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illumos day 2014: The Dream is Alive! Running Linux containers on an illumos kernel

illumos · 15K views · 2014-10-01 · 1:44:56

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Overview

Bryan Cantrill's illumos Day 2014 talk on running Linux containers on an illumos kernel via LX-branded zones. He covers emulating Linux syscalls on SmartOS and compares Linux and Solaris-derived systems.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as an entertaining deep dive on Linux emulation on SmartOS and on how the Solaris kernel and libc are tightly coupled.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2014–2019

Topics

Operating systems & kernelsCloud, DevOps & reliabilityLinux & open-source ecosystems
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bryan cantrillsmartoslx zonescontainerssyscalls

What people said

ketralnis · 2016-02 · Strong recommendation

I really enjoyed this talk[1] by Bryan Cantrill, part of which is about what it took to emulate Linux's syscalls from within SmartOS. It's lengthy, but enjoyable. One of the applications that they tried to port directly to before the emulation layer was htop, and he has a good rant about what that took because of its use of /proc and how that made porting it very difficult. Given that, I'm sure this wasn't easy. Kudos! [1] [VIDEO]

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AnbeSivam · 2015-10 · Recommendation

Video of this talk. [VIDEO] Though it is from 2014, it is interesting on comparison between linux and smartos(solaris). There is also a recent, shorter video [LINK]

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the_why_of_y · 2019-12 · Reference

A stable syscall ABI is a Linux peculiarity and was never a part of the UNIX tradition. Here's a talk where Bryan Cantrill describes the tightly coupled Solaris kernel/libc combination as a "welded unit", and mocks the Linux "libc ecosystem" and the complexity of ENOSYS handling in glibc. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by illumos, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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