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back to article Havana see your bare metal: New OpenStack v8 clinches containerization

Open-source cloud controller OpenStack has gone into its eighth major release bringing with it technologies that should let admins chuck out hypervisors and spin up bare-metal clouds. The "Havana" edition was announced on Thursday and brings with it several new technologies as well as the stability improvements and an uptick …

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  1. Kebabbert

    Solaris containers

    are far older than 2005. It has been reworked several times, and the last iteration wast released 2005. It stems back from 1999.

    Anyway, this Linux tech seems it is heavily inspired by Solaris containers. The cool thing about Solaris containers back then, was it remapped all kernel calls to the Solaris kernel - this was new. So when you installed Linux Red Hat, it would remap all Linux kernel calls to the Solaris kernel, so only one Solaris kernel was active no matter how many Containers you booted. Each container only cloned a few kernel data structures in RAM (40MB RAM), and also cloned the filesystem (100MB) via ZFS. So Containers are really resource saving, that is the point of Solaris containers. One guy booted 1,000 containers on a 1GB PC back then, it worked but it was really slow. Now, this Linux tech seems awfully similar, just like systemd is a clone of Solaris SMF, Linux btrfs is a clone of Solaris ZFS, Linux systemtap is a clone of Solaris Dtrace, Linux open vSwitch is a clone of Solaris Crossbow, etc etc etc.

    It would be really cool if Linux developers did something new themselves, instead of cloning what others have done. For instance, the Linux "RCU" which is presumably cool according to Linux developers, turns out to be patented tech from IBM. So, RCU is not an invention by Linux devs either. BTW, did you know that the "Linux" kernel itself, is a clone of Unix? Everything in Linux is a clone, nothing is new?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Solaris containers

      It's a reasonable observation, and I recall cringing at an event years ago where a Linux vendor bragged about implementing some NFS code for Linux in only 6 months when it had taken the "old" UNIX companies 10 years to come up with the same thing - as if reinventing the wheel was something worthwhile.

      Having said that, there are a few points:

      - probably the best "new" contribution i've seen in the Linux world is package, patch & update management: Solaris never ally had a good handle on this, especially when it came to package dependencies

      - although there were many great leaps made by Sun with solaris (especially in solaris 10), the vast majority of the people who developed those innovations left the company many years ago (even before the oracle takeover) to work on other projects, often not in any way related to opensolaris/illumos/etc - so the torch has to be passed along somehow.

      - I'm sure long-time mainframers would look at many items on the list of solaris achievements & scoff at the idea that they were first conceived in UNIX... so what goes around, comes around I suppose.

      (ac as i'm speaking my mind, not that of employers past or present)

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