illumos is a fully open-source effort to produce a highly reliable, performant, and scalable operating system with leading-edge technologies and tools.

We bring together a passionate community of developers and a growing base of commercial participants (Delphix, DEY, Joyent, Nexenta, OmniTI).

illumos is the successor to the OpenSolaris project, and our culture draws heavily on what distinguished Sun engineering culture: systems engineering (component, interaction, and interface design with a strong commitment to minimalism), architectural coherence (design cooperation across subsystems), measurement-driven development (strong visibility tools, mature methodologies for their use, embedding both thoroughly in the development process). We have adapted it to work beyond the framework of a single corporate entity via federated efforts of individuals and companies with distinct interests in the technology (cloud infrastructure, storage systems, application servers, and others), sharing an interest in commodity hardware and production-driven innovation.

illumos features an unparalleled combination of technologies, including the highly reliable ZFS storage stack, dynamic tracing (DTrace), FMA predictive self-healing, SMF for persistent process and system resource management, zones for lightweight isolation and virtualisation, a port of the KVM hypervisor for full system virtualisation, Crossbow for virtualised networks, a high-performance kernel CIFS/SMB client and server implementation, and the MDB kernel and application debugger. All of these subsystems are actively developed by the illumos project. Both ZFS and DTrace have been ported beyond illumos (notably to FreeBSD, OS X, and Linux), where our community has taken a leading role in coordinating new feature development across platforms, serving as a reference platform and repository.

Projects

File system disturber File system disturber kernel module used for injecting pathological behaviour into vfs calls. It could be used for monitoring how software behaves when the file system does things wrong.
Rearchitect and replace interrupt distribution The interrupt balancer intrd will be rewritten in C to remove Perl as build and run dependency. Besides a compatibility mode that preserves the original intrd algorithm, new placement functions for core, power and cache affinity are evaluated and implemented.
Unionfs Implementation Implementation of UnionFS as an extension of the LOFS kernel module.