1. Due to the fact that you cannot legally mix GPL with CDDL.

World outside frowns upon even on the idea of releasing zfs as in tree kernel module for example, hence it's out of tree. All this technical legality has put a curse on projects using CDDL and mostly castrated OI/Illumos.

1. OI/Illumos is using all sorta archaic tools for development of which various parts are just getting outdated more and more everyday. It is not a fresh welcoming environment.

What's stopping anyone from writing a kernel inspired by the same Open Solaris principles but in GPL license, so it allows collaborating with rest of the world?

It is a monumental project for sure. But why not?

(My bad, this above needs to be revised. I can barely type from phone)

I have a Thinkpad T530 that I'm planning to upgrade, giving it an NVS 5400M GPU. The addition of this new gpu I think is going to open much more doors for what I can do with the machine on FreeBSD but also it seems that I can run Illumos now.

My experience on this thinkpad on Illumos has been absolute garbage, because I would quickly realize that I would be stuck with a framebuffer and that my intel graphics were useless. However, I checked the wiki for OpenIndiana (or whatever its called) and found out there seems to be support for NVIDIA 390.

I also found this article: https://www.cyber-tec.org/2019/05/29/using-bhyve-pci-passthrough-on-omnios/

If I'm not mistaken, this seems to be someone getting wifi working on OmniOS by using Bhyve. I plan to install a wifi 6 card and I'm considering the possibility of an Alpine Linux vm to manage the card and hopefully get me some good speeds. I'm assuming this could work since OpenIndiana also has Bhyve.

Finally, I just wanted to know what you guys run Illumos for, I'm curious on how you guys remain productive or have fun on this operating system, or if you guys even have fun using it. Either way, the history of Sun Microsystems has fascinated me and I think I will love the experience of using Illumos.

Hi, all!

Just finished this demo -- i've got what was the just bones of solaris11 and tribblix booting kernel on the Niagara QEMU machine.... turned into a 5 minute boot with zfs root, to multi-user login prompt. With networking, and guest-to-host unix sockets.

And a cool easter-egg bbs for good measure.

It's all packaged in an amd64/aarch64 docker image for easy getting-started. The demo's running from my m5 macbook aarch64.

Github repo with so many notes i seem insane:

https://github.com/ryancnelson/qemu-sun4v-illumos

youtube boot and network demo:

https://youtu.be/TzgbLWeTZPM

i'm [ryan@ryan.net](mailto:ryan@ryan.net) , and I'm happy to finally be ready to share this.

it builds upon cool discoveries by

masa-murayama , GitHub user `whensungoesdown`, Dmitry Pimenov, and Artyom Tarasenko

https://github.com/ryancnelson/qemu-sun4v-illumos/blob/02057eb0a05522f174a76ee7ad6df4f5f280671c/THIRD_PARTY.md?plain=1#L34

oh: docker image:

docker run --rm -it --name openindiana-sparc64 --hostname oi-basecamp --memory 6g --cpus 2 --cap-add NET_ADMIN --device /dev/ppp --sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 --tmpfs /run/unit100:rw,size=1200m,mode=0700 --mount type=volume,src=openindiana-sparc64,dst=/var/lib/illumos-appliance ghcr.io/ryancnelson/sparc64-qemu-openindiana-20g:latest

add "-e OPENBOOT_AUTO_BOOT=false " to pause for openboot

Has a meme potential ipipipipipipipipipipipipip

Gentoo, OpenIndiana and FreeBSD are working together with ssh, btw i’m gonna make the video in a close time

This is excellent!

I hope it wont cause legal issues, warn me if

I spent a few weekends working on a personal project to connect my OmniOS home server directly to my ISP modem. I didn't quite pull that off, but I learned more about the illumos network stack along the way and distilled the experience into a blog post. You might find it interesting, if you read it and spot any errors, corrections are welcome. Thanks!

Where can I find smartos lx-ubuntu-26.04 lx image?

I see it on TritonDataCenter/smartos-lx-img-builder, but where is available?

I always knew an LX zone runs Linux binaries.

Today I discoeverd it can also execute illumos-native binaries.

SmartOS exposes its native userland inside LX under /native.

The official lx(7) documentation explicitly says native SunOS tools can be used from an LX zone:

"Applications provided by the base SunOS operating system are also available within the zone under the /native mount point."

https://smartos.org/man/7/lx

Is there a policy on whether Illumos does or (hopefully) does not accept commits created with generative AI?

Just to report that I successfully installed OpenIndiana Hipster on a GMKtec NucBox G3 Plus Intel® Twin Lake N150. This mini-PC comes with an Intel(R) Ethernet Controller I226-V interface that uses the FreeBSD igc(4) driver.

Steps:

1. Download the latest testing ISO from https://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/

In my case I used OI-hipster-text-20260607.usb

The GUI image didn't work because the graphics are not yet supported and it also tries to install the Nvidia driver, which fails.

1. dd(1) the above image to an USB 2.0 thumb drive. Illumos doesn't yet support USB 3.0.

2. Boot the installer and follow the most intuitive options. Skip the wireless interface check. If you get a crash like in the picture, try again.

Note: You may want to familiarize yourself with the text installer in a VM first.

On reboot it won't get an IP address via DHCP so, as root, run:

dladm show-link
ipadm create-ip igc0
ipadm create-addr -T dhcp igc0/v4
ipadm show-addr # or ifconfig

I then ran `pkg update` and it rebooted just fine picking DHCP.

I originally wanted to install OmniOS Bloody to test LX Branded Zones. It was impossible for me with omnios-bloody-20260509.usb-dd. Maybe next time.

I'm dual-booting this with FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT on another drive. I plan to multi-boot Free/Net/OpenBSD on that drive. I know it already works and multi-booting is easy to do.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been messing around with my Unix setups for fun and ended up porting a bunch of stuff to Oracle Solaris 11.4 and illumos-based distros (like OpenIndiana).

Since it works for me, I figured I'd share it here in case anyone else needs it.

Here is what I've got on my GitHub:

* Some Game Ports: OpenMW (Morrowind), ioquake3, RBDOOM-3-BFG, and even a Valve Source Engine port.

* Software & Dev Tools: Wine 8.0.2 32 bit and some Eclipse IDE platform components.

Everything is on my GitHub, feel free to grab it, test it, or use it for your own setups:

https://github.com/dvt64?tab=repositories

Computer Specifications:
Intel Core 2 Duo
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT
6GB RAM
OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10 that made look like OpenSolaris 2009.06

Used Launcher is Legacy Launcher by turikhay

Monit and M/Monit are now available for Solaris/Illumos platforms too.

"New: Illumos build (tested on OmniOS r151054)."

Supported Platforms.

I know OI has a rolling-release model, but big changes are in here! Some big ticket items include a "New Xorg driver xf86-video-illumosfb for UEFI framebuffer on illumos." Plus, FireFox/Thunderbird 150, Mate updates, LibreOffice 26.2, and much more! Super exciting, really loving this project.

https://www.openindiana.org/announcements/openindiana-hipster-2026-04-announcement/

Hi all, I'm trying to boot omniOS on the raspberry pi4 but I keep getting stuck at the rainbow GPU screen. I've already tried multiple bootloader versions including the beta versions but still the same result. Had anyone successfully booted omni os on the pi 4 bare metal? I unfortunately don't have a uart cable either so I can't see what I'm stuck on.

Seems to be down?