Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017)

Re:Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017) by danieldk on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @05:17AM (#22801622)

For instance, you could run your package manager across all containers to see if they have packages with known CVEs. Or manage the filesystems of all containers on the system (the usefulness of this is only clear with filesystems like ZFS and btrfs). This is effectively what you can do with Solaris Zones.

You can also do this on Linux with NixOS, where you can define the system and all containers it runs declaratively. Updating the system will update everything, including the containers (of course, you can also pin the containers or packages in the containers to specific versions).

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Re:Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs (2017) by cyphar on Tuesday April 07, 2020 @08:20AM (#22802493)

Sure that's because the package manager is container-aware (and NixOS is very cool -- don't get me wrong), but the distinction is that on Solaris all system tools are Zone-aware (including things like DTrace which would require specifically an in-kernel container concept because you need to be able to aggregate by container and there isn't any in-kernel data to aggregate on in Linux -- and no, cgroup IDs aren't sufficient).

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