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by xj9 2897 days ago
the linux world is slowly (and badly) recreating technology that has existed in FreeBSD and Solaris/Illumos for decades.
5 comments

You probably never heard or used - Linux VServer. Available from the later version of the 2.4 kernel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-VServer

2003 http://linux-vserver.org/Overview#History

In the Linux distribution that I used (PLD), the first vserver support took place in january 2004. https://github.com/pld-linux/kernel/commit/5be58c1bcc5568676...

Maybe a little earlier because the util-vserver showed in Nov 2003. https://github.com/pld-linux/util-vserver/commit/c4036d6e748...

Be fair here. The software world is slowly recreating technology. Being even more fair, they do often add to it. Usually UX capabilities, but sometimes full on features. Yes, often the features require more resources than were available before. Such that previous versions couldn't have offered some of these things.

That said, it is not limited to any one set of our industry. It is likely not even limited to our industry.

Software getting recreated, sometimes without the security promises (linux containers as they started vs. solaris zones) the previous solution had. To be fair, Google didn't really need the security in linux containers, they didn't run multi-tenant workloads, so it wasn't their top concern when submitting code to the linux kernel...

We like building new things, from different angles, but in the end it seems like everything cycles through the same ideas.

Completely agreed. It is hilarious because we all preach "don't reinvent the wheel" at the same time that our interviews are basically "can you implement this ridiculously low level wheel" on top of "come here where we are simply using the latest rims!" :)
Which technologies were those?

I’m only vaguely familiar with FreeBSD, and not at all with Solaris.

FreeBSD has had jails and Solaris has had zones (with a Linux compatible zone as well aka branded zone). Given Illumos takes a lot of its roots from Solaris, it also has LX branded zones.
And HP-UX/Tru64 before them.

We were deploying into HP Vaults in 2000.

Yeah, except even jails has gaps, like for example; shared memory isn't jailed.