illumos-gate VS linux

Compare illumos-gate vs linux and see what are their differences.

linux

Linux kernel source tree (by torvalds)
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illumos-gate linux
36 1,042
1,692 187,405
1.3% 1.2%
9.6 10.0
5 days ago 1 day ago
C C
- GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

illumos-gate

Posts with mentions or reviews of illumos-gate. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-22.
  • C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2025
  • Oxide Cuts Data Center Power Consumption in Half
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2024
  • The Last Sun Sparc Workstation
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Oct 2024
    It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/
  • CVE-2023-2163: How we found and fixed an eBPF Linux Kernel Vulnerability
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Aug 2024
    DTrace and eBPF are "not so different" in the sense that dtrace programs / hooks are also a form of low-level code / instruction set that the kernel (dtrace driver) validates at load. It's an "internal" artifact of dtrace though, https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/master/usr/src/... and to my knowledge, nothing like a clang/gcc "dtrace target" exists to translate more-or-less arbitrary higher-level language "to low-level dtrace".

    The additional flexibility eBPF gets from this is amazing really. While dtrace is a more-targeted (and for its intended usecases, in some situations still superior to eBPF) but also less-general tool.

    (citrus vs. stone fruit ...)

  • "Doors" in Solaris: Lightweight RPC Using File Descriptors (1996)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jul 2024
  • What Is PID 0?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jun 2024
    We can see it is called sched. Why sched? This article talked about the historic role of PID 0 in process swapping. Process swapping is a scheduling problem (like a lot of problems in software). This is why swappers are traditionally called medium-term or memory schedulers. Illumos generally gives most groupings of kernel worker threads their own processes with their own PIDs, but one, called "sched", remains in PID 0, and its responsibility? Process swapping:

    https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/579c23696ac6891...

    The Wikipedia article has now been hastily edited, and replaces a claim that was true only of certain Unixes other than Linux with a claim true only of certain Unixes including Linux. Is this an improvement?

  • eBPF Documentary
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2024
    It may become a footnote on Linux, but Linux isn't the only system out there -- and DTrace remains alive and well in many systems (not least in its reference implementation in illumos[0]).

    [0] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate

  • Oxide Computer releases distribution of illumos intended to power the Oxide Rack
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2024
    Nobody's paid to have it pass Open Group Unix Branding certification tests

    https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

    so it can't use the UNIX™ trade mark.

    But it's got the AT&T Unix kernel & userland sources contained in it.

    PDP-11 Unix System III: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/ut...

    IllumOS: https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/b8169dedfa435c0...

  • In OpenZFS and Btrfs, everyone was just guessing
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023
    > it seems like this bug might actually date back to the very beginning of ZFS with Sun

    Looks like you might be right about that. The oldest commit referenced in the fix [0] was from 2006[1], which was just months after Sun released ZFS.

    [0] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15571

    [1] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/c543ec060d

  • Getaddrinfo() on glibc calls getenv(), oh boy
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Oct 2023

linux

Posts with mentions or reviews of linux. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-02-07.
  • RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13 is now available
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2025
    It's not about the arm as an instruction set (I'm writing this from the arm machine running linux). It's the drivers, bootloader, all the fdt glue. You don't just need support for arm, but for the specific board on the specific SOC.

    Want a different board on a soc that already works? Welcome to the world of writing this kind of things: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/arm64/boo... and compiling the kernel from some dude's branch instead of going with mainline.

  • Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Resigns from Linux Kernel
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Feb 2025
    Marcan is still posting to the LKML as himself too and he said he might contribute patches in the future if he feels like it. He just resigned as a maintainer:

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1b3291f00013c86a9bb...

    So the title is factually correct (unless Sven Peter is another of his aliases, of course).

  • Beej's Guide to Git
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2025
    If the tool is designed to support the use case of the 1% with concessions for the other 99%, the tool is badly designed.

    Git is designed for the case where you have multiple remotes with no central authority. Except that’s not how any project I’ve _ever_ worked on functions in reality. It makes sense for some applications, but if I say that I run Linux, there’s an assumption that I’m running something compiled from https://github.com/torvalds/linux - I.e. there is a central space.

    I’ve used git and perforce in anger for a decade, in teams of 1 to 150+ (with a brief blip in the middle where I tried plasticscm which was a mistake), and I’ve been the “git guy” on teams during that time. If git’s defaults were tweaked for “one origin, probably authoritative” and it had better authentication support out of the box it would be a significantly better experience for 99% of people. Those 1% of people who are left over are going to customise their config anyway, so make them add the distributed-defaults=true flag and the rest of us can get on with our work.

  • Resistance to Rust abstractions for DMA mapping
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2025
    Nitpick: There are actually a handful Rust drivers in-tree, e.g. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/ph...

    Though, I think all of them are direct ports of existing drivers.

  • Rust in Peace
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
  • Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jan 2025
    Many changes require multiple smaller changes, so this is not always possible.

    For me the commit message should tell me the what/why and the diff is the how. It's great to understand if, for example, a change was intentional or a bug.

    Many times when searching for the source of a bug I could not tell if the line changed was intentional or a mistake because the commit message was simply repeating what was on the diff. If you say your intention was to add something and the diff shows a subtraction, you can easily tell it was a mistake. Contrived example but I think it demonstrates my point.

    This only really works if commits are meaningful though. Most people are careless and half their commits are 'fix this', 'fix again', 'wip', etc. At that point the only place that can contain useful information on the intentions are the pull requests/issues around it.

    Take a single commit from the Linux kernel: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/08bd5b7c9a2401faabd...

  • What does "supports DRM functions and may not be fully accessible"mean for SSDs?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2025
    > Indeed where the DRM error message comes from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/ffd294d346d185b70e28b...

    That's for compact flash cards. Based on the kernel message from the StackExchange post we can tell it isn't a CF. So it's not coming from the line you linked, but 4 lines below.

  • Exploring AI for Refactoring at Scale
    5 projects | dev.to | 19 Jan 2025
    I’ve randomly selected screenshot-to-code. While it is definitely not a linux repo, it is old enough to already face tech debts and far more complex than those MVP projects people are building with AI. git clone https://github.com/abi/screenshot-to-code
  • Ask HN: Why it is difficult to copy strings from web pages?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2025
    Maybe it is just me being delusional, but I found it more and more difficult to copy strings, especially substrings from web pages.

    Example:

    Click this link (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1115/files#diff-821e5c0c63b06b94e7d7a562e03e7b0c6c633b21f0e0ef82c9c9e80a1df4b304) and tries to copy "namespace" from the "ipc/namespace.c". I couldn't do it.

    Yes I know there is a "Copy" button to the right side of it -- but I don't want the whole path. Plus, the real issue is not with the Linux repo, because most of its filenames are short anyway, but with my work repos, where you can get "dir1/dir2/abc_def_ghy.yaml", and I only want the "abc_def_ghy" part.

    I think the problem is that -- there are too many clickable items on web pages nowadays. If it's clickable, users can't click in the middle without opening something.

    What do you think? This has been a constant minor frustration for me for a long time.

  • Lenovo Officially Announces the Legion Go S Handheld with SteamOS
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jan 2025
    I'd say on PC because it's easier to name the modern controllers that don't use Xinput: Nintendo, Sony, and Steam. Basically every other controller targeting PC from the old Logitech F710 to the Flydigi Apex 4 will be using XInput to communicate with the computer. Even the Hori Steam Controller has an alternative XInput mode despite being the only current standalone Steam Controller.

    Steam Link the streaming application does require the Steam. Steam Link the discontinued hardware was able to run local applications without Steam.

    The Steam Controller defaults to a keyboard and mouse mode until it receives a signal from Steam. So even on Linux, the Steam controller required Steam until someone reverse engineered the controller protocol and contributed it to the kernel. Can read about it in the driver comment header: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/hid/hi...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing illumos-gate and linux you can also consider the following projects:

glibc - GNU Libc

zen-kernel - Zen Patched Kernel Sources

linux - Kernel source tree for Raspberry Pi-provided kernel builds. Issues unrelated to the linux kernel should be posted on the community forum at https://forums.raspberrypi.com/

serenity - The Serenity Operating System 🐞

unix-v6 - UNIX 6th Edition Kernel Source Code

DsHidMini - Virtual HID Mini-user-mode-driver for Sony DualShock 3 Controllers

awesome-space - 🛰️🚀A list of awesome space-related packages and resources maintained by The Orbital Index

winapps - Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

ipd - illumos Project Discussion

freeCodeCamp - freeCodeCamp.org's open-source codebase and curriculum. Learn to code for free.

orbiter - Open-source repository of Orbiter Space Flight Simulator

Git - Git Source Code Mirror - This is a publish-only repository but pull requests can be turned into patches to the mailing list via GitGitGadget (https://gitgitgadget.github.io/). Please follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches procedure for any of your improvements.

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