SmartOS is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

SVR4 Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is calle ...

based on the

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser 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, and ot ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

that combines

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around th ...

technology with Linux's KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributed to the

illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device ...

project. It features several technologies:

Crossbow A crossbow is a ranged weapon using an elastic launching device consisting of a bow-like assembly called a ''prod'', mounted horizontally on a main frame called a ''tiller'', which is hand-held in a similar fashion to the stock of a long fi ...

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 under ...

, KVM,

ZFS ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...

, and

Zones Zone or The Zone may refer to: Places Climate and altitude zones * Death zone (originally the lethal zone), altitudes above a certain point where the amount of oxygen is insufficient to sustain human life for an extended time span * Frigid zone, ...

.. Unlike other illumos distributions, SmartOS employs

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...

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 19 ...

package management. SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances. It was originally developed for and by

Joyent Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics. Services Triton, Joye ...

, who announced in April 2022 that they had sold their business supporting and developing it 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 that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad v ...

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 ( ...

. 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 Joyent 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,

and

MongoDB Inc. MongoDB, Inc. is an American software company that develops and provides commercial support for the source-available database MongoDB, a NoSQL database that stores data in JSON-like documents with flexible schemas. History The company was first ...

(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 an isolated SmartOS environment to run your applications in, like having a virtual machine without the hypervisor overhead.

LX (Linux Emulation)

LX-branded zones provide the Linux system call interface, allowing you to run most Linux application binaries without recompiling them for SmartOS. This facility is available in several distributions, including Illumos, 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 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 Samsung software Virtualization software