[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana Intro questions

[Lonnie Cumberland]

Thanks for responding to my inquiry about OpenIndiana.

Basically, I really like the small footprint of SmartOS and its ability to
be a good hypervisor (Linux and Windows) but for a desktop project, I
wanted to be able to have a minimal OS that basically just run the
containers/zones and then have one of the containers have a X-Server such
that the base OS does not have applications installed in it. Then the GUI
zone could be passed through to the video driver thus all of the X-Server
stuff is also in a container.

This was an idea that I have been playing around with for some time as was
going to look into possibly using SmartOS, but it is really not set up for
this and which is where I started digging into Illumos and subsequently
OpenIndiana to see if something like this might make a good starting point
for this work.

Thanks again,
Lonnie

On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 12:00 PM, Alexander Pyhalov <alp at rsu.ru> wrote:

> On 10/23/17 06:21 PM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
>
>> Greetings All,
>>
>> 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, it can. illumos-kvm is not a part of illumos-gate, but is a separate
> codebase, developed mainly by Joyent. We compile and deliver it, but KVM
> benefits from several system features (the one which comes to my mind is
> VND), which are available in SmartOS, but not in other distributions
> (AFAIK). OI can run KVM guests on modern Intel hardware, but SmartOS can be
> more efficient, for example, in network virtualization.
> --
> Best regards,
> Alexander Pyhalov,
> system administrator of Southern Federal University IT department
>