The Branded Zones community just
opened up on opensolaris.org. This is the underlying technology that enables you to create Linux zones on a Solaris system.
Linux Zones on Solaris now Available
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Basically, leveraging their normal Zones implementation, you can now load pretty much any user land you want (which you could before anyway), but also they exposed hooks in the kernel that allow it to EMULATE something like, oh, say, Linux.
You’re still running on the Solaris kernel, but BrandZ gives you a patching layer to intersperse things between the systems main Solaris kernel, and the userland in the zone.
So, it’s a combination of Zones, a packaging system (that bundles up these Zone configs), and the patching mechanism.
Check out Adam’s blog entry on the topic:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ahl?entry=dtrace_for_linux
Bon Appetit!
That is pretty cool… time for me to start reading up on DT… I wonder what kind of success people would have with X apps in the zones.
this is the second great notice after zfs!!
congratulations to opensolaris developers, bloggers, supporters and users around the world
I can imagine now a opensolaris running various zones with solarios and linux in the same machine… in NOT mainframe machine or 5000GHz CPU… sounds very nice… near in the future
I wonder what else will they be able to emulate, right now, there is only some support for linux emulation, and you probably can get to emulate all the other bsd’s without much work.
This technology makes some *business sence* as it lighten the costs of migrating linux (redhat and imitations rather), there is a little preformance tradeoff though.
It is also great for linux app devels who will now be able to use dtrace to debug their programs, it will also get those devels to know solaris (if they dont get traped by the branded zone) which will in the end be good for the opensolaris community.
They say an opensource project is about the code AND a community, well people, the code is already there and it’s great, who wants in?
I started a project to attempt this at one point (with FreeBSD), and failed miserably (ZoneBSD if anyone remembers)
However, I’ll certainly be looking forward to installing Linux-based zones on my dual Opteron Solaris 10 colo server, provided that’s even possible.
With the BrandZ framework, it would be much more tenable to create a FreeBSD braded Zone. If you’re still interested in making that happen, check out the design documents on the BrandZ OpenSolaris community and post to [email protected] if you get stuck.
This is so TOTALLY Cool – I just wonder what point there is in continuing to pay Red Hat. It looks like Sun’s Solaris distro is the same as their commercial platform – unlike the nasty Fedora/RHEL split. So I can migrate to Solaris, run Red Hat, and not pay anyone a dime… woo hoo!!
That’s exactly Sun’s point too. Only pay for their services (such as support, which an enterprise will need but hobbyists and developers will likely not), software is free for all.
Why you pay to Red Hat ? If you don’t need support you can use CentOS.
If you run os (1) under other os (2) you still need valid licences for both os.
Why you pay to Red Hat ? If you don’t need support you can use CentOS.
That’s fine for the home user or home developer but most
enterprises employing the OS in production will want
support.
…most enterprises employing the OS in production will want support.
This is a good point, which causes me to wonder about support for BrandZ. Let’s say you install RHEL under BrandZ. Will Red Hat still support it? Will RHEL-certified applications still be certified on a RHEL/Solaris combination? I suspect the answer is no in both cases. I’m not sure if this matters, though.
“This is a good point, which causes me to wonder about support for BrandZ. Let’s say you install RHEL under BrandZ. Will Red Hat still support it?”
Depends on whether Sun is willing to work with Red Hat on it just like any other Red Hat ISV or IHV. They have worked together on several things despite the marketing crap being thrown around. So its definitely possible.
O.K., so I can install something like CentOS in a zone as I understand it. So what is the future for zone technology used for multiple OS instances when the combination of Xen and Pacifica etc. are on the horizon ?
Xen and VMware virtualize at the level of x86 hardware, whereas Zones and BrandZ are much lighter weight environments. There are advantages to both approaches: hardware virtualization lets you run almost any operating system, but the Zones technique gives you finer control and observability into the containers and the system as a whole.
Sun has announced that Solaris will work with Xen as both a host and a guest. Think of this, however, as a complementary technology rather than something that will replace BrandZ.
What I am wondering is this: Somewhere I read there was also a global zone, is which software can be installed that should be available for all zones. Is there just the opensolaris compiled version put into place, and run transparantly from within a branded zone? Or does it have to be a native Linux binary?
If Sun says BrandX is only going to work under Redhat Linux, they’re pretty much dead!.
Caller: My foo application keeps crashing.
Redhat Support: Are you running under Brand X?
Caller: Yes
Redhat Support: Please contact Sun support. We can only
support Redhat Linux running on a Dell/IBM/HP PC.
There is a big difference between RedHat Linux and Sun Solaris. The difference is huge and Sun cannot overcome this by just opensourcing Solaris. The simple fact is that Linux is truly free. Not only is it free as in it is open source, but it is also free of any one company, person, country. The community is completely self sustaining. Companies buying RedHat are committing to Linux not RedHat. They only pay RedHat because they offer a form of Linux and something on top that is worthwhile. But if RedHat dies, life will go on everywhere but at RedHat. If RedHat charges too much, people move to another distribution and life will still go on. You see, in the Linux community, there is true freedom. You have IBM, HP, SGI, China, Japan, Korea, Brazil, all of Europe, India, and thousands of smaller companies, and communities all working on and sustaining Linux. Even Linus Torvald, the figure head of Linux, is powerless to do anything but bring good to Linux. The second he misbehaves, he will get a swift kick in the ass and life will move on (just look at example of Xfree86 and Xorg.) In a way, the kernel code itself is alive. Unless all of humanity itself dies, Linux will go on.
Solaris, on the other hand, is not at all like this. It breathes and dies with Sun. So Sun can add Dtrace, Zones, Fast Booting, ZFS, and whatever cool gizmo they want. But at the end of the day, Solaris is a small part of Sun. It breathes because Sun allows it to breathe. Compare this to RedHat and Linux where the only reason RedHat is breathing is because of Linux. RedHat is much smaller than Linux.
So Sun can add whatever they want to Solaris, but as long as Sun owns Solaris, I will stick with Linux. I can assure you that Linux already works great and will only work better in the future. DTrace is nice but Enterprises have been living without it all their lives. I’m quite sure life can continue until Linux, AIX, HPUX, etc. also implement the features. If you want me to switch to Solaris, you will have to wait until Solaris becomes greater than Sun. Convince me when Sun becomes a minor contributor to Solaris trying to scrape by, when governments around the world have adopted Solaris as the de facto standard, when Sun’s death means a second of silence to celebrate its long existence and people then go on using their Solaris distribution of choice. Until then, it is very hard for me to see a feature Sun can add into Solaris that will be greater than the freedom I get from Linux.
So Sun, thanks, but no thanks. I’m happy where I am right now.
For a number of the reasons you cite linux to be a bigger movement, are reasons that disallow it to innovate at the kernel level with things such as DTrace. There are innovations in Linux with applications that runs on it, but these applications are not inherent to Linux. There is nearly nothing in a Linux distribution that I can’t get/run from NetBSD or Solaris.
Also, with such a large movement but no governing body, there is greater chance something was implemented incorrectly, but allowed because someone felt good about it. Code can be so wrongly implemented that it is impossible to retool. How much work have/can Linux developers do with recoding their NFS implementation now that Sun has opened solaris? Is there NO lesson to be learned from Sun?
“Without a strict and unforgiving chain of command, chaos is inevitable.”
This new zone based approach that Solaris is taking allows me to run 64 bit oracle while running code that was developed for Linux when people wanted to toy with cheap hardware until it can be recompiled on cheap hardware running solaris.
Nobody said RH is going to die, let alone Linux. Goodbye RH could also mean: “Bye I’m going to stop doing business with you.” Please do not try to see things that are not really there.
hmm, you don’t seem to understand how opensolaris was opensourced, why don’t you check the opensolaris web page and read about it?
There are already at least two opensolaris distributions that were created outside sun, and both are completely free and opensource, and what’s best is that in the future (if not already) will be able to use ZFS and branded zones, and they already have DTrace that sounds quite free to me, doesn’t it?
Enterprises have been living without something like DTrace for ages because there simply wasn’t anything like that before, and linux is years away from having something like it, same thing goes for ZFS.
Solaris will be bigger than sun when the opensolaris community around grows big enough, if you really want that to happen, youre free to join and help