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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 - Sun Storage 7310

May 27, 5:00 AM

Today we're introducing a new member to the Sun Unified Storage family: the Sun Storage 7310. The 7310 is a scalable system from 12TB with a single half-populated J4400 JBOD up to 96TB with 4 JBODs. ...

ahl - Mirroring flash SSDs

May 25, 12:01 AM

As flash memory has become more and more prevalent in storage from the consumer to the ="http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/fishworks_launch">enterprise people have been charmed by the performance ...

ahl - SS 7000 simulator update plus VirtualBox

May 4, 11:59 PM

On the heels of the 2009.Q2.0.0 release , we've posted an update to the Sun Storage 7000 simulator . The simulator contains the exact same software as the other members of the 7000 series, but runs ...

ahl - Sun Storage 7000 simulator upgrade

Apr 27, 5:51 PM

Today we released the first major software update for the Sun Storage 7000 series. It includes a bunch of new features, bug fixes, and improvements. Significantly for users of the Sun Storage 7000 ...

ahl - SSDs for HSPs

Mar 10, 5:00 PM

We're announcing a couple of new things in the flash SSD space. First, support the Intel X25 SSD in a bunch of our servers. This can be used to create a Hybrid Storage Pool like in the Sun Storage ...