On 1/13/15 14:11 , J Marc Edwards wrote: > Robert: > > So, historically, wrt OpenSolaris, when SUN Microsystems was selling > workstations running X-Windows, am I going too far back when Solaris zones > were not being used for this use case? I know I must sound completely > ignorant as to even be suggesting what I am trying to do. I just made this > crazy assumption that as a descendant of OpenSolaris, that SmartOS would be > able to assign the video resources in a highly flexible manner to > accommodate this type of desktop on a locally attached display.
Hi Marc, Well, I certainly haven't been involved in everything here and I'm not best person to really relate the entire history of Sun, especially given that I wasn't a part of those conversations and many of them happened long before I even worked at Sun. To clarify, yes, you can cause the frame buffer device to exist inside of the zone. However, that doesn't mean it's possible to run X11 inside of a zone. No one has ever really taken the effort and work to get that possible with Xorg, though it may have worked briefly with Xsun (which I think maybe only ran in an S8 or S9 branded zone). Even if it were possible to run Xorg inside of a zone, that's entirely different from what it means to work in the case of hardware virtualization. A hardware virtualized guest has two real options for its display: 1) Its display is virtualized, eg. it's a virtual hardware device that is emulated. 2) Its display is a PCI device that has been designed to be given straight to the guest. That also means that the host cannot use it, unless the device supports PCI virtual functions, which to my knowledge is not common for most graphics cards. Both of these are very different from the zone model and what Sun was working on. The method of virtualization used for hardware virtualization and OS virtualization are quite different. There are a bunch of different paths forward here, it all depends on how much effort you're willing to expend to get there and if writing code is on the table or not. If not, I'd suggest looking at what I mentioned previously and what Nahum wrote. I hope that clarifies what's going on here, Robert ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
