Times have changed, and Linux (now at 4.10) now does have an answer to each of these, particularly:
- ZFS: ZFS on Linux, now part of Ubuntu. btrfs has been coming along as well, and I included a couple of btrfs performance analysis screenshots in my DockerCon talk last week, since we're testing it.
- DTrace: enhanced BPF now provides the raw features (as of Linux 4.9), and is merged in the Linux kernel (unlike SystemTap etc).
If illumos were proposed today, I would not get behind it as I no longer think it makes sense when you're comparing it to Linux 4.10. It's no longer 2010.
Good luck to everyone moving on. I've published a lot on debugging and tracing on Linux, which should be helpful.
It seems to me, unfortunately, that since there are so many OpenSolaris descendant distros, and that Linux can only barely sustain 3 large commercially supported general purpose distros (Redhat, Ubuntu & Suse, but please correct if I am wrong), that there has to be some amount of consolidation that needs to/will take place if OpenSolaris/Illumon is to survive.
11 is just the number of currently active distributions and is not meaningful for getting an idea of where the most stuff happens (By the same logic Distrowatch lists 288 active Linux distributions). There is only few main distributions with most mindshare (SmartOS, OpenIndiana and OmniOS. Nexenta is also a big one but I heard they don't get along well with the upstream).
Illumos is the upstream base and AFAIK Illumos community and distribution communities are indeed in tight relationship where the contributions to individual distributions find their way into the base not a long time later. And as a project it has a larger scope compared say, just the Linux kernel. It is the kernel, drivers, base libraries, core utilities etc. so developers on these different areas still belong to same tight community.
https://omniti.com/remembers/2017/every-good-surge-must-come...
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> We still run quite a bit of infrastructure on OmniOS and expect to continue contributing
I'm not sure how to interpret this. They will simultaneously suspend development and continue contributions? That seems contradictory.
SmartOS: https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent and https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live
Triton (the orchestration around it): https://github.com/joyent/triton - this is the root repository of the project, there are many services which are linked to here: https://github.com/joyent/triton/blob/master/docs/developer-...
