Run containers on bare metal already!

What people said

kbenson · 2017-11 · Strong recommendation

SmartOS's LX branded zones seem kind of cool to me, and may hit an interest point for you. Basically, SmartOS is an OpenSolaris variant where they use Solaris Zones for docker images, but they've implemented a Linux syscall table API so you can create Linux "compatible" containers from a Solaris kernel (and also full access to ZFS, etc). You can see a talk here[1] where Bryan Cantrill goes over the reasons you might want to use containers, SmartOS and how LX branded zones. Warning though, he's an extremely engaging speaker, so not only are you likely to watch all of that 40 minute talk, but you might feel like binging on some other talks of his, so here you go.[2] 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]

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kbenson · 2025-11 · Recommendation

It's all just history now for all I know, but there was work in the past to make Linux containers work on a Solaris fork (SmartOS, specifically) by emulating the Linux syscall table and presenting that to the containers. Joyent did work on this (alas, and there's an excellent and entertaining talk from Bryan Cantrill[1] that goes over it. I imagine FreeBSD could do something similar if they aren't already. IIRC FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (but I don't know how much attention it still gets), and it's had containerization primitives longer than linux, so some amount of filling in the gaps in containerization features and syscall tables (if needed) could possibly yield an OCI compatibility later (for all I know all this already exists). The problem, and the reason if this doesn't exist why people probably weren't as interested in doing the work, is it would always be "mostly" compatible and working and there would be no guarantee that the underlying software wouldn't exhibit bugs or weird behavior from small behavior differences in the platform when emulating something else. Why open yourself up to the headache when you can just run Linux with containers or build what you want on FreeBSD with jails and their own native containerization primitives. 1: [VIDEO]

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dpeterson · 2015-11 · Recommendation

I have run containers on bare metal and in Amazon. Performance can be noticeably slower in Amazon on machines with similar specifications. A detailed explanation why is in this informative video by Bryan Cantrill [VIDEO] . It is a talk about how layering containers on top of virtual machines is a recipe for poor performance and wasted resource utilization. He equates it to developers “being given fire, then proceeding to put the fire out.”

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