On 5/16/07, Frank Van Der Linden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You can't do that with zones as they stand now. There's a whole list of things you can't do in a non-global zone. So you'd have to pick one environment for the global zone (which can do everything you want), and then one for another zone (which can't do a number of things). In other words, you'd be providing an environment for first-class citizens and an environment for second-class citizens, who will be stuck in a restricted environment. Zones are very cool for some usage models, like e.g. an ISP offering a restricted environment for clients. But there is a big mismatch between the model of selectable user environments and that of zones.
I'm obviously working from the 50,000 foot view, but I thought you could run an entire copy of the OS (sans kernel) in a zone (as opposed to the sparse variety). The ideal situation would be if we could think of the global zone as the "hypervisor", then make it easy to spin up virtual machines above that hypervisor (be they Xen domains or zones), with a few predefined environments people could choose from (GNU vs. Solaris classic). This goes a long way to pushing the unique advantages of Solaris angle that I keep talking about (ever tried to spin up a new Xen domain on Linux??) even as I suggest we need to borrow heavily from Linux. Plus, with ZFS, this makes the installation problem a lot easier too... P.S. - This approach helps with the laptop problem too, and again, in a very unique way: I just got a new laptop and am faced with the extremely painful task of migrating everything, which as anyone who has ever done this knows means move than just moving my home directory. This time, I installed Ubuntu under VMware, so next time, I'll just have to move the disk image. Instead of VMware, could the hypervisor be Solaris/OpenSolaris? -ian -- Ian Murdock 650-331-9324 http://ianmurdock.com/ "Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
