Introduction

Introduction #

Thank you for choosing OmniOS! In this chapter will cover the following

  • The goals of the OmniOS Project.
  • What OmniOS can do.
  • How OmniOS is developed

Project Goals #

As mentioned in the OmniOS: Motivation and Design presentation, the goals of the project are the following

  • Just Enough Operating System: OmniOS has the tooling required to build itself
  • ABI Stability: old software runs on new installations
  • ZFS: OmniOS can run root-on-ZFS, supports ZFS Boot Environments, fault management, administrative delegation and more
  • Zones: completely isolated virtual servers within a single operating system instance
  • DTrace: comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for debugging production systems

OmniOS Usage #

OmniOS has a large collection of software and subsystems, which allows it to be used as:

  • Web server
  • File server
  • Email server
  • Storage server
  • Virtualization server
  • And more…

OmniOS Development #

The development of OmniOS happens on GitHub, here are a list of some important repositories:

  • omni: Tools to automate the setup and maintenance of an OmniOS build server or zone.
  • omnios-build: Build system for OmniOS
  • omnios-extra: Extra packages for OmniOS
  • kayak: PXE-enabled network imaging of OmniOS

Anyone is welcome to fork, modify and send PRs to the OmniOS project!