[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana Intro questions

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 23.10.17 um 17:21 schrieb Lonnie Cumberland:
> Greetings All,
Welcome to OpenIndiana!

>
> I have recently been playing around a little with SmartOS for running
> containers and hypervizing VM's for which it seems to work pretty well, and
> wanted to also investigate the desktop side of things as well so I hope
> that someone on the list will answer a few rudimentary questions to get me
> going with my OI explorations.
>
> I know that SmartOS can be a hypervisor to run the Linux, and Windows OS's
> as VM's in zones, but I was wondering if OpenIndiana was able to hypervize
> these OS's as well?
Yes, Joyent ported Linux KVM to SmartOS and integrated it into illumos. 
OpenIndiana uses
almost plain illumos for its base. Alas there is no nice frontend to it 
(like vmadm et al.) on OpenIndiana.
You can find some information about virtualisation on OpenIndiana on the 
wiki:
https://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/7.+Virtualization
>
> Basically, I am trying to find out if, beyond the desktop targeting of OI,
> and the server targeting of SmartOS, are there any other major differences
> in these distributions?
While OpenIndiana is a straight successor of OpenSolaris, SmartOS is 
stripped down to what
Joyent thinks they need for their Cloud systems. It's more like VMWare's 
ESXi plus ZFS.

>
> Also, in some basic reading and browsing, it seems that Illumos has the
> ability to do some GPU passthrough, if I remember what I ready albeit not
> too widespread, and I wanted to know if OpenIndiana had the same, or
> similar capabilities?
OpenIndiana has everything that illumos has. I am not aware of 
GPU-passthrough for illumos.
As soon as Joyent (or their customers) need it, I am sure the folks will 
create a solution.

Regards
Andreas