You may have noticed that there hasn’t been an update on here in a while, and that’s because work on StormOS stalled shortly after the announcement of illumian. Really the project has been dead ever since NCP4 (the precursor to illumian) decided that the illumos userland (think coreutils, not illumos-userland) should take precedence over the GNU userland, and that illumos packages should be generated from the IPS metadata.
These two changes might not sound significant, but the truth is that doing things this way requires virtually every package imported from Debian to be adapted to work with the illumos userland, to be adapted to fit in with our differently organised core package structure, or both. On top of that we still needed to port them to the Solaris architecture. The extra overhead caused by this was enough to kill the project.
Illumian tries to fix these problems by taking it a step further and removing all Debian packages and instead opting to use illumos-userland (a fork of Oracles userland-gate) and some conversion tools to generate packages, and there’s nothing really wrong with doing this if you have the manpower, but what you’re left with in the end isn’t really Debian anymore and that doesn’t fit in with the vision that I had for StormOS.
Dyson tries to do things the way I would have liked to by combining the illumos kernel and libc with the Debian userland and libraries. It also doesn’t have any baggage from NCP and is free to move in whatever direction it sees fit (there is talk of moving to glibc in the future, an idea that I support). This is why I recommend that anybody hoping for another NCP or StormOS release looks to osdyson instead.