[FreeBSD-Announce] Foundation Announces Jail Based Virtualization Project

[Deb Goodkin]

Dear FreeBSD Community,

We are pleased to announce that Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant 
to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to 
continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software 
GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.

FreeBSD has been well known for its jail based virtualization during the 
last decade. With the import of the virtual network stack, FreeBSD's 
operating system level virtualization has reached a new level.

This project includes cleanup of two years of import work and 
development and, more notably, brings the infrastructure for a network 
stack teardown. Cleanly shutting down a network stack in FreeBSD will be 
the major challenge in the virtualization area to get the new feature to 
production ready quality for the 9.x release
lifecycle.

Further, the project includes generalization of the virtual network 
stack framework, factoring out common code. This will provide an 
infrastructure and will ease virtualization of further subsystems like 
SYSV/Posix IPC with minimal overhead. All further virtualized subsystems 
will immediately benefit from shared debugging facilities, an essential 
feature for early adopters of the new technology.

"Improved jail based virtualization support, that continues to be very 
lightweight and as easily manageable as classic jails, will be a killer 
feature for the next few years," said Bjoern A. Zeeb, FreeBSD developer.
He also added, "It will allow people to partition their FreeBSD server, 
run simulations without racks of hardware, or provide thousands of 
virtual instances in hosting environments fairly easy and efficiently. 
While this follows the trend of green computing, it also adds to 
FreeBSD's virtualization portfolio with Xen or other more heavyweight 
hypervisor support, which can be mixed with jails as needed."

While work in this area will have to continue, the funding for this 
project will end mid-July 2010.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation