[MrDOS]

A true BSD chroot jail restricts the user's mobility around the file system, effectively limiting them to running only what binaries have been explicitly placed within that jail. It means, among other things, that the fork hacks that command= is vulnerable to (e.g., vim running other programs) don't work because non-permitted programs basically don't exist as far as the user can see. The downside to jails is that, without automation, they're tedious to maintain, and disk overhead is not insignificant as you have to have a duplicate set of system binaries for each user. In practice, chroot jails end up being very similar to OpenVZ “virtualization” on Linux.

[Freaky]

> The downside to jails is that, without automation, they're tedious to maintain, and disk overhead is not insignificant as you have to have a duplicate set of system binaries for each user

On FreeBSD it's common to use nullfs to reduce this - you make one jail skeleton hierarchy and then null-mount it for individual jails so they all share the same underlying files (and cache). zfs clones can be used similarly. I'm sure other OS's have similar capabilities.

[jvoorhis]

That's a lot like the layered model used by docker and warden.