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But if you've followed the story, lx branded zones became a mere historical reference.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

dtrace with Python

dtrace: Python instrumentation

...where time becomes a loop

Last year, I mentionned that it was time for the Python community to embrace dtrace. I've gotten questions left and right, at user groups, through email etc as to what is dtrace and how it ties in with Python.

This week, a few posts on the Argentinian and Venezuelan Python lists on debugging Python and a total absence of a mention of dtrace and I knew I had to do a writeup. But before we get into the details, let's step back a bit.

Head over to my Python blog to read the rest of the article.

François
@f_dion

Illumos on RaspberryPi

Starting point

I have now dedicated two Raspberry Pi to work on some bare metal (C, assembler, no operating system) code. I'm hoping that publishing some of this work will help to start somekind of an effort to get the OpenSolaris ARM code out of the mothballs.

IllumOS

Obviously, long term will be to get the IllumOS kernel booting, but there is a lot of work between now and then.

On this blog

So, usually I post all the Raspberry Pi stuff on the Raspberry Pi Python Adventures blog, but I want to keep it mostly Python, with the occasional C code (swig etc). Since we are going bare metal, I think it'll be better if I track this stuff here.


@f_dion

OpenSXCE

Mystery solved

The new open sourced solaris / illumos distribution is called OpenSXCE (as in Open Solaris Express Community Edition - a clin d'oeil to the original open sourcing done by Sun and the Express program)

OpenSXCE

brought to you by Martin Bochnig 30 January 2013
Here is the first release of OpenSXCE for SPARC.
OpenSXCE 2013.01 Live for SPARC (1.2GB) -- 30 January 2013

The site is www.opensxce.org

Note the md5sum : 330a82654405c77c8cea903ed18117f2


@f_dion

Mysterious post

Hint

It has to do with illumos, solaris and sparc

What he said

Martin Bochnig via jeeves.archives.listbox.com
to discuss, developer Hi Garrett,   Release tomorrow. Status: http://twitter.com/MartinBochnig

Till then.

Martin