Actually the kernel is in all zones - it is the same kernel that is shared among all zones. Certain things cannot be accessed in non-global zones.
Zones are a lightweight form of virtualisation - lighter weight than full virtual machines and para-virtualised systems such as Xen. The advantage of zones is that the overhead for this form of virtualisation is very small, so less of your system capacity is used up just on the virtualisation. Andrew. This message posted from opensolaris.org
