First publicly released in April 2012, OmniOS is a continuation of the OpenSolaris legacy and aims to address the longstanding issues that occurred when Oracle discontinued open development of the operating system. OmniOS builds on Illumos to make a complete Operating System solution. OmniOS is a free and open alternative to Oracle Solaris 11. Affordable OmniOS support is offered at several levels and a discount is offered to educational and non-profit institutions.
Key highlights of the release include:
New ZFS features
- rewritten write throttle to produce more consistent performance under constant load
- L2ARC compression
- Zpool features: spacemap_histogram, multi_vdev_crash_dump and extensible_dataset
Driver updates
- Added support for Intel I210/I211 and I217/I218 network interfaces
- New open-source driver for HP SmartArray controllers
Package signing has now been added to OmniOS. This is important to those who work within enterprise deployments or who operate within regulated environments. Administrators can now be assured that the package content they receive originates from a trusted source and has not been modified in transit.
Other Notable Changes include:
- The Internet Packet Disturber (IPD), a new kernel facility for simulating pathological networks by inducing packet drops, delays and corruption
- Dump volumes may now be placed on multi-vdev pools such as raidz or striped mirrors.
- Oracle Java SE 6 has been replaced with OpenJDK 7.
The newest version of OmniOS is immediately available for download at omnios.omniti.com. In addition, the new version will soon be updated within Amazon Web Service (AWS) as a public Amazon Machine Image (AMI), for those deploying in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud, designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. OmniOS brings the power of ZFS and DTrace to developers working in this environment.