One of the interesting capabilities of Solaris zones was the ability to run older versions of Solaris than that in the global zone. Marketing managed to mangle this into Containers, and it was supported for Solaris 8 and Solaris 9.
I used this extensively on one project, to lift a whole datacenter of ancient (yes, really ancient) Sun servers into zones on a couple of T5240s. Worked great. (We had to get an E450 out of the dumpster and build it specially to get a Solaris 2.6 system, however.)
Solaris 11 and illumos have dropped the Solaris 8 and 9 legacy containers, but have a Solaris 10 zone brand. On Tribblix, this can be installed with
zap install TRIBsys-zones-brand-s10
(If you're on an IPS based distro, the package name is system/zones/brand/s10.)
Installing an s10 branded zone is just like a regular zone, but you need a Solaris 10 image to install from. You could tar up a legacy system, or create a new image from the install media.
There are certain requirements for the software in the image and on the host. If, on a Solaris 10 system, you look in the directory /usr/lib/brand/solaris10, you might see a couple of files called 0 and 1. They have a little bit of text in them for explanation, but these are emulation compatibility feature flags. If you look at the illumos source, you can see them listed too. This is a basic versioning system - the host running the global zone needs to support all the features of the software in the zone. Fortunately that feature list hasn't changed, so we're good.
For the image, the s10 brand checks the SUNWcakr package and needs it to be patched to a minimum level. In practice, this means that anything S10U8 or newer will work.
During zone installation, there's some sanity checking. It turns out the installer is looking for /var/sadm/system/admin/INST_RELEASE and gives up if it can't find it. I had to manually create that file:
cat > ......./var/sadm/system/admin/INST_RELEASE
OS=Solaris
VERSION=10
REV=0
^D
There's also some processing of the zone image that gets done as part of the zone installation. And if that processing fails, then the zone install will fail too.
It has a hardcoded list of safe_dir entries for things it needs to replace. If you don't have those, it simply fails, so you need to add a bunch of packages just to make it happy. Specifically: autofs, zfs, and ipf.
The postprocessing also runs sys-unconfig, so you need to make sure that's present, from SUNWadmap.
Enough chatter. If I have my Solaris 10 media under /mnt1, and want to create an image under /export/S10, then it's going to look like this:
cd /mnt1/Solaris_10/Product
# SUNWCcs SUNWcar SUNWcakr SUNWkvm
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcsr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWckr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcnetr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcsd
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcsl
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcsu
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcar.i
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcakr.i
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWkvm.i
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcslr
# SUNWCfmd
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWfmdr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWfmd
# SUNWClexpt
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWlexpt
# SUNWCpicl
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWpiclr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWpiclu
# SUNWCopenssl SUNWhea (but not man)
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWopensslr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWopenssl-libraries
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWhea
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWopenssl-include
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWopenssl-commands
# SUNWCpkgcmds SUNWwbsup
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWproduct-registry-root
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWwsr2
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWpkgcmdsr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWwbsup
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWpkgcmdsu
# SUNWCpr SUNWCtls
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWpr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWtls
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWjss
# SUNWCfwshl
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWbash
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWtcsh
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWzsh
# perl
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWperl584core
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWperl584usr
# SUNWCptoo SUNWtecla SUNWesu SUNWtoo
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWtecla
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWbtool
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWesu
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWcpp
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWtoo
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWlibmr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWlibm
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWlibmsr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWlibms
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWsprot
# SUNWCfwcmp SUNWlibC
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWlibC
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWbzip
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWgzip
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWzip
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWzlib
# release and sys-unconfig
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWsolnm
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWadmr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWadmlib-sysid
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWadmap
# autofs is needed for validation
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWatfsr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWatfsu
# ditto zfs
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWlxml
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWsmapi
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWzfskr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWzfsr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWzfsu
# ditto ipf
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWipfr
pkgadd -d . -R /export/S10 SUNWipfu
# It's about 235M at this point
If you cd to /export/S10, make sure the INST_RELEASE file is there with the correct contents (see above) and then tar up what you have, you can feed that tarball to the zone installation and it should work.
If you look at documentation for s10 zones on Solaris 11, you'll see a -c option. We don't have that, but you could drop a sysidcfg file into /etc/sysidcfg in the zone so it will configure itself at boot. It will look something like this:
system_locale=C
terminal=xterm
# shared
network_interface=primary {
hostname=${ZNAME}
}
# exclusive
network_interface=primary {
hostname=${ZNAME}
ip_address=192.168.0.101
netmask=255.255.255.0
default_route=NONE
protocol_ipv6=no
}
security_policy=NONE
name_service=DNS {
domain_name=special.example.com
name_server=192.168.112.3,1.2.3.4
}
nfs4_domain=dynamic
timezone=${TZ:=UTC}
root_password=jhDYXBAnWJKr2
If you're using Tribblix, most of the zone creation is simplified, and it will be:
zap create-zone -t s10 -z s10-test4 -I /tmp/S10.tar -i 192.168.0.224
I haven't tried this on SPARC (my use case is building Java and Node.JS), but it ought to be exactly the same modulo trivial chagnes to package names.