I have been playing around with the bastillebsd.org scripts for creating and managing jails. I think it aims to be more 'Docker like'.
Worked well from the limited testing I have done so far
FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
11–20 of 161 posts
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#12FreeBSD Jails were so much better than everything else out there, for a long time. I'll just copy&paste part of a comment I wrote on another HN thread some time ago, since it's relevant here: [...] In fact, many years ago, when FreeBSD was my main OS (including on notebook) I went as far as to isolate each app that used internet into its own custom-setup jail [0][1]. I had Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and a few other…
Yes, but in a sense that's the essence of why the technology got left behind. Jails were a mechanism for expert admins to play with container ideas.
What the market actually wanted was Docker. And what Docker needed was Linux containers (complicated, flexible, piecewise technology) and not jails, which were higher level abstractions (but yet not high enough) with jargon and framework assumptions that didn't match Docker's needs 1:1.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#13I never understood the appeal of BSD jails over Solaris zones which seem to be more hardened and seem to vitualize more of the OS.
FreeBSD is the appeal. Back in the earlier days of containerisation Linux had no options (Linux was pretty late to that particular game) and Solaris wasn’t free. So FreeBSD made a lot of sense. These days the tooling around Linux is better and there are open source forks of Solaris so FreeBSD might seem like an odd choice for some. However I still think FreeBSD is a rock solid operating system and one that doesn’t ge…
FreeBSD's appeal for me is the easy maintenance. Everything related to config is in /etc/rc.conf; tunables in /boot/loader.conf. The ZFS implementation is rock-solid. I therefore only have to fiddle with my FreeBSD server, running 80TB ZFS storage pool, once a year or so.
No other OS gives me this kind of comfort and stability.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#14I never understood the appeal of BSD jails over Solaris zones which seem to be more hardened and seem to vitualize more of the OS.
Same here, but I never understood how BSD jails or Solaris zones are better over normal hardware virtualization which is used in Qubes OS. In addition, you get a great UX in the latter.
Containerisation makes much more sense than virtualisation in a lot of areas:
* lower runtime overhead
* quicker deployment time
* smaller image foot print
Plus most of the advantages of VMs can still be applied.
However it does massively depend on individual use cases. Qubes aims to be ultra secure and containers in Linux weren’t up to that task at the time (the situation has since improved massively).
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#15I never understood the appeal of BSD jails over Solaris zones which seem to be more hardened and seem to vitualize more of the OS.
Same here, but I never understood how BSD jails or Solaris zones are better over normal hardware virtualization which is used in Qubes OS. In addition, you get a great UX in the latter.
I don't think Qubes OS existed around 2000, did it?
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#16I always hoped for macOS to borrow FreeBSD jails for itself.
A Docker-like solution with a pretty UI could be really useful for pros. For novices, it could mean a less cumbersome security measure than the restrictions we’ve been experiencing since Catalina.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#17I never understood the appeal of BSD jails over Solaris zones which seem to be more hardened and seem to vitualize more of the OS.
The issue with zones was the lack in the early days of GNU software and the difficulty in compiling certain things.
For instance, awk can act differently and if you don't know the 25 year old decisions that led to the differences, it can be very confusing. (There are different behaviors and command line switches between GNU's AWK and the version from SVR4/XPG)
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#18FreeBSD Jails were so much better than everything else out there, for a long time. I'll just copy&paste part of a comment I wrote on another HN thread some time ago, since it's relevant here: [...] In fact, many years ago, when FreeBSD was my main OS (including on notebook) I went as far as to isolate each app that used internet into its own custom-setup jail [0][1]. I had Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and a few other…
Yes, but in a sense that's the essence of why the technology got left behind. Jails were a mechanism for expert admins to play with container ideas. What the market actually wanted was Docker. And what Docker needed was Linux containers (complicated, flexible, piecewise technology) and not jails, which were higher level abstractions (but yet not high enough) with jargon and framework assumptions that didn't match Doc…
And slowly the only thing left from Docker will be the image format.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#19I never understood the appeal of BSD jails over Solaris zones which seem to be more hardened and seem to vitualize more of the OS.
Same here, but I never understood how BSD jails or Solaris zones are better over normal hardware virtualization which is used in Qubes OS. In addition, you get a great UX in the latter.
Also OS level emulation. Linux system calls can be translated to Solaris system calls allowing to run Linux specific workloads without having to emulate hardware and a full Linux kernels. Furthermore before Dtrace was ported Linux it allowed to debug Linux workloads under DTrace.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#20I never understood the appeal of BSD jails over Solaris zones which seem to be more hardened and seem to vitualize more of the OS.
Note that FreeBSD Jails were introduced in 1999, while Solaris Containers and Zones were introduces in 2004. At the time FreeBSD Jails were introduced, probably the only alternative that was wildly available was chroot, which is really far from what Jails offer. Full virtualization was too slow to be practical for most scenarios, back then. 1999 is the year when Pentium III was released.
Bringing other UNIX into the party, HP-UX Virtual Vaults, which were introduced in HP-UX 11, available in 1997.