OmniTribblix

In Tribblix, it's a basic principle that I ship upstream software unmodified. I don't impose my own views on installation layout, nor do I customize it. Generally, I apply patches only to make stuff compile.

This means that what you see in Tribblix is exactly what the upstream author intended, and not some distro-specific bastardization of it.

It also makes my life easier, I don't have to maintain patches, and updating software is much easier if it's unmodified.

In particular, I use an absolutely vanilla illumos-gate. (For a long time it differed only in that I had the fix for 5188 applied, relevant because Tribblix actually uses SVR4 packaging, but now that's integrated I don't even need to do that.)

Again, this makes my life easier. (When you're maintaining a distro on your own in your spare time, making decisions that simplify your job is essential.)

But it also has another benefit: because I have no "special" features that I've added, I'm not tied to one particular version or variant or commit of illumos. Any version of illumos-gate will do just fine. When it comes time to make a release, I just clone the gate, build, and go.

What I could do, then, is build an instance of Tribblix atop some other fork of the gate. For example, illumos-omnios.

I did just that, built the gate (it needed a couple of changes to Makefiles because of the way that perl and snmp are slightly different in OmniOS than it is in Tribblix), created packages, built an ISO, booted and installed it in VirtualBox.

As expected, it just works.

But just demonstrating that it works isn't really the reason I wanted to do this. What I'm really after is the LX brand, which has been integrated into current OmniOS.

Installing an LX zone requires a Linux image. The original (Joyent) work was for their own deployment mechanism, using ZFS images. As soon as it was available in OmniOS the first thing I did was use tarballs, which OmniOS now supports. The easiest way to create a Linux image is to create a Docker container the way you like it, and then export it to a tarball. I did that for Alpine and installed a zone based on that.

Then you can do very simple things like:

# zlogin lx1 /bin/uname -a 
Linux lx1 4.4 BrandZ virtual linux x86_64 Linux

It's an attractive idea to simply use this as the base for the next Tribblix release. However, that requires illumos-omnios to be supported in the long term, which is currently at risk.