The SmartOS / Illumos community is pretty vibrant and active! Also the OpenZFS community is also very much alive. Yeah Solaris could have been bigger if they hadnt killed Opensolaris but I think things turned out pretty well actually!

Can SmartOS / Illumos run on Xen/AWS? OpenSolaris had Xen support at one point.

The Xen support was opensolaris running a Xen Hypervisor. That was reverted from opensolaris, but later added to DilOS [1].

See OmniOS[2] - an Illumos distro that provides AMIs [3].

BTW, SmartOS and OmniOS both have support for Linux binaries within Zones, a superior Container technology.

[1] http://www.dilos.org

[2] https://omnios.omniti.com

[3] https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/Installation

The Omni folks got this working for OmniOS[1]; we would love SmartOS support on AWS, but (as one might imagine) we at Joyent don't have an immediate commercial interest in it. That said, we do have a clear indirect commercial interest in it, and we would happily engage/encourage any effort for SmartOS on AWS. Given that it's been done for OmniOS, it shouldn't be difficult...

[1] https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/Ec2Ami

I got SmartOS running on EC2 back in 2015 as an exercise.

https://twitter.com/aszeszo/status/658115638683115521

The details below may be useful for whoever wants to get the latest images running on EC2 again. Unfortunately, I don't have time to tinker with this stuff after-hours anymore:

Required patches from Delphix illumos tree (at the time):

58b782ef6ec93fef26ab349aff81e8748f673b24 32722 Xen PV disks don't have properties set 09846dfe2cfc30fe54d80637aea0aa38b64127ed 33942 Creating xdf.conf file causes the kernel to panic on boot 2c4f787714ba44c84b8ed4dfb7ad05288c942a0e 34224 Xen HVM VM with 32 VCPUs hangs on boot 1fc3b35c42d5aeadb1e9c8b7308f3c33cfba00ac 34424 Some PV devices should not be configured in HVM mode 91f305d4c307729116dfa89022334083bf817058 34508 Expose xdf minor nodes when in PV-HVM mode 718bba6535f2a3423643aede0067775730a15a23 35310 Fix iostat on the EC2 instances

Files that had to be updated in the the vanilla SmartOS image after building the smartos-live tree:

platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/cmdk platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/rtls platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/sd platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xdf platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xnf platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xpv platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/amd64/xpvd platform/i86hvm/kernel/drv/xpvd.conf platform/i86hvm/kernel/misc/amd64/hvm_bootstrap platform/i86hvm/kernel/misc/amd64/hvm_cmdk platform/i86hvm/kernel/misc/amd64/hvm_sd

I would be cool to see official SmartOS images on EC2!

Microsoft supports Windows on multiple cloud providers, while competing vigorously to be the "best cloud" for running Windows.

Joyent's business team surely knows the difference between demand generation for SmartOS (anywhere) and a marketing pitch for Joyent as the "best cloud for running SmartOS at scale".

There is nothing indirect about a marketing funnel that makes it easy for the largest developer community to evaluate your operating system.

SmartOS can run under Xen.

The version I am running doesn't work with more than one CPU (SmartOS Live Image v0.147+ build: 20160622T220759Z), and I think the network interface defaults to using the realtek 8139 driver.

This was enough for my situation, but not optimal for heavy use.

But why would people develop for Solaris if there is Linux and the BSDs? Sincere question

One of the things that stands out to me personally is that Illumos/ Solaris values debugging (both in-situ and postmortem) far more than other platforms. Both ZFS and dtrace are brilliant examples of this as well as mdb but I'm much less well versed in the later. If you're interested I'd recommend browsing through posts of perhaps to two largest Illumos deployments.

https://www.joyent.com/blog

http://www.circonus.com/blog

Solaris had a lot of useful and unique features, and was backed with a substantial support apparatus. If you developed a feature for Solaris that got in, it'd be documented and supported to quite a high degree.

If you wanted support from the primary vendor of your OS, and wanted a pretty high-quality Unix, Solaris would fill that niche for you. There's definitely a market for that, but not nearly enough to keep Sun or Solaris alive.

OpenSolaris did not accept contributions.

That's the thing when you look at it from today's standpoint and you are correct there. But jump back to January 2005. You got DTrace and ZFS and branded Zones. Way ahead of the curve. Just look at that release. But sadly it all got overshadowed by Oracle.

And the service/init management stuff, that was long before systemd.

Stability.

a.k.a. stagnation?

No, the ability for the machine to not crash or need to be rebooted for long periods of time. Linux has gone completely downhill in this respect for the past few years. Switching to Solaris on my main Unix workstation has been a breath of fresh air compared to the constant naggering from Linux systems for updates, but I like old school...because it seems to 'just work'.

Many Linux systems now support livepatch to update the kernel for security fixes without rebooting.

ZFS storage layers built on OmniOS/OpenSolaris/Illumos enjoy more years of maturity (and thus demonstrated stability) than upcoming versions for Linux/Ubuntu. If you have to build large storage in-house, stability is a high priority.

I doubt it would have met with long term success, Sun played a lot of the same stupid liscening games they did with Java.

Exactly. You couldn't build OpenSolaris without proprietary blobs, the build process only worked correctly inside Sun's network, code contributions were not accepted. Under Sun the OpenSolaris project had already started to take technical decisions behind closed doors more and more (it was easy to confirm this from their bug tracking system that differentiated between public and private tickets). I dont understand why people think Sun was the open source god in the sky. Perhaps too much emotional attachment from the "good old days", but I can't relate.

6 or so years ago I thought Solaris would have a fighting chance. I was naive.