[geeks] Project Etude

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007, Francois Dion wrote:

> I dont know which meaning they had in mind when they named this
> project: http://blogs.sun.com/dp/entry/project_etude_revealed
>
> But at any rate, pretty interesting, to be able to run Solaris 8 under
> a Solaris 10 container.

Unless things have changed significantly in the zone architecture, it's
not so much running Solaris 8 as it is running a Solaris 8 userland
against Solaris 8 kernel emulation[0].  It would be Really Nice to see
actual virtualization leveraged through the zones interface on Sun's
platforms that support it (sun4v and late-rev amd64).

The missing part of the puzzle is that most of the applications people
would have to run on Solaris 8 are due to limited vendor support, and,
therefore, usually imply some sort of barbaric licensing restrictions.

For example, $ork has several relatively lightweight applications
that are used to hand out Flex-alike licenses for various programs from
Cadence and Mentor Graphics.  These applications are old, are no-longer
vendor-supported, and are keyed to the system IDs of very dead hardware.

What I had -wanted- to do was run Solaris 10 with several zones, each
with a different system ID to match the original hardware to which the
license-server was licensed[1].  However, since the system ID is cached
in (true) kernel memory, it's shared across zones.  In fact, nothing you
can do in a zone is supposed to give you write access to it.  So, we
have a small pile of v210s, all running load averages of 0.00, each
running a hostid hack and one license server.  What a wonderful waste of
electricity.

Branded zones are a neat technology, but I really can't see them being
useful for more than prototyping and non-production use yet.  There just
isn't sufficient isolation from the global zone.


[0] A syscall translation table is dropped in-place to make the zone's
     kernel look like Solaris 8 while calling code in the Solaris 10
     kernel.
[1] Dirty and underhanded at some level, but the vendor refused to issue
     new licenses at any price, and, given that the license servers use
     broadcast traffic, it's not like we could run two or three clones on
     the network to get more licenses.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke     )
Elgin, TX            (      "I detest logging filesystems."
USA                   )                    --Linus Torvalds