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AnnouncementsThis is the default content for the Announcements page. If you are a community leader, click "Edit this page" to change this content. BrandZ in the press | 12/09/2007It's not really a review, but BrandZ got a positive mention at ServerWatch. BrandZ has integrated into the Solaris gate | 09/12/2006As of about 2AM (EDT) last night, BrandZ is in the mainline Solaris tree. Barring any hideously embarrassing disasters, it will be available in the snv-49 release. Thanks to everybody who has used and tested BrandZ as a pre-integration project, and for all the feedback you've sent in the past 10 months or so.
brandz-discuss mailing list brandz-discuss at opensolaris dot org BrandZ/29 available: now with audio | 12/23/2005Ordinarily when news breaks after 5:00 (EST) on a friday, it's because the breaker has something to hide. When that friday precedes a major holidy, that is even more true. Today however, I bring you tidings of great joy: brandz_29 is now ready. This release fixes many BrandZ bugs (listed below) and brings us into sync with build 29 of OpenSolaris. Among the apps enabled by these bugfixes are:
The BrandZ Community Is Open For Business | 12/13/2005Welcome to the BrandZ Community! Today we are opening the Branded Zones (BrandZ) community and starting to move the BrandZ development to opensolaris.org. You can find the community at: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz There is a new brandz-discuss forum available at: http://opensolaris.org/os/discussions/ Blog entries about BrandZ can be found at http://blogs.sun.com, and will also be collected on the BrandZ community page. BrandZ is a technology that extends the zones infrastructure to allow for the creation of "non-native" zones. Non-native is a deliberately ambiguous term, as we are trying not to let our preconceived notions of the technology limit its usefulness. The first brand we are developing under the BrandZ umbrella is 'lx', a brand that supports the execution of 32-bit x86 Linux applications on a x86/x64 machine running Solaris Nevada. Specifically, the lx brand allows the user to install a complete CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x distribution in a zone. When the zone is booted it will still be running the Solaris kernel under the hood, but the userspace environment will include nothing but Linux software from init(1M) on up. In theory the BrandZ infrastructure could also be used to create other types of zones. One such example would be a GNU Solaris brand, which runs Solaris binaries but has the standard utilities replaced by their GNU equivalents. Other possible uses would be the creation of zones for running FreeBSD or Darwin x86 environments. Because this technology is being made available via the OpenSolaris community, you as a community member will be able to help create these or other brands if so inspired. BrandZ and the lx brand will be integrated into Nevada and a Solaris 10 update, and will be released as "Solaris Containers for Linux Applications". That integration date is still months away, so the source code for BrandZ and the lx brand is available on the BrandZ community page, but it is not yet part of the mainline OpenSolaris source tree. The key reason for releasing this as a work-in-progress is to get community feedback on the infrastructure. Our primary focus to this point has been on supporting the lx brand, but we want to be sure that the infrastructure we develop is general enough to support a variety of different brands. Our hope is that the people most likely to use this infrastructure in the future are already participating in the OpenSolaris community, and will be able to identify any limitations in BrandZ while there is still plenty of time for us to address them. This is an experiment for the BrandZ team, and to some extent for Solaris in general. This is the first time we have opened up the source to a project at such an early stage of development. For the immediate future, technical limitations will require us to do the bulk of the ongoing BrandZ development behind the Sun curtain. We will release snapshots on a regular basis, but we will not be able to roll each putback out individually. If you are interested in participating in the development of the infrastructure or the lx brand, we will certainly do what we can to make that as easy and productive as possible. There are plans in the works to bring a full-fledged source code management system to opensolaris.org. When that system is in place, we will reevaluate how we approach our day-to-day development. Many thanks to our management for supporting this experiment and to the OpenSolaris team for helping us get this endeavour off the ground.
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