[illumos-Discuss] Fate of the lx brand?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Matt Lewandowsky <matt at greenviolet.net> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>
> 
> If someone is really going to put effort into this piece of code, I would see 
> it integrated in a different way as a final goal:
> 
> We are no longer forced to do political decisions like Sun did in the past.
> So it would make sense to allow to use the lx brand not only in a dedicated zone 
> but also anywhere else.

That was Sun's original Janus project, based on SCO's lxrun, but
better integrated into Solaris.

There was at the time a lot of interest from Enterprise customers in
that, and there was a working build available. Unfortunately, it made
quite a mess of the kernel, which is partly why it went back to the
drawing board and reappeared as an lx zone. There never was any much
interest in the lx zone version from the Enterprise, partly because
the enforced zone separation made it much less flexible, and partly
because the extra development delay pushed the feature out past the
end of its window of opportunity.

3-4 years later, and I would say this feature (either as Janus, or as
an lx zone), is completely past any window of opportunity - indeed it's
so distant behind us now, it's not visible anymore.

-- 
Andrew Gabriel