Further reading & resources

solnix documents what is specific to solnix; for illumos and Nix themselves, the canonical upstream material is excellent and we point at it rather than duplicate it. This is a curated reading list in the style of the SmartOS “illumos and SmartOS basics” page: the books, manuals, and sites worth knowing, grouped by topic, plus the solnix-specific resources.

Many of these describe Solaris/illumos as a general platform. The commands and concepts (SMF, ZFS, DTrace, zones, MDB, boot environments) apply directly to solnix, which is an illumos distribution — solnix changes how the system is built and activated (Nix), not how these subsystems work.

illumos itself

• illumos.org — the project home: news, downloads, the distribution list.
• illumos documentation — the docs this handbook’s structure and tone are modeled on (features, user guide, developer guide).
• illumos manual pages — the authoritative reference for every command and subsystem below.
• solnix man pages — the man pages that ship with the packages actually in the binary cache, browsable A–Z by package and section (like manned.org, for solnix). Coverage is early and grows as more packages land; for anything not yet here, the upstream illumos man pages are the reference. Every package in search also links straight to its man pages.
• illumos-gate — the source tree solnix inherits its kernel and load-bearing userland from. See How solnix is built.
• The illumos Developer’s Guide — building and contributing to the gate.

Basic system administration

• Service Management Facility smf(7) — the SMF concept page; start here for services. Then svcs, svcadm, svccfg. See SMF services.
• beadm(8) — boot environment management. See ZFS boot environments.
• OpenZFS documentation — the cross-platform OpenZFS admin docs; plus zpool and zfs. See ZFS storage.
• zonecfg(8) / zoneadm(8) — zone administration. See Zones and LX-branded zones.
• dladm(8) / ipadm(8) / flowadm(8) — the Crossbow network- virtualization stack. See Networking (Crossbow).
• The classic Solaris/illumos System Administration material (network, dladm, ipfilter, users, RBAC/pfexec) — much of it still accurate for illumos; the manual pages are the current source of truth.

Not yet documented (known gaps)

Accurate detail on these is thin in this handbook today; they are real illumos topics worth a page as solnix matures. Listed here so they aren’t lost:

• RBAC / privileges in depth — roles, profiles, authorizations, and the full privilege set. Briefly covered in illumos features (pfexec, least-privilege); a dedicated walkthrough is a gap. Reference: rbac(7), privileges(7), pfexec(1).
• Kernel modules — modinfo, modload/modunload, add_drv, and how the gate’s kernel modules load. Not yet written up; relevant once solnix builds kernel bits. Reference: modinfo(8).
• FMA in depth — partly covered in illumos features and Debugging (fmadm faulty, fmdump); the diagnosis engine and event protocol are a gap.
• pkgsrc — the package system SmartOS and some other illumos distributions use, and the thing solnix replaces with Nix. Mentioned in the history; a comparison page is a gap.

Performance, profiling, and programming (DTrace)

• DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD (Gregg & Mauro) — the DTrace book; the canonical reference and a deep performance-analysis text.
• dtrace(8) — command reference. See DTrace.
• Brendan Gregg’s DTrace one-liners and Systems Performance — practical starting points for observability.

Kernel and debugging

• The Modular Debugger mdb(1) and the MDB guide — inspecting live processes, core files, and kernel crash dumps.
• Writing Device Drivers — including the chapter on debugging, testing, and tuning drivers.
• Debugging broken systems and debugging applications — the illumos user-guide pages this handbook’s Debugging page is adapted from.
• Solaris Internals (McDougall & Mauro) — the classic deep dive into the kernel architecture illumos descends from.

Nix and NixOS

• nix.dev — the official Nix learning hub.
• Nix manual · Nixpkgs manual · NixOS manual — the CLI, packaging, and module system solnix reuses. See Learning Nix.
• nixbsd — NixOS retargeted to the BSDs; the closest prior art to what solnix does for illumos, and the playbook solnix follows. See How solnix is built.

solnix-specific

• The solnix Handbook — this book.
• The binary cache — cache.solnix.io; add it as a substituter and skip the recompilation tax.
• Package search — search.solnix.io; full-text search over the solnix package set.
• Community pulse — active machines, regions, and popular packages (opt-in; see Privacy & telemetry).
• Contributing — repos, mailing lists, and how to help (every architecture needs a builder).