The maintainers writeillumos in lowercase,[6] since somecomputer fonts do not clearly distinguish a lowercaseL from an uppercasei:Il (seehomoglyph).[7] The project name is a combination of wordsilluminare from the Latin forto light, andOS forOperating System.[8]
TheOpenIndiana operating system is one of many Illumos distributions.
Illumos was announced viawebinar on 3 August 2010,[9] as a community effort of a group of core Solaris engineers to create a truly open source Solaris, by swapping closed source bits ofOpenSolaris with open implementations.[10][11][12] OpenSolaris itself is based onSystem V Release 4 (SVR4) and theBerkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
The original plan explicitly stated that Illumos would not be a distribution or afork. However, afterOracle announced the discontinuation of OpenSolaris, plans were made to fork the final version of the Solaris ON kernel,[a] allowing Illumos to evolve into a kernel of its own.[13] As of 2010[update], efforts focused on libc, theNFS lock manager, the crypto module, and many device drivers, to create a Solaris-like OS with no closed, proprietary code. As of 2012[update], development emphasis includes transitioning from the historical compiler,Studio, toGCC.[14] The "userland" software is now built withGNU make,[15] and contains many GNU utilities such asGNU tar. At the time,[clarification needed] Illumos had been lightly led by founder Garrett D'Amore and other community members/developers such asBryan Cantrill andAdam Leventhal, via a Developers' Council.[16]
As of 2019 its primary development project, illumos-gate, derives from OS/Net (aka ON),[17] which is aSolaris kernel with the bulk of the drivers, core libraries, and basic utilities, similar to what is delivered by aBSD "src" tree. It was originally dependent onOpenSolaris OS/Net, but a fork was made afterOracle silently decided to close the development of Solaris and unofficially killed the OpenSolaris project.[18][19][20]
DTrace, a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), a virtualization infrastructure. KVM supports native virtualization on processors with hardware virtualization extensions.
OpenSolaris Network Virtualization and Resource Control (or Crossbow), a set of features that provides an internal network virtualization and quality of service including: virtual NIC (VNIC) pseudo-network interface technology, exclusive ip zones, bandwidth management, and flow control on a per interface and per VNIC basis.
TheIllumos Foundation was incorporated in theState of California in 2012 as a501(c)6 trade association, with founding board members Jason Hoffman (formerly atJoyent), Evan Powell (Nexenta), and Garrett D'Amore.
As of 2024, its status in California is "dissolved".[28]
