I haven't run SmartOS for about a year, but I was using it to run Linux binaries. It was fundamentally great. Stable, efficient ... great. Joyent were nailing compatibility bugs in a matter of days.

A couple of small things - one is that entire distributions "just as they are" are unlikely to work, in much the same way as trying to boot a docker container doesn't. Lots of things rely on /proc and cgroups and these are big, ugly interfaces that are never going to see parity between the two OS's. /proc is (amusingly) built as a r/o filesystem that has an htop-esque thing writing state onto it constantly.

The big one is memory allocation. Linux will let memory allocations fail. It will also just shoot apps in the head if it wants to. Solaris does not do such shit and will return the malloc call when it has allocated some memory - even if it's next week some time. On more than one occasion I have been completely locked out of a SmartOS box because of this and one ends up having to be really, really careful with allocation strategies as a result.

SmartOS will run Linux distros in an LX zone, much like Solaris did. There are some limits around what syscalls are available, but generally most software works or a bug can be opened. There is support for Linux containers natively, but the last I checked only Docker v1 repos were supported. v2 is forth coming. Virtualization-wise, Bhyve is supported as is KVM.

If you are running open source, there are usually SmartOS packages in pkg src, which makes SmartOS zones a CPU/memory/security bargain. https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/

Is that for ports of linux software, or for "Triton" images?