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A Linux/UNIX ABI is probably the minimum cost of entry for an OS to participate in this idea, at least in the short-term, since everything for the server is currently built primarily for Linux.



Er. The OS minus the OS services?

This idea would mean you're not running the OS's kernel, and you are only running the userspace components that were written against Linux emulation, which are often just Linux binaries copied from some Linux distribution.

We have that. It's called Linux.


And NT and Solaris both support the Linux ABI now. OS X / iOS is basically the only holdout with nontrivial market share.


I don't know that Oracle Solaris supports the Linux ABI. The revival of Linux ABI support in zones (containers) is a SmartOS (and illumos) thing, and we've diverged significantly from Solaris at this point.


Aw, looks like it was Oracle Solaris 10 only.

(Is there a good generic word for Oracle Solaris + SmartOS + Illumos + etc.?)


SmartOS is really just a distribution of illumos; so are OmniOS, OpenIndiana, etc. We are all very similar as we push and pull from our common source base.

When Oracle took the source closed again, they essentially forked their own private product. They have diverged significantly enough from everybody else that it's not really helpful to include them in the same family anymore.

tl,dr: we just call it all "illumos" now.


Is anyone still using Solaris?

I knew it had fans but I assumed people moved on after Oracle closed the open source development.


I will bet lots of places in the enterprise, which didn't care how Solaris was developed in first place, and were already Sun customers before they open sourced it.


I'm sure.

But where I was it seemed like it was open sourced there was a lot of excitement about its future, and after being bought by Oracle and closed source, not so much.




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