ALIEN-ROOT(7) Standards, Environments, and Macros ALIEN-ROOT(7)

NAME

alien-root zone variant

DESCRIPTION

The alien-root zone brand in Tribblix allows you to run an
alternative illumos distribution in a zone.

The current implementation simply populates the zone file systems
from a tarball, a live ISO image, or a zfs send stream. Tarballs
generated by the zmvix.sh script from the mvi project
(https://github.com/ptribble/mvi) should be suitable. Installation
ISO images from OmniOS prior to r151022, OpenIndiana, XStreamOS, and
DilOS should be recognised. For ZFS send streams, the PXE images
provided by the OmniOSce project can be used. Any further
customization or software installation must be done inside the zone.

The approach used is fragile due to the nature of stable interfaces
in illumos. Namely, the userland in the zone must be similar to that
in the global zone. In illumos, the stability boundary is exposed by
libc; the kernel interface to libc is private. Therefore, the version
of the kernel and libc in the alien zone must be similar to that in
the global zone. No check is made for compatibility, the user is
entirely responsible for making sure that the combination will work.

(In practice, the rate of change of kernel interfaces in illumos is
low. While creating an alien zone from a newer version of a
distribution than the version of Tribblix installed in the global
zone will be problematic, if the alien distribution is older than the
version of Tribblix in the global zone there is a good chance of
success.)

The recommended way to create zones in Tribblix is to use the zone-
create subcommand of the zap(1) utility.

For an alien-root zone, specify -t alien as follows.

zap create-zone -t alien ...


The location of the tarball or ISO image to be used as the source for
the zone file system needs to be specified as follows.

zap create-zone ... -I /path/to/distro.iso ...

NOTES

If the alien zone uses the IPS packaging system, then you should
issue the following command in the newly created zone.

pkg change-variant variant.opensolaris.zone=nonglobal


And then reboot the zone.

SEE ALSO

zap(1), brands(7), zones(7)

Tribblix November 19, 2024 ALIEN-ROOT(7)