OpenSolaris has a new community and application framework known as Branded Zones or BrandZ that will eventually enable users of the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS) to run Linux applications, Darwin, Mac OS X's underlying operating system and FreeBSD programs, reported Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols with eWeek.

BrandZ developed out of the original Project Janus, which promised Linux binary application compatibility in Solaris 10 OS. Project Janus was delayed due to Linux binaries dependencies for native environments already built in, which required separate development work for each version. Project Janus then transformed into the Linux Application Environment, which was to enable users to run Linux applications with an optional Solaris kernel service. Now with BrandZ, OpenSolaris users will have access to a framework that extends the SolarisTM Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments.

"Each operating environment is provided by a brand that plugs into the BrandZ framework. A brand may be as simple as an environment with the standard Solaris utilities replaced by their GNU equivalents, or as complex as a complete Linux userspace," explains the BrandZ community site located on the OpenSolaris Web site.

This community's first brand development will be 'lx' whose goal is to support the execution of 32-bit x86 Linux applications on a x86/x64 machine running Solaris Nevada, which is Sun's code name for the next release of the Solaris OS. With the lx brand, users will be able to install a complete CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x distribution in a zone. "When the zone is booted it will still be running the Solaris kernel under the hood, but the userspace environment will include nothing but Linux software from init(1M) on up," writes the BrandZ team. The group clarifies that the lx brand is not a Linux distribution and does not contain any Linux software at all. The lx brand enables user-level Linux software to run on a machine with a Solaris kernel, and includes the tools necessary to install a CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution inside a zone on a Solaris system.

BrandZ and the lx brand will be integrated into Solaris Nevada and a Solaris 10 OS update, and will be released as "Solaris Containers for Linux Applications." The actual integration date is still undetermined. Therefore, the source code for BrandZ and the lx brand is being made available on the BrandZ community page, although it is not yet part of the mainline OpenSolaris source tree.

"The key reason for releasing this as a work-in-progress is to get community feedback on the infrastructure. Our primary focus to this point has been on supporting the lx brand, but we want to be sure that the infrastructure we develop is general enough to support a variety of different brands," clarifies the BrandZ team. "Our hope is that the people most likely to use this infrastructure in the future are already participating in the OpenSolaris community, and will be able to identify any limitations in BrandZ while there is still plenty of time for us to address them."

Current plans are to have the BrandZ development team routinely release snapshots, although they caution that they will not be able to roll each putback out individually.

In an online memo from BrandZ's technical lead Nils Nieuwejaar, Vaughan-Nichols reports Nieuwejaar stated, "BrandZ/lx is still very much a work in progress. This means that it should be expected to crash at any time, set fire to your datacenter and kick your cat.

"Getting this out on opensolaris.org lets us answer everybody at once," Nieuwejaar continued. "This isn't feature-complete by any stretch of the imagination but, for good or ill, this release will let everybody know exactly where the project stands." [...read more...]

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