[illumos-Discuss] Fate of the lx brand?

[Matt Lewandowsky]

There's always been more interest in the community than effort when it comes to the lx brand. As Garrett said, it's extremely non-trivial to maintain, let alone enhance. Dragons have been sighted in the realm of lx.

Also, note that lx doesn't need to live in ON. It's wholly appropriate for it to be a separate effort which tracks Illumos ON, so that distros which wish to have it can "bake it in". Presumably, installers or something could be offered for users who run a distro which opts to not include it, but they still want the feature. But worrying too much about that is putting the cart before the horse.

Let me know if you're seriously interested in contributing to reviving the lx brand. There will be commitment required, and you'll have to be able to work at least some magic in kernel code. But there are a few people who are interested in putting forth effort on lx branded zones if there's enough people involved so that it doesn't devolve into a one-man show.

--Matt

--
Matt Lewandowsky
Greenviolet
http://greenviolet.net/

----------------------------------------
> From: garrett at nexenta.com
> To: viskovatoff at imap.cc
> Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 11:54:11 -0700
> CC: discuss at lists.illumos.org
> Subject: Re: [illumos-Discuss] Fate of the lx brand?
>
> 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
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss at lists.illumos.org
> > http://lists.illumos.org/m/listinfo/discuss
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.illumos.org
> http://lists.illumos.org/m/listinfo/discuss