OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI

So we are now nested, what, six deep in forks? I've long since lost track: OpenSolaris =&#62; OpenIndiana =&#62; Illumos =&#62; this new thing ? are there some in-between steps?<p>And we don't have 100% solaris api/abi compatibility.<p>Or a Sun compiler.<p>Or Sun drivers, necessarily.<p>Or a real guarantee of future source releases from Oracle.<p>Who/what is this for?

My understanding of hardware support from SmartOS and Illumos was that it only worked on Intel hardware and not AMD. Is this still the case?<p>Relevant to this discussion : Joyent releasing SmartOS <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2887170" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2887170</a><p>AMD support from SmartOS wiki: <a href="http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Technical+FAQs#SmartOSTechnicalFAQs-WhataboutAMDsupport%3F" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Technical+FAQs#S...</a>

I gotta say, ZFS+KVM sure seems like an awesome combo. Any ideas how this is different than SmartOS?

Can anyone elaborate: why all these cloud webhosting people are taking legal risks of Oracle changing license for (Open)Solaris or closing this OS project entirely, legal risks of being sued by Oracle for patent infrigement / whatever else legal bullshit?<p>They could just port KVM to FreeBSD instead; FreeBSD already has ZFS, DTrace and all other necessary bells and whistles for cloud webhosting infrastructure. But in contrast to (Open)Solaris they have community support for new hardware, a lot of already working drivers for existing hardware and also much safer legal position.<p>Are there any technical difficulties with porting KVM to FreeBSD? Can anyone elaborate?

I would love to have a special laptop edition of a OS like this.<p>Some nice features:<p>A nice VM overview/start/manage screen A way to group VM's so it starts multiple VM's with a single "click" (in a pre defined order).<p>Switching between VM's with a shortcut and/or alt-tab/expose visual style.<p>Host menu to openen up new VM's, looking at stats etc. maybe a fold down over the current VM

I'm not to familiar with the Illumos world. Would this be the equivalent of a new Linux distribution?