OpenSolaris now natively runs Linux

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 | 2 Comments |

BrandZ is Sun project aimed to run unmodified binaries developed for other operating systems on the Solaris 10 operating system. Originally called Project Janus and expected at beginning of 2006 , the company delayed the project and enhanced it, allowing integration with the OS partitioning technology Solaris Containers (aka Zones). After more than 10 months, today BrandZ is finally integrated in the OpenSolaris (the open source edition of Sun Solaris 10) codebase and its available in the new 20060911 build. The first available Branded Zone is the lx brand, which allows to run applications made for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS without further intervention. Sun could officially release BrandZ in the upcoming Solaris 10 Update 3, where the technology will be called Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.

Comments

I would be more precise about the statement: the Solaris Branded Zones approach allows to run Linux applications and not a complete Linux distribution as you stated, in fact the Linux kernel calls are remapped to the Solaris kernel calls. Overall this is not a trivial aspect. For enterprise usage you need to have all the hosted application supported and certified by the vendors...
Moreover it is applicable only to Solaris x86 and currently this port of Solaris suffers from the fact that most of the enterprise class applications are not yet completely certified and supported.
So although it is a great achievement and a very well designed architecture it can be used mostly in restricted domains of applications and surely not for enterprise class environments (at least not now...).

By Franco Fiorese, at Thursday, September 14, 2006 6:58:00 AM

Franco,
thanks for stopping by and provide this useful feedback.

The article has been corrected accordingly.

By alessandro, at Thursday, September 14, 2006 10:42:00 AM

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