Minimal illumos zones

Zones, meet MVI. MVI, meet Zones.

In Tribblix, zones can be the traditional Solaris sparse-root or whole-root style, or variations such as partial-root or alien-root. There's also the option to boot a blank zone - one in which nothing (or as close to nothing as possible) is running.

In parallel development, minimal viable illumos allows you to boot illumos in 48M of RAM, or to build single purpose bootable images.

So what happens if you combine these strands of thought? Minimal illumos zones, that's what.

The general idea here is that you can use the (new) zmvix.sh script in mvi to build a tarball containing a filesystem image. This image is designed for use in zones, so contains none of the kernel components. And there's no point building an ISO image, as it never needs to be bootable of itself.

The alien-root brand in Tribblix was originally designed to build a zone from an installation ISO. The minimal zone is a similar concept, although quite a bit simpler. Unpacking a tarball is far more direct that dissecting a bootable ISO. Furthermore, it's not necessary to undo the live media customizations present on an installation image. So the zone installer just has a simple branch to a tarball unpacker or the iso unpacker depending on filename.

The whole premise of mvi is that it's minimal. However, what counts as the bare minimum depends on context.

For example, a zone whose networking is provided via a shared-ip stack has no need for networking tools, as all the networking is configured for it by the global zone. So that's a major potential simplification.

On the other hand, getting zlogin working was a bit of a challenge. The first problem is that you need getent to be present in the zone. This is defined by the user_cmd element of the zone brand's config.xml file. So my zmvix.sh script explicitly adds /usr/bin/getent to the image. That's enough to get zlogin -S to work.

A full zlogin is a bit more work. That calls /usr/bin/login, which has a bunch more dependencies, including a number of pam modules. The list of files needed a bit of trial and error to obtain. So you can make a full zlogin work, but you don't need to.

While I was doing this I had a look through the zlogin source, and to say it's a massive kludge is a bit of an understatement. And when I read comments like:

It's truly amazing that there is no library function in OpenSolaris to do this for us.

Then I get alarmed. There is truly weird stuff going on here, and I'm clearly not supposed to understand it.

The result of all this, if you create an image from mvi with the command:

./zmvix.sh nonet node

then you end up with an 11M image file, which I can use to create a zone with

zap create-zone -z zmvi -t alien \
-I /var/tmp/zmvi.tar.gz \
-i 192.168.1.234

and if you point a browser at the zone's IP address, port 8000, you get back the page from the node server.

You can do this yourself if you check out mvi and are running a fully updated Tribblix m18.

In all, there are 4 processes associated with the zone. There's zsched, init, and the console shell, plus node. That's it.

Of course, this isn't the only way to do it. Another option would be to use the partial-root zone installer and get it to construct the zone's filesystem image the same way that mvi does, bypassing the tarball creation and unpacking.