Dyson OS Is Trying To Pair Debian With The Illumos Kernel

Not to be confused with the Dyson vacuum cleaners, Dyson OS is an attempt at becoming a general purpose operating system based on Debian while using the Solaris-derived Illumos kernel.

The goals of Dyson aren't far off from StormOS that was an OS trying to run Ubuntu off OpenSolaris. Besides using the Illumos/OpenSolaris kernel, Dyson is looking to ultimately become an official Debian port -- similar to the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port that runs the Debian userland atop the FreeBSD kernel.

While community-based Solaris-derived distributions are no longer too common these days, Dyson is still ticking away. The latest Dyson LiveCD ISO iamge is from October of this year and supports x86_64 hardware. Dyson is able to support the X.Org Server, Java, and has full SMP support. Among the tasks still being addressed are enabling support for Zones, packaging KVM and QEMU, porting libusb, providing a GNU-toolchain-friendly DTrace, switching to GRUB2 as the boot-loader, read/write support for common Linux file-systems, porting glibc to use instead of libc, and porting the Debian Installer.

Those wishing to learn more about Dyson OS can visit OSDyson.org.