Arch inside an OpenSolaris branded zone

Question

Hi,
Those of you who have OpenSolaris installed might be interested to learn that it turns out that Arch runs quite nicely inside it. (Open)Solaris has a facility called BrandZ which allows you to run Linux programs under Solaris, more or less analogously to the way you can run Windows programs under Linux using WINE. But judging from the OpenSolaris Web site, the people developing BrandZ are under the impression that support for distributions using the 2.6 kernel is not very good at this point. That's because the distributions they've tried are CentOS and Ubuntu (!), instead of a distribution that keeps it simple like Arch.
I've tried Arch under OpenSolaris, and it runs surprisingly well. (If you can call it Arch: Linux programs are run using the OpenSolaris kernel.) I've posted instructions on how to set things up on the OpenSolaris forums. You don't have to do a new install, since I've created a tarball with an already installed and configured Arch system.
Maybe someone here will want to try this out. If there's interest, I'll add a page about it to the Wiki.
One last note: most people here who have tried OpenSolaris have probably run it inside a virtual machine. That might work for this, but thinking about it makes my head spin a bit.
Last edited by herzen (2010-03-14 04:13:57)

Answer 1

Yes, I think you're right, if I understad you correctly. The FreeBSD facility for running Linux applications seems to be more like Wine in that both just run individual applications without creating a whole OS environment (excluding the kernel).
I don't understand the working of the Solaris Linux brand in any detail, but I do know that the Linux zone goes through its own boot and shutdown process (which is very quick). In Wine, you run Windows applications from a Linux shell. With BrandZ in contrast, from the Solaris global zone, you have to log into a shell in the Linux non-global zone, and run Linux applications in that shell. To run an X application, you use ssh with X11 forwarding. (I just tried running the Chromium browser but it doesn't work, because the Linux clone function hasn't been implemented in the lx26 brand.)
By the way, OpenSolaris is both a distribution and an OS, so it's a bit confusing. There's another distro of the OpenSolaris OS called Nexenta, which builds a Debian-based system on top of the OpenSolaris kernel. I haven't tried it, because I'm not fond of Debian and because I find OpenSolaris quite satisfactory, but Nexenta does seem to be under active development.
Someone could do with Arch what the Nexenta project is doing with Debian: now that would be what you call an Arch Solaris. But I don't really see what would be the point. I think you get just about all the functionality of Arch you need, that OpenSolaris doesn't give you yet, in the way I've described here, with BrandZ.
Still, I wish the lx26 brand were more actively developed and promoted. For example, sound works on the more fully implemented brand for Linux 2.4, but not on lx26. Also, apparently NFS doesn't work under lx26 (which Sun calls "experimental"), but it does under lx 2.4. I get the feeling that Sun is hoping that Linux hackers will pick up the slack when it comes to lx26 development.
Edit: I just tried the latest beta release of Nexenta, and it is totally broken, when it comes to a GUI, anyway. I don't see why Sun still even bothers linking to Nexenta's Web site on the OpenSolaris.org pages: it must be a personal or political thing. I also don't understand where Nexenta is getting the money that is keeping it afloat, since the project is obviously misconceived and doomed.
Last edited by herzen (2010-03-19 03:36:40)