OpenSolaris

  subsites   code review   repo   packages   bugs   defect   polls   planet
You are not signed in. Sign in or register.

OpenSolaris Community: BrandZ

View the leaders for this community
Community Observers

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

edp - running filemerge on opensolaris

Aug 29, 6:54 PM

to continue with the theme of my last post, i recently discovered teamware filemerge doesn't run on opensolaris because of missing X and tool talk components. at first you might might think this is a ...

edp - building OS/Net on opensolaris

Aug 26, 7:41 PM

i use my desktop as my primary build machine, so i was a little surprised after upgrading my desktop to opensolaris i could no longer do full ON (aka OS/Net) nightly builds. i discovered that there ...

ahl - A glimpse into Netapp's flash future

Aug 11, 7:00 AM

The latest edition of Communications of the ACM includes a panel discussion between "seven world-class storage experts". The primary topic was flash memory and how it impacts the world of storage. ...

edp - moving from nevada and live upgrade to opensolaris

Jul 25, 12:39 AM

so recently i made the plunge into running opensolaris. previously both my desktop and laptop were running nevada and i was using live upgrade to update the systems every two weeks to the latest ...

ahl - Hybrid Storage Pools: The L2ARC

Jul 23, 5:06 PM

I've written recently about the hybrid storage pool (HSP), using ZFS to augment the conventional storage stack with flash memory. The resulting system improve performance, cost, density, capacity, ...