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What is illumos?¶

illumos is a consolidation of software that forms the core of an Operating System. It includes the kernel, device drivers, core system libraries, and utilities. It is the home of many technologies including ZFS, DTrace, Zones, CTF, FMA, and more. We pride ourselves on having a stable, highly observable, and technologically different system. In addition, illumos traces it roots back through Sun Microsystems to the original releases of UNIX and BSD.

illumos itself does not offer an OS distribution -- rather, it is the core from which distributions can be created. In this sense, illumos is similar to a BSD source tree, or Linux's kernel.org.

Please see the history page for more information about the origins of illumos.

License¶

illumos is available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

Community Values¶

Empathy for users as a core engineering value
Maintaining code quality through peer review

Technology Features¶

The following are shared development tenets and features for distributions utilizing illumos:

Stability
SMP support for many CPUs
Security facilities like Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and Privileges
Multi-tenancy with Zones
Deep system introspection with DTrace
A unified Fault Management Architecture (FMA) for monitoring hardware
Network virtualization with Crossbow
Hardware virtualization with KVM
Excellent manual pages
Source code for the entire system

For more in-depth descriptions, please see the features page.

Uses for illumos¶

While it can be and is used in nearly any situation where a UNIX-type server is needed, illumos excels at storage applications, large multi-tenant systems, and other cloud-centric uses.

Have a look at who is using illumos to see what illumos technologies are being used for!

Supported hardware platforms¶

illumos currently best suports 64-bit x86 hardware from Intel and AMD.

There are also several SPARC distributions of illumos; if you are interested in running illumos on SPARC, please refer directly to those distributions' docs.

To determine if a specific piece of hardware will work with illumos, please refer to the Hardware Compatability List.

For pre-defined builds of server-grade hardware, you may also refer to Joyent Engineering Manufactoring database.

illumos Development Model¶

Please refer to the illumos Developer's Guide, as well as the Building illumos and contribution sections of this documentation.

Contributing to illumos¶

Please see the community and contribution guides if you'd like to participate in the project.

Third Party Software¶

illumos does not itself ship third party software, or contain software like webservers and so forth.

Distributions include their own package management.