Welcome 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.
- The BrandZ team
