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SmartOS is the core operating system for Triton datacenter -- https://www.tritondatacenter.com Triton is the orchestration of SmartOS compute nodes.
Code + issues are active under https://github.com/TritonDataCenter (smartos-live, illumos-joyent, triton, etc.), and docs are at https://docs.smartos.org/.
SmartOS is released every two weeks, and Triton is released every 8 weeks -- see https://www.tritondatacenter.com/downloads
And Triton object storage will have S3 support in the next release!
[edit: removed semicolon from link!]
Glad to see SunOS/Solaris still alive in some form in the Open Source space. Had heard of Illumos and OpenIndiana, but didn't know about SmartOS. It's definitely won me over with the NetBSD pkgsrc package manager... Very nice.
> SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS.
Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox? I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead of manually setting PVE on each. Ansible or salt is an option but that tends to degrade over time.
I remember several years ago, SmartOS was being mentioned many times on HN.
Joyent, the company behind SmartOS, was since acquired, and I don’t usually see anyone talking about SmartOS nowadays.
Is anyone on HN using SmartOS these days?
Genuine question: in 2026, what does SmartOS (or any other Illumos/Solaris OS) buy you over something like Linux or FreeBSD?
SmartOS has grown a web UI in the last couple years, too. I haven't gotten around to trying it out on my last remaining SmartOS homelab box. I enjoy the CLI tooling very much. For some, though, the web UI might be worthwhile: https://docs.smartos.org/web-interface/
I was intrigued by the idea that in the Manta object store you could schedule computations on the storage nodes. However I am not sure how much improvement that brings in practice. Any practical experience with this?
I know someone who runs SmartOS for their home server. They only had good things to say about it. It's been working well for a few years now.
I’m confused by the wording “without wasting disks for the base OS” - I wouldn’t normally consider this a “waste”, would anyone else? There are big downsides to running off of a USB key all the time unless I’m missing something
wait this seems totally awesome? i hadnt remembered until reading the comments now that this was a joyent thing, and that somehow it has largely disappeared despite seeming like an awesome way to do all sorts of things.
So, Solaris > OpenSolaris > Illumos > SmartOS? Do I have that right?
great product. sadly dead! bought up by Samsung and now the briantrust has left to go work at a much cooler place
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See also: Qubes OS, which is a desktop OS based on virtualization, https://qubes-os.org
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.