PapersWeLove
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2016–2025
1:45:47 · 34K views · Mar 3, 2016
Bryan Cantrill's Papers We Love talk on FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, tracing how OS-level virtualization grew out of chroot and the limits of the traditional UNIX security model.
Recommended repeatedly as the best account of container history and how Zones built on and went beyond Jails.
9 comments from Hacker News
I highly recommend this talk, talking about Jails and Zones. Jails was first, but Zones took a lot of lessens from it and went further. this video
Bryan Cantrill has a wonderful talk about exactly this in Illumos that I recommend at every opportunity this video
FreeBSD jails were released in 2000 in FreeBSD 4.0. Solaris Zones in 2004/2005. In fact, the original Solaris Zones paper cites jails as inspiration. Jails: Confining the omnipotent root (2000): < [LINK] > Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads (2004): < [LINK] > Originally, jails didn't virtualise the network stack. That was added later, in FreeBSD 8.0 with VNETs, which were buggy for a long time, but went through extensive testing and are enabled by default since FreeBSD 12.0 (quite recently). Solaris Zones went a step further than the original design, and run a separate network stack for each zone from the start, years before FreeBSD did. BTW, recommended talk about those topics: Papers We Love: Jails and Zones: < this video >
I am watching it now but he's talking about VMs ("KVM") and not "containers". As to why we're in this mess, this rather amusing talk by B. Cantrill discusses the history: this video (Linux) Containers are not VMs: [LINK]
This talk by Bryan Cantrill on the history of OS-level virtualization is great. this video Apparently the first version of Jails was a few hundred lines of code.