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Bryan Cantrill on Jails and Solaris Zones

4 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
6 HN users recommended this talk6 months2016–2025 score 7
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended repeatedly as the best account of container history and how Zones built on and went beyond Jails.

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.

“I highly recommend this talk, talking about Jails and Zones.” (HN, 2024)

2 strong recommendations · 4 recommendations · 3 citations · Talks · intermediate

9 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@eternalban Jan 2017 Recommends
on HN thread Memory Deduplication: The Curse that Keeps on Giving [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]
Amusing Cantrill talk on the history of containers
@kohtatsu Jun 2020 Recommends
on HN thread Gocker: Docker implemented in 1.3k lines of Go
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.
Great talk on history of OS-level virtualization
@yakubin Feb 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Sun: The Network Is the Computer
Read more
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] >
Talk on FreeBSD jails and Solaris zones

Citations, criticism and jokes

@Annatar Aug 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Docker Storage: An Introduction
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.. no? Because many of the grsecurity+pax improvements apply to any kernel that runs on a CPU (it provides active protections against certain forms of kernel vulnerabilities caused by bugs). This includes illumos, thus the question is valid. grsecurity is a set of patches for the GNU/Linux kernel. illumos is based on Solaris, so the entire argument about grsecurity is nonsense. illumos uses red zones to prevent buffer overflows, which grsecurity is attempting to address. grsecurity is a commercial product by the way. A single license costs $19,000 USD. Enhanced auditing and process control which grsecurity provides have been part of Solaris, and therefore illumos, since Solaris 10, some even earlier. GNU/Linux is still playing catch-up, and as long as people like myself, Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal and the rest of the former Sun kernel engineers live, it will be playing catch-up forever. My impression about package management being a shit-show on other operating systems is that every single podcast or blog post I read about those operating systems is celebrating that "package management is easy now with pkg" -- while it's actually not IMO as good as certain GNU/Linux package managers. In order for that opinion of yours to actually mean anything, the question is: how many packaging formats do you know to produce packages for? Only then will you be in a position where you would actually be competent to make such a statement, and where your opinion would actually make a diffe
@bcantrill Sep 2016 Cites it
on HN thread Haiku Project
I love Haiku -- and their inspiration in BeOS brings back my memories of deciding not to work for Be in 1996, and then later hitting jackpot at the Be Inc. bankruptcy auction.[1] [1] [this video]
@TZubiri Mar 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Kubernetes Home – what do you do if your ISP changes your IP addresses?
1st of all yes, many people consider not only chroot to be virtualization (of the file system). Yes it is arguable as it is the birth of lightweight virtualization. But you were wrong in saying no one does. [link] [this video] 2nd containers go farther and virtualize network, and other resources.
Cited to support chroot as lightweight virtualization

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