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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 Image

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 - 2009.Q3 Storage Configuration

Sep 16, 5:38 PM

Today we shipped our 2009.Q3 release . Amidst the many great new features, enhancements and bug fixes, we've added new storage profiles for triple-parity RAID and three-way mirroring. Here's an ...

edp - solaris domU hvm pv disk io support

Aug 25, 1:48 PM

recently i finished up working on pv disk io support for hvm solaris domains when running under the xvm hypervisor. after finishing this work i gave a presentation on it to the solaris sustaining ...

ahl - Flash Memory Summit 2009

Aug 12, 12:09 AM

At the Flash Memory Summit today, Sun's own Michael Cornwell delivered a keynote excoriating the overall direction of NAND flash and SSDs . In particular, he spoke of the "lithography death march" ...

ahl - Triple-Parity RAID-Z

Jul 21, 11:48 PM

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. ...