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OpenSolaris Community: BrandZ

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Overview

BrandZ is a framework that extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments. The term "non-native" is intentionally vague, as the infrastructure allows for the creation of a wide range of operating environments.

Each operating environment is provided by a brand that plugs into the BrandZ framework. A brand may be as simple as an environment with the standard Solaris utilities replaced by their GNU equivalents, or as complex as a complete Linux userspace.

BrandZ extends the Zones infrastructure in user space:

  • A brand is an attribute of a zone, set at zone create time
  • Each brand provides its own installation routine, which allows us to install an arbitrary collection of software in the branded zone.
  • Each brand may provide pre/post-boot scripts that allows us to do any final boot-time setup or configuration.
  • The zoneadm and zonecfg tools can set and report a zone's brand type.

BrandZ provides a set of interposition points in the kernel:

  • These points are found in the syscall path, process loading path, thread creation path, etc.
  • At each of these points, a brand may choose to supplement or replace the standard Solaris behavior.
  • These interposition points are only applied to processes in a branded zone
  • Fundamentally different brands may require new interposition points

Linux Zones on Solaris

The lx brand enables Linux binary applications to run unmodified on Solaris, within zones running a complete Linux userspace. The combination of BrandZ and the lx brand will be productized as Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.

The lx brand is not a Linux distribution and does not contain any Linux software at all. The lx brand enables user-level Linux software to run on a machine with a Solaris kernel, and includes the tools necessary to install a CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution inside a zone on a Solaris system.

The lx brand will run on x86/x64 systems booted with either a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel. Regardless of the underlying kernel, only 32-bit Linux applications are able to run.

We do not support SPARC linux. This might be an interesting community project, but it's not on our roadmap.

Documentation

Official Documentation

The Other Kind

Announcements

09 Dec 2007 BrandZ in the press
12 Sep 2006 BrandZ has integrated into the Solaris gate
23 Dec 2005 BrandZ/29 available: now with audio
13 Dec 2005 The BrandZ Community Is Open For Business

Blogs

ahl - dtrace.conf post-post-mortem

May 5, 12:06 AM

This originally was going to be a post-mortem on dtrace.conf, but so much time has passed, that I doubt it qualifies anymore. Back in March, we held the first ever DTrace (un)conference, and I hope ...

ahl - DTrace and JavaOne: The End of the Beginning

Apr 10, 9:00 AM

It was a good run, but Jarod and I didn't make the cut for JavaOne this year... 2005 In 2005, Jarod came up with what he described as a jacked up way to use DTrace to get inside Java. This became the ...

ahl - Expand-O-Matic RAID-Z

Apr 7, 9:59 PM

I was having a conversation with an OpenBSD user and developer the other day, and he mentioned some ongoing work in the community to consolidate support for RAID controllers. The problem, he was ...

ahl - pid2proc for DTrace

Mar 13, 1:11 AM

The other day, there was an interesting post on the DTrace mailing list asking how to derive a process name from a pid . This really ought to be a built-in feature of D, but it isn't (at least not ...

ahl - Mac OS X and the missing probes

Jan 18, 11:49 PM

As has been thoroughly recorded , Apple has included DTrace in Mac OS X . I've been using it as often as I have the opportunity, and it's a joy to be able to use the fruits of our labor on another ...