FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
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FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
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Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#2I never understood the appeal of BSD jails over Solaris zones which seem to be more hardened and seem to vitualize more of the OS.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#3(FreeBSD) jails are amazing. I just wish there were easier ways to use them more "cattle"-like, so I can augment or replace Docker/Podman. At the moment tooling and many of the real-world setups remind me a lot of "pet" LXC containers or even VMs in the Linux world.
The tooling is slowly moving in a direction I like, though :)
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#4I am amazed at how many interesting things I still have to learn in this life. Too many tools, too little time to see them all... :(
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#5I 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.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#6(FreeBSD) jails are amazing. I just wish there were easier ways to use them more "cattle"-like, so I can augment or replace Docker/Podman. At the moment tooling and many of the real-world setups remind me a lot of "pet" LXC containers or even VMs in the Linux world. The tooling is slowly moving in a direction I like, though :)
Author here!
This is an old post of mine which I happened to find useful. Orchestration of jails moved quite bit forward lately! For example, you can manage your jails quite nicely with containerd today! See great post from Samuel Karp about the topic: https://samuel.karp.dev/blog/2021/05/running-freebsd-jails-w...
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#7FreeBSD 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 others running in complete isolation from the base system, and from each other. I even had a separate Firefox jail that was only allowed to get out via a Tor socks proxy to avoid leaks (more of an experiment than a necessity, to be fair). Communication between jails was done via commonly mounted nullfs. I have also setup QoS via PF for each of them. They were all running on the host’s Xorg, which was probably also the weakness of this setup. It was a pretty sweet setup, but required quite a bit of effort to maintain, even tho I automated most of the stuff. [...]
The original comment is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27709256
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#8I 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 get taken as seriously these days as it should do.
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#9Are Jails really that safe & secure?
Re: FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit (2020)
#10I 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.