alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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These days, you're indeed better off using Illumos/SmartOS to run GNU/Linux zones/VMs, rather than native applications, from what I hear.
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.
not sure if you have given FreeBSD a chance yet and it has an in-progress jail/vm frontend: https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve