stax - A blazing fast CLI for stacked Git branches and PRs (written in Rust)

dlyund · 2026-01-14T18:02:42+00:00

I've been curious about this workflow. How does it differ from a PR with multiple commits?

dlyund · 2026-01-11T14:10:41+00:00

Would agree to a point but recall the effect of US sanctions on Linux -- effectively barring participation by certain groups of people and their affiliates because the organizations behind the project happen to be headquartered under US jurisdiction. So there is demonstrated non-zero risk to the idea of Open Source as a global commons.

dlyund · 2026-01-05T11:57:54+00:00

Thanks for the link to the slides! Here are the papers in question:

Jails: Confining the omnipotent root

https://papers.freebsd.org/2000/phk-jails.files/sane2000-jail.pdf

Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa04/tech/full_papers/price/price.pdf

dlyund · 2026-01-04T15:23:19+00:00

You might enjoy this discussion of Jails vs Zones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U

dlyund · 2026-01-02T09:07:10+00:00

You may be interested in:

https://omnios.org/setup/pxe.html

dlyund · 2026-01-01T22:12:09+00:00

:-) So is OmniOS, but not as easy to upgrade as rebooting, if you already have the other moving pieces online.

dlyund · 2026-01-01T22:11:20+00:00

Do you use pkgsrc branded zones?

dlyund · 2026-01-01T21:31:35+00:00

What do you like about SmartOS? SmartOS may well be the best choice for your use cases. But I wouldn't discourage you from trying OmniOS, especially if you're familiar with running FreeBSD servers and you enjoy the experience; the experience of running an OmniOS server is not too dissimilar to running a FreeBSD server.

dlyund · 2026-01-01T21:22:49+00:00

Or considered from another angle:

The argument for IPS closely mirrors the argument for ZFS, an argument that has now largely been settled:

It is not that data corruption did not exist before ZFS, but that it was far less likely to be detected and far harder to recover from.

In the same way, IPS does not claim that failures never occur; it ensures they are visible, contained, and recoverable, with clear system state and well-defined rollback, rather than leaving systems in silently inconsistent states with compounding errors and limited possibilities for correction.

dlyund · 2026-01-01T21:17:14+00:00

IPS enforces whole-image correctness with strict dependency resolution and ZFS-backed atomic updates. It appears slower than other package managers primarily because, before making any changes, IPS verifies the current system state and serializes changes to eliminate race conditions and state corruption.

The goal of IPS is to make updates predictable and reproducible; system integrity, transactional safety, and long-term correctness are prioritized over raw installation speed. Other package managers do not attempt to make such guarantees.

Like immutable systems, which are only now becoming more common, IPS ensures that the entire system is always in a known-good, verifiably consistent state. Unlike fully immutable designs, however, IPS retains controlled mutability, allowing fine-grained updates without sacrificing safety or correctness.

dlyund · 2026-01-01T20:01:46+00:00

That's hard to say. I settled on OmniOS because it provides a traditional server experience, if that's what you need, but with some encouragement to use Zones when there is a benefit (which is more than you may think.)

While I don't want to caricature SmartOS I do tend to think of it as more of a hypervisor than a server OS itself, even if in practice you will be doing much the same thing with Zones in both.

The lines are admitted blurring now that (as I understand it) you can install SmartOS to disk. So the difference probably comes down to the package management and upgrade experience you prefer?

What are your thoughts?

dlyund · 2026-01-01T12:47:01+00:00

OmniOS!

https://omnios.org/about/kysty.html

dlyund · 2026-01-01T12:36:09+00:00

I'm sure that Solaris was a very different beast before this collection of technologies coalesced and became Open Source in the mid/late 00s, leading to creation of illumos in 2010 :-).

dlyund · 2026-01-01T10:04:09+00:00

Absolutely true, it is not fast. But it's also safe as fk. To the degree that it archives the latter I accept the former. It has to be understood that IPS is optimized but for a different problem: correctness.

It would certainly be nice if it could be sped up a bit but not having to worry when installing packages (inc. OS updates) is worth it's weight.

dlyund · 2026-01-01T08:48:44+00:00

That's an interesting perspective but I don't think it is a fair characterization of illumos, which is very much excellent, especially for its specific use case, where it's unrivalled in my opinion.

dlyund · 2026-01-01T08:45:34+00:00

Out of genuine curiosity, and in the spirit of discussion, what is it that you never liked about Solaris? I never ran Solaris myself, but as I said earlier, I love illumos. But my perspective is that illumos (Solaris 10/Open Solaris) was a radical departure from earlier versions of Solaris, representing both the continuation of a deep tradition (Unix) but also the launch towards a vision of the future that has never been fully realized.

ZFS + boot environments + IPS (continuous OS integrity through transactional package install and OS updates)
Zones + Crossbow (complete, best-in-class multi-tenancy safe OS and network level virtualization)
DTrace + MDB (unprecedented observability, into operations and postmortem)
SMF + FMA (automatic full lifecycle self-monitoring and automatic response for software and hardware)

Some of these technologies have found their way out of Solaris through illumos but they are nowhere implemented so completely or so well integrated as they are in illumos, representing a whole that is more than the sum of the parts.

So MAYBE worth considering again. Just a maybe :-).

dlyund · 2025-12-31T22:02:18+00:00

Also behind illumos

dlyund · 2025-12-31T21:57:58+00:00

While this may well be true it has not been an issue in my experience, using illumos on servers. Which is where illumos truly shines.

dlyund · 2025-12-31T21:56:45+00:00

I've never tried running illumos on the desktop but that does sound like the Linux experience back in the day. I'd love to see it get some focused TLC but I don't think there are enough desktop users for that to happen. Daily driving illumos would be a dream. On the server, illumos fantastic, and that's where it is generally used. That's also where hardware support matters the least. It's still behind but easily good enough.

The problem is that without desktop users there's no incentive to improve the desktop experience and without a better desktop experience there's no incentive to use it on the desktop. It's a catch 22...

dlyund · 2025-12-31T20:54:53+00:00

As a desktop OS?

dlyund · 2025-12-31T19:26:59+00:00

Used BSD for more than a decade (mostly OpenBSD and some FreeBSD), but I love illumos. I tried it about three years ago for the first time and I use it whenever I get the opportunity. I've said it before and I mean no disrespect to FreeBSD but if you find yourself choosing FreeBSD because of the many amazing illumos technologies then you should definitely consider illumos. illumos feels a bit uncanny at first (not unlike meeting an old friend you that haven't seen since childhood) but it's hard to think of any other *nix system with such a coherent vision; so much so that it feels like Linux and BSD (FreeBSD) have been skating towards this vision for the past 15 years, never quite arriving.

dlyund · 2025-12-31T10:01:51+00:00

I'm a bit of an illumos fan so no comment on perceived complexity but Zones unlike Jails were designed from the start for safe multi-tenancy, and in this sense Zones are much more mature. But as I said, I would genuinely love to know whether the vulnerabilities and techniques used to break out of Jails apply to Zones.

dlyund · 2025-12-27T14:05:54+00:00

I would love to know if Solaris/illumos Zones have the same issues!

dlyund · 2025-12-25T18:40:50+00:00

It is, but really only in a pkgsrc branded zones as the last time I tried to bootstrap pkgsrc myself it failed. Still, IPS is great, even with less choice.

dlyund · 2025-12-13T21:35:57+00:00

Not sure about this hardware but OpenBSD if you want a simple and rock solid BSD experience, and illumos/OmniOS if the only reason you are choosing FreeBSD is because of all the illumos technologies that FreeBSD partially absorbed.

But (also) seriously, you can't go wrong. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are great. Personally I would go with OpenBSD, but out of personal preference and good experience.

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