Friday, January 17, 2014

LX zones back in illumos and OpenIndiana?


Branded Zones


If you've used Solaris and typed man lx, you saw:

Standards, Environments, and Macros lx(5)NAME

lx - Linux branded zone

DESCRIPTION



The lx brand uses the branded zones framework described in
brands(5) to enable Linux binary applications to run unmodi-
fied on a machine with a Solaris Operating System kernel.

The lx brand includes the tools necessary to install a Cen-
tOS 3.x or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x distribution inside
a non-global zone. The brand supports the execution of 32-
bit Linux applications on x86/x64 machines running the
Solaris system in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode.

Supported Linux Distributions
The lx brand emulates the system call interfaces provided by
the Linux 2.4.21 kernel, as modified by Red Hat in the RHEL
3.x distributions. This kernel provides the system call
interfaces consumed by the glibc version 2.3.2 released by
Red Hat.

In addition, the lx brand partially emulates the Linux /dev
and /proc interfaces.


But if you've followed the story, lx branded zones became a mere historical reference. Until now.

Reintroduction

David Mackay posted the following webrev to the illumos developer mailing list:

http://cr.illumos.org/~webrev/DavidJX8P/lx-zones-restoration/


This is great, and I hope this gets reintegrated and pushed in the next openindiana!

François
@f_dion

No comments: