omnios-build VS kayak

key features at OmniOS Community Edition

OS Challenge: Try out an Illumos (OpenSolaris) image in a VM (there are Solaris kernel options available in Proxmox). If you want something fun, install OmniOS and create a Linux zone on it. So cool to run Linux on Solaris. https://omnios.org/

While UTM is much better at resource usage, it's not perfect. Virtualbox seems to emulate more of a system instead of passing it through to the hypervisor and so is better for running more unusual OSes. I have two VMs there running Illumos which I have yet to figure out how to boot in UTM. A problem that I think is related to UTM's greater use of the hypervisor is that you can't suspend and resume VMs that use it instead of being emulated, so I've still got a few VMs hanging around in Virtualbox which spend most of their time suspended. Finally, what stops me from using UTM at work is that you can't use it as a Vagrant provider. This is incredibly annoying, as the lack of a decent virtualization application makes the otherwise very nice M1 Macs nothing more than pretty toys. I expect that this glaring lack will be fixed within the next couple of years.

Can anyone recommend a good place to start learning OmniOS? Coming from Debain world. Other than the documentation on omnios.org, I only found a few blog posts here and there...

OpenIndiana is pretty neat. It has quite a few cool features like Zones, DTrace and Crossbow. ZFS is another big feature but you have already said that you don't really care about that. Hardware support is kinda lacking, but improving. Also it's rolling release so if you're like me and don't like that, OmniOS might be a better option; it's another illumos based OS.

You're familiar with this project, right? https://www.illumos.org/ It is a continuation of Open Solaris, and is 100% open source. There is a subreddit for IllumOS. There are a couple very usable systems based on that code base as well. i.e. a stable server OS https://omnios.org and rolling release desktop/multi-purpose OS https://openindiana.org Both run the Solaris kernel and tools. If UNIX and operating systems development really interests you, you might also look at BSD UNIX. SunOS version 4 was based on BSD UNIX. Solaris (aka SunOS 5) was a hybrid BSD/SystemV OS. If I were just starting out learning UNIX operating system code, I would start with Minix (an OS written with teaching OS design in mind) and NetBSD (carefully minted OS to run on any architecture, developed slowly because of its high coding standards).

OmniOS is a still actively maintained Solaris derivative - maybe that will run? https://omnios.org

Neat ideas. Have you looked into MAAS for PXE booting? It might do a lot of the stuff you're looking for. If that's too heavy, I've also seen a lighter PXE manager called Kayak for OmniOS... it's written in python, so if you wanted to port it, it might not be hard. https://omnios.org/setup/pxe https://github.com/omniosorg/kayak