She's dead Jim

It looks like (if the rumor is true) that Solaris will be pushing up the daisies soon. Note: Solaris != SmartOS This has been a long time coming. Combine this with Fujitsu dumping SPARC for headline projects … yeah … its likely over. FWIW: I like SmartOS. The issue for it are drivers. We tried helping, and were able to get one group to update their driver set. But getting others to update (specifically Mellanox) will be even harder now (and it was impossible beforehand, for reasons that were not Mellanox’s fault). I’d like to use more SmartOS, but I keep running into things I can’t fix or work around. I can’t use my Mellanox 40+ Gb cards, or any Infiniband stack. I can’t use 100Gb cards. I can’t use Intel OPA. CUDA is right out. I had hoped that Samsung would be throwing beau-coup money at Joyent to really solidify the platform after the purchase. Still hoping. So our OS choices seem to be Linux based and BSD based going forward. We use BSD for specific functions, and Linux for many things. The closest thing I’ve found to SmartOS on Linux is RancherOS. It is not identical, but darn it, it is close to what we need, and I can replace the kernel, add in a few things we need. Ubuntu is making a strong play for this as well adding ZFS to its mix. But again, SmartOS != Solaris. I played with recent Solaris a few months ago to see how it had progressed. Still not that impressive (especially compared to SmartOS and others). So while Solaris is going away, I don’t think it will be missed greatly. If the licensing could be made to work to cross-pollinate between Linux and SmartOS, I’d bet we could solve the driver problem too. /sigh