[illumos-Discuss] Fate of the lx brand?

[Alex Viskovatoff]

Hi all,

Although the lx brand is still present in the last binary release of
OpenSolaris, snv_134, as one sees in the following thread, Oracle
decided to cancel it:

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=129326&tstart=0

I haven't looked at the ON code base, but my guess is that support for
the lx brand is not present in the code base that IllumOS has forked
from.

Have there been any thoughts regarding whether Illumos should keep the
lx brand alive? I can understand why Oracle killed it: it is not
something that a large enterprise would use, and kernel developers (at
least those working on the Zones infrastructure) must take account of
the lx brand even if they are not concerned with it directly, which
creates a large code maintenance issue.

Still, I find the lx brand very useful, since it allows one to run
applications that have not been ported to OpenSolaris yet. Sun itself
never bothered to update the lx brand to emulate the 2.6 Linux kernel,
but an outside developer did this, although not all Linux system calls
have been implemented, and some facilities, such as sound and NFS, do
not work.

Since the Linux 2.6 implementation of the lx Brand was never finished,
clearly the lx brand is not appropriate for an operating system intended
for enterprise-class production systems. But I think it can be
appropriate for an open source OS. I'm not a kernel developer, so I
don't have a very good idea of what's involved, nor could I develop and
maintain the lx brand myself. But if Illumos takes off, someone may
become inclined to put more work into the lx brand. So my concern at
this point is whether it might be possible for Illumos not to shut the
door entirely on the lx brand.

Alex