Illumos

Illumos is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It has been developed since 2010 and is based on OpenSolaris, after the discontinuation of that product by Oracle. It comprises a kernel, device drivers, system libraries, and utility software for system administration. Its core has become the base for many different open-sourced [|Illumos distributions], in a way similar to how the Linux kernel is used in different Linux distributions.

Name

The maintainers write illumos in lowercase, since some computer fonts do not clearly distinguish a lowercase L from an uppercase i: Il. The project name is a combination of words illuminare from the Latin for to light, and OS for Operating System.

History and development

Illumos was announced via webinar on 3 August 2010, as a community effort of a group of core Solaris engineers to create a truly open source Solaris, by swapping closed source bits of OpenSolaris with open implementations. OpenSolaris itself is based on System V Release 4 and the Berkeley Software Distribution.
The original plan explicitly stated that Illumos would not be a distribution or a fork. However, after Oracle announced the discontinuation of OpenSolaris, plans were made to fork the final version of the Solaris ON kernel, allowing Illumos to evolve into a kernel of its own., efforts focused on libc, the NFS lock manager, the crypto module, and many device drivers, to create a Solaris-like OS with no closed, proprietary code., development emphasis includes transitioning from the historical compiler, Studio, to GCC. The "userland" software is now built with GNU make, and contains many GNU utilities such as GNU tar. At the time, Illumos had been lightly led by founder Garrett D'Amore and other community members/developers such as Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, via a Developers' Council.
As of 2019 its primary development project, illumos-gate, derives from OS/Net, which is a Solaris kernel with the bulk of the drivers, core libraries, and basic utilities, similar to what is delivered by a BSD "src" tree. It was originally dependent on OpenSolaris OS/Net, but a fork was made after Oracle silently decided to close the development of Solaris and unofficially killed the OpenSolaris project.

Features

ZFS, a combined file system with integrated logical volume management, providing a high level of data integrity for very large storage capacities.
Solaris Containers, a low overhead implementation of operating-system-level virtualization technology for x86 and SPARC systems.
DTrace, a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine, a virtualization infrastructure. KVM supports native virtualization on processors with hardware virtualization extensions.
OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control, a set of features that provides an internal network virtualization and quality of service including: virtual NIC pseudo-network interface technology, exclusive ip zones, bandwidth management, and flow control on a per interface and per VNIC basis.
Distributions

Distributions, at illumos.org

DilOS, with Debian package manager and virtualization support, available for x86-64 and SPARC.
NexentaStor, distribution optimized for virtualization, storage area networks, network-attached storage, and iSCSI or Fibre Channel applications employing the ZFS file system.
OmniOS Community Edition, takes a minimalist approach suitable for server use.
OpenIndiana, a distribution that is a continuation and fork in the spirit of the OpenSolaris operating system.
SmartOS, a distribution for cloud computing with Kernel-based Virtual Machine integration.
Helios, a distribution powering the Oxide Computer Rack.
Tribblix, retro style distribution with modern components, available for x86-64 and SPARC.
v9os, a server-only, IPS-based minimal SPARC distribution.
XStreamOS, a distribution for infrastructure, cloud, and web development.

Discontinued:

Dyson, derived from Debian using libc, and SMF init system.
OpenSXCE, distribution for developers and system administrators for IA-32/x86-64 x86 platforms and SPARC.
Illumos Foundation

The Illumos Foundation was incorporated in the State of California in 2012 as a 5016 trade association, with founding board members Jason Hoffman, Evan Powell, and Garrett D'Amore.
As of 2024, its status in California is "dissolved".