[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOSce r151028 with production ready Bhyve hypervisor released.

[Tobias Oetiker]

OmniOSce - r151028 - released
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New Features
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The OmniOSce team and the illumos community have been very active in creating new features and improving existing ones over the last 6 months. Highlights of this new release include:

* Production-ready Bhyve hypervisor. For years, OmniOS has provided a linux kvm based hypervisor. With this release, we are adding a second option. The bhyve hypervisor from the BSD world has been made a first class illumos component through the combined efforts of Pluribus networks and Joyent with extra help from the FreeBSD community. It provides massively faster disk and network io than the kvm hypervisor as it does not rely on qemu emulation for these services but comes with a super optimised native driver implementation.

* Branded zones for bhyve and KVM virtual machines. Running a virtual machine inside a zone provides an additional layer of security as any success in breaking out of the virtual machine container will only result in access to the branded zone which itself guarantees strong isolation from the global zone. On top of added security, zones also provide protection against hyper-threading attacks such as L1TF and Portsmash, and allow strict resource controls for cpu, disk and network access. Our website contains documentation (https://omniosce.org/info/bhyve_kvm_brand) on how to make use of these new zone types.

* ZFS support for mounting filesystems in parallel. This significantly improves boot time for systems with many filesystems.

* All userland tools are now compiled with gcc7 and several 32-bit only packages have been moved to 64-bit only.

* Many packages have been updated to newer releases like Python 3.5, Perl 5.28, OpenSSL 1.1. And developers can now start using gcc 8 on OmniOS.


New Hardware Support
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* Emulex 31000/32000-based Fibrechannel cards.
* ATTO Celerity FC-162E Gen 5 and Celerity FC-162P Gen 6 Fibrechannel cards.
* QLogic 16Gb/s Gen5/6 fibrechannel cards.
* QLogic QL41000/45000 series devices.
* NVMe 1.3 devices.
* SMB access to some HP scanner models.

OmniOSce Newsletter
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Since the start of OmniOS Community Edition project, we have predominantly announced our new releases via twitter. With r151028 we are now also offering a newsletter with announcements of updates, bug fixes and new releases. You can subscribe here http://eepurl.com/dL1z7k

Release Notes and Upgrade Instructions
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This is only a small selection of the new features, and bug fixes in the new release; review the release notes at https://omniosce.org/releasenotes for full details and find upgrade instructions at https://omniosce.org/upgrade

Commercial Support
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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 https://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 - https://omniosce.org/patron.

cheers
tobi

-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
www.oetiker.ch tobi at oetiker.ch +41 62 775 9902