4 ms·

I love the idea of using containers. Due to linux popularity and google's backing, containers will be next. But FREEBSD had jails since back in the day. What's

by kayman 11y ago

I love the idea of using containers. Due to linux popularity and google's backing, containers will be next. But FREEBSD had jails since back in the day. What's the benefit of containers over bsd jails?

otterley 11y ago
Linux has copy-on-write block devices that make it possible to efficiently layer container filesystems. FreeBSD has no such thing as far as I know; the best you can do involves hard links (correct me if I'm wrong).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bch 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS Edit: addendum Additionally, a hardlink solution (as you point out) really doesn't sound too outrageous to me. A trivial tool to write to manage immutable things like binaries. Or is there some trouble I'm failing to see (possible)?
  - otterley 11y ago
    According to the mount_unionfs(8) man page: > THIS FILE SYSTEM TYPE IS NOT YET FULLY SUPPORTED (READ: IT DOESN'T WORK) AND USING IT MAY, IN FACT, DESTROY DATA ON YOUR SYSTEM.
    - bch 11y ago
      You're right. My personal reference for unionfs is NetBSD, which doesn't include such a warning [0]; apparently freebsd's implementation needs some love. [0] http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mount_union++NetBSD-current http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mount_union++NetBSD-cur...
- tachion 11y ago
  You are incorrect, FreeBSD has ZFS file system as a first class citizen and that allows all these things (and much more). Check out tools like iocage[1] that are using it in very user friendly manner. [1] https://github.com/iocage/iocage https://github.com/iocage/iocage
TheIronYuppie 11y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Google on Kubernetes & Containers I mentioned earlier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570639 - but the biggest thing is not isolation, it's portability. You do not care what you're running on, just that you have a certain amount of disk, CPU and network available to you, and the rest you handle yourself. That gives your organization a crazy amount of flexibility in moving that ball of stuff around.
- otterley 11y ago
  > You do not care what you're running on, just that you have a certain amount of disk, CPU and network available to you Does Kubernetes provide those guarantees to the containers? And, if so, what does it do once those guarantees can no longer be met, say, due to neighbor growth?
- kayman 11y ago
  You can also archive and move jails as well...

by kayman 11y ago

otterley 11y ago

Linux has copy-on-write block devices that make it possible to efficiently layer container filesystems. FreeBSD has no such thing as far as I know; the best you can do involves hard links (correct me if I'm wrong).

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bch 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS Edit: addendum Additionally, a hardlink solution (as you point out) really doesn't sound too outrageous to me. A trivial tool to write to manage immutable things like binaries. Or is there some trouble I'm failing to see (possible)?
- otterley 11y ago
  According to the mount_unionfs(8) man page: > THIS FILE SYSTEM TYPE IS NOT YET FULLY SUPPORTED (READ: IT DOESN'T WORK) AND USING IT MAY, IN FACT, DESTROY DATA ON YOUR SYSTEM.
  - bch 11y ago
    You're right. My personal reference for unionfs is NetBSD, which doesn't include such a warning [0]; apparently freebsd's implementation needs some love. [0] http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mount_union++NetBSD-current http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?mount_union++NetBSD-cur...
tachion 11y ago
You are incorrect, FreeBSD has ZFS file system as a first class citizen and that allows all these things (and much more). Check out tools like iocage[1] that are using it in very user friendly manner. [1] https://github.com/iocage/iocage https://github.com/iocage/iocage

TheIronYuppie 11y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google on Kubernetes & Containers I mentioned earlier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9570639 - but the biggest thing is not isolation, it's portability. You do not care what you're running on, just that you have a certain amount of disk, CPU and network available to you, and the rest you handle yourself. That gives your organization a crazy amount of flexibility in moving that ball of stuff around.

otterley 11y ago
> You do not care what you're running on, just that you have a certain amount of disk, CPU and network available to you Does Kubernetes provide those guarantees to the containers? And, if so, what does it do once those guarantees can no longer be met, say, due to neighbor growth?
kayman 11y ago
You can also archive and move jails as well...