The OmniOS Community Edition Association is proud to announce the general availability of OmniOS - r151030.

OmniOS is published according to a 6-month release cycle, r151030 LTS takes over from r151028, published in November 2018; and since it is a LTS release it also takes over from r151022. The r151030 LTS release will be supported for 3 Years. It is the first LTS release published by the OmniOS CE Association since taking over the reins from OmniTI in 2017. The next LTS release is scheduled for May 2021. The old stable r151026 release is now end-of-life. See the release schedule for further details.

This is only a small selection of the new features, and bug fixes in the new release; review the release notes for full details.

If you upgrade from r22 and want to see all new features added since then, make sure to also read the release notes for r24, r26 and r28.

New Features (since r28)

Before upgrading make sure to review the upgrade notes in the release notes

The OmniOS team and the illumos community have been very active in creating new features and improving existing ones over the last 6 months.

System Features

  • Support for the SMB 2.1 client protocol has been added illumos issue 9735.

  • The console now has full framebuffer support with variable resolution, more colours and unicode fonts. This is also visible in the boot loader.

  • Several 32-bit only packages have been moved to 64-bit only.

  • OmniOS userland is now built with gcc version 8.

  • A default installation now includes ntpsec in place of ntp; the package can still be removed if not required.

  • A default set of system default parameters are now installed in /etc/system.d/_omnios:system:defaults. These can be overidden if necessary by creating additional local files under /etc/system.d/.

Commands and Command Options

  • The ipadm and dladm commands now show IP and link information if invoked without arguments.

  • dladm show-vnic now shows the zone to which each VNIC is assigned.

  • The default behaviour of recursive chown and chgrp has changed and these commands are now safer with respect to following symbolic links. If only the -R parameter is provided then these utilities now behave as if -P was also specified. Refer to the chown(1) and chgrp(1) manual pages for more information.

  • The /usr/lib/fm/fmd/fmtopo command has improved support for enumerating USB topology.

Zones

  • The defaults for new zones have changed. Creating a new zone now initially sets brand=lipkg and ip-type=exclusive.

  • Zone brand templates are available allowing zones to be created within zonecfg via: create -t <type>.

  • pkgsrc branded zones are now available; these are sparse zones with pkgsrc pre-installed.

  • illumos branded zones are now available; these run an independant illumos distribution under the shared OmniOS kernel. Subject to the constraints imposed by the shared kernel, it can be used to run a different version of OmniOS userland or even a different illumos distribution.

  • Zone VNICs and networking information can now be dynamically managed as part of the zone configuration. Refer to https://omniosce.org/setup/zones for more details.

  • A firewall policy can now be enforced on a non-global zone by creating ipf configuration files under <zoneroot>/etc/. Rules defined in these files cannot be viewed nor overridden from inside the zone. Additional rules can be defined within the zone. This works for all zone types apart from kvm zones; it is even possible to define a global firewall policy for a bhyve zone.

  • The memory footprint of zones has been reduced by disabling unecessary services.

ZFS

  • Support for importing pools using a temporary name.

  • Support for variable-sized dnodes.

Package Management

  • pkg verify has gained an option to verify individual files: 
    # chown sys /var
# pkg verify -p /var
PACKAGE                                                            STATUS
pkg://omnios/SUNWcs                                                 ERROR
      dir: var
              ERROR: Owner: 'sys (3)' should be 'root (0)'
  • Individual origins for a publisher can be enabled and disabled using -g to specify the origin: 
    # pkg set-publisher -g https://pkg.omniosce.org/bloody/fred/ --disable omnios
# pkg publisher
PUBLISHER    TYPE     STATUS   P LOCATION
omnios       origin   online   F https://pkg.omniosce.org/bloody/core/
omnios       origin   disabled F https://pkg.omniosce.org/bloody/fred/

  • Package manifests now include SHA-2 hashes for objects, and extended hash information for binary objects, alongside the existing SHA-1 information for backwards compatibility with older pkg versions.

  • Automatic boot-environment names can now be based on the current date and time as well as the publication date of the update. Refer to the pkg(5) man page for more information. Example:

    # pkg set-property auto-be-name time:omnios-%Y.%m.%d

Hardware Support

  • Support for modern AMD and Intel systems.

  • New para-virtualisation drivers for running OmniOS under Microsoft Hyper-V/Azure (beta). These are delivered by the new driver/hyperv/pv package.

  • New bnx (Broadcom NetXtreme) network driver.

  • Improved support for USB 3.1.

Release Notes and Upgrade Instructions

For full relase notes including upgrade instructions; review the release notes and find upgrade instructions at omniosce.org/upgrade

OmniOSce Newsletter

Since the start of OmniOS Community Edition project, we have predominantly announced our new releases via twitter. We are now also offering a newsletter with announcements of updates, bug fixes and new releases. You can subscribe here.

Commercial Support

Have you ever wondered how OmniOS development gets financed? You may have noticed that there is no big company bankrolling it all. The way we keep afloat is by the companies who rely on OmniOS powered servers taking out support contracts for their hardware. How about you? Visit omniosce.org/support for more details and to generate a quote. If you aren’t in a position to take a support contract, please consider becoming an OmniOS patron to help secure its future - omniosce.org/patron.

About OmniOS Community Edition Association - this Swiss Association is responsible for the ongoing development and maintenance of OmniOS, having been established in Summer 2017 after OmniTI announced their withdrawal from the project.

OmniOSce Association Aarweg 17, 4600 Olten, Switzerland