LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos

Caption notes

At LISA11, Bryan Cantrill recounts how illumos went from a downstream OpenSolaris project to an independent fork. He uses DTrace and ZFS to illustrate how engineers reshaped Solaris in response to practical debugging and storage problems. He distinguishes access to most of the source from the ability to maintain the whole system independently. In his account, some components remained closed, so illumos contributors rewrote them or brought in other open implementations. He then describes the upstream project ending real-time source releases and explains how downstream work continued. This guide presents a participant’s 2011 account. Demonstrations, performance, licensing interpretations and personal allegations were not independently verified.