[re-lre-l]

I am a huge fan of SmartOS. Back in the 2010s (around 2012), I was advocating its use in production at a small startup I worked. The SunOS kernel, ZFS, zero install, immutable core, convenient way to manage containers and VMs together - all of this looked great on paper, especially containers.

In reality, I ended up running almost everything in VMs. The only thing worked well natively was nginx. MongoDB, Mysql, even our php backend (some libraries) had issues, unfortunately.

A year ago, I considered SmartOS again as a home lab driver, and no success again, Linux just has better support: drivers, pci passthrough, etc... and now with containers+vm through Proxmox or anything else. You can even run a k8s+kubevirt with zfs practically out of the box as a complete overkill though.

[fridder]

not sure if you have given FreeBSD a chance yet and it has an in-progress jail/vm frontend: https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve

[rtaylorgarlock]

Ah, very cool. Thanks for sharing; will try it out

[abrookewood]

You can get some of that with IncusOS (https://linuxcontainers.org/incus-os/introduction/), which includes ZFS, immutability and manages both containers and VMs. I haven't used the OS yet, but have been enjoying Incus + Ubuntu.

[rufugee]

Using incus heavily on Omarchy here and love it. I created a script to read yaml configs and create ephemeral incus containers with certain capabilities and certain directories mounted within. It's a wonderful experience for sandboxing Claude Code.

[abrookewood]

Interesting idea. How short lived are the containers?

[rufugee]

As short-lived as I want them. Recreating them is one command and about 10 seconds (I have scripted apt/gem/etc installs as a part of the recreation).

I tend to use them for a bit, and then destroy/rebuild. Think days, not weeks.

[gr4vityWall]

These days, you're indeed better off using Illumos/SmartOS to run GNU/Linux zones/VMs, rather than native applications, from what I hear.

[ninninninnin]

Until you OOM ... Have fun with the kernel implementation differences between Solaris and linux

[throwawaypath]

OOM in Solaris is much better than in Linux.

[gigatexal]

If you’re just going to run things in VMs then QubesOS one might as well

[Zaskoda]

So many PHP libraries are just wrappers for some other library. I think that's mostly a strength, but in this case it was clearly a weakness.