[illumos-Discuss] Fate of the lx brand?

[Garrett D'Amore]

The great thing about illumos is that anyone can create a fork, and if
the work is useful and high quality, the work can merge back into the
"upstream".

So anyone who wants to do take on lx_brand has my explicit blessing,
with a full understanding that such an effort is highly non-trivial.
I'll even be happy to offer advice to help in the effort, but I can't
spend the time to work on it directly myself.

So far, I'm not aware of anyone that has the competence to do the work
and has stepped forward to offer to take it on.

Btw, the dom0 xvm/xen support is in the category.  Its something lots of
people ask for, but nobody has stepped forward to "own". I think a lot
of this is because corporate contributors to illumos have other
priorities (like ZFS and networking enhancements.)

Hopefully that makes sense.

	-- Garrett


On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 14:49 -0400, Alex Viskovatoff wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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