In August of 2010, Garrett D'Amore, Rich Lowe, and others forked OpenSolaris with the intention of reducing and eliminating its closed-source components. Unbeknownst to them, Oracle was planning to shut off publication of the OS/Net consolidation, which included the OpenSolaris kernel & system-critical user-space. This coincidence propelled the fork, illumos, into the vehicle in which OpenSolaris could continue, albeit under a different name.

illumos is now over five years old, and its distributions continue to fulfill the promise of OpenSolaris. illumos is the reference implementation of OpenZFS and DTrace. The SmartOS distribution has continued pioneering work in zones, commonly known outside Solarish circles as containers. Both OpenIndiana and OmniOS use the Image Packaging System (IPS) in traditional deployments. OpenIndiana and XStreamOS continue work on an illumos Desktop. DilOS (Debian) and Tribblix (SysV) use alternative packaging with illumos. Appliance distributions like NexentaStor and Delphix use and innovate with OpenZFS to great effect.

This talk will frame the history of illumos, and what it carries forward from Sun's engineering approach to Solaris.