites bdha · 2012-04 · on “OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI”
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]
Cites Annatar · 2016-05 · on “Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source”
> 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
Cites bcantrill · 2016-12 · on “"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term"”
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 s
Cites bcantrill · 2018-11 · on “Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing”
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]
Cites panick21_ · 2024-09 · on “Why Oxide Chose Illumos”
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.