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Solaris zones

To: "Josef 'Jeff' Sipek" <jeffpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Solaris zones
From: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 19:12:43 -0500 (EST)
Cc: pcp <pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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In-reply-to: <20150114172743.GD101479@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Reply-to: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Thread-index: JHaLpcX1Oe6/ltXBmynjByP5Sofzgw==
Thread-topic: Solaris zones

----- Original Message -----
> [...]
> (Note: I've never used containers on Linux, so I don't know what their
> limitations/annoyances are.  Therefore, I may be missing something totally
> obvious that answers my questions - sorry.)
> 
> Interesting.  As a Illumos (OpenSolaris-fork) fan & developer, I'm curious
> if you've given any thought to what this would mean for Solaris/Illumos
> zones.

Yep, a little, the code has been arranged to allow multiple container engines
to be supported (there are already many on Linux), hopefully that will prove
extensible to Solaris too.

> There, the global zone has access to all the state of the non-global zones.
> E.g., the list of mounts includes *all* the mounts across all the zones; the
> list of processes includes *all* processes on the system.  (If you are in a
> non-global zone, you only see processes/mounts/etc. related to the zone you
> are in.)  I bring this up because a large-ish portion of the above link
> seems to talk about how to deal with state extraction across the container
> boundary.
> 
> FWIW, zones get a integer ID when they boot (rebooting a zone will change
> its ID).  There's a way to map it to a user-supplied zone name which is
> persistent across zone reboots.

That's exactly the kind of stuff we need to know about in the PCP collector
code.  I'm planning a little writeup of using the container instrumentation
so far, which might help us here a little with exchanging ideas.  If you're
interested in some Solaris zone PCP hacking though, the place to start will
be digging into what per-zone instrumentation exists, how to access it, how
to enumerate the set of zones, etc - and then we can dovetail that into the
work that's being done for Linux.

cheers.

--
Nathan

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