SmartOS is a
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...
SVR4 hypervisor based on the
UNIX
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
that combines
OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system for SPARC and x86 based systems, created by Sun Microsystems and based on Solaris. Its development began in the mid 2000s and ended in 2010.
OpenSolaris was developed as ...
technology with
bhyve and
KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributes to the
illumos
Illumos (stylized as "illumos") is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It has been developed since 2010 and is based on OpenSolaris, after the discontinuation of that product by Oracle. It comprises a kernel, device driver ...
project. It features several technologies:
Crossbow
A crossbow is a ranged weapon using an Elasticity (physics), elastic launching device consisting of a Bow and arrow, bow-like assembly called a ''prod'', mounted horizontally on a main frame called a ''tiller'', which is hand-held in a similar f ...
,
DTrace
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time.
Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released un ...
,
bhyve,
KVM,
ZFS
ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System) is a file system with Volume manager, volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris (operating system), Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, includin ...
, and
Zones.
Unlike other
illumos distributions, SmartOS employs
NetBSD
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...
pkgsrc
pkgsrc (''package source'') is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 1 ...
package management. SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances. It was originally developed for and by
Joyent, who announced in April 2022 that they had sold their business supporting and developing of Triton Datacenter and SmartOS t
MNX Solutions It is open-source and free for anyone to use.
SmartOS is an in-memory operating system and boots directly into random-access memory. It supports various boot mechanisms such as booting from hard drive,
USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...
thumbdrive, ISO Image, or over the network via PXE boot. One of the many benefits of employing this boot mechanism is that operating system upgrades are trivial, simply requiring a reboot from a newer SmartOS image version.
SmartOS follows a strict local node storage architecture. This means that virtual machines are stored locally on each node and do not boot over the network from a central
SAN or
NAS
Nas (born 1973) is the stage name of American rapper Nasir Jones.
Nas, NaS, or NAS may also refer to:
Aviation
* Nasair, a low-cost airline carrier and subsidiary based in Eritrea
* National Air Services, an airline in Saudi Arabia
** Nas Air (S ...
. This helps ensure that network latency issues are eliminated as well as to preserve node independence. Multi-node SmartOS clouds can be managed via the open-source MNX Triton DataCenter (formerly known as SmartDataCenter) cloud orchestration suite or via the Project Fifo
Open Source SmartOS Cloud management platform built on
Erlang.
In 2012,
Joyent and
MongoDB Inc. (formerly 10gen) partnered to improve the scalability of SmartOS.
Virtualization
SmartOS includes a number of virtualization technologies, including:
* Zones, a light weight operating system-level virtualization; analogous to "jails" or "containers" as provided by other systems
* Hardware virtualization
Native Zones
Native zones provide SmartOS applications isolation environment, based on
Solaris Containers, an
OS-level virtualization, without the overhead of hardware-emulating
HVM virtual machines.
LX zones (Linux system call emulation)
LX-branded zones provide the Linux system call interface, enabling the execution of Linux application binaries without recompiling them for SmartOS. This facility is available in several illumos distributions, including SmartOS and OmniOS.
KVM
KVM and QEMU were ported to SmartOS in 2011, and can be used on Intel CPUs with VMX and EPT support.
bhyve
The Bhyve hypervisor from
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...
was ported to SmartOS. This is the preferred virtualization when required to use HVM for Windows or Linux guests.
References
External links
*
*
SmartOS Docs
{{Solaris
Joyent
OpenSolaris
Solaris software
OpenSolaris-derived software distributions
Samsung software
Virtualization software
Free software programmed in C
Software using Common Development and Distribution License