LXC Linux Containers To Be Better With Pangolin

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LXC Linux Containers To Be Better With Pangolin

Improvements for LXC (Linux Containers) virtualization are planned in time for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" release...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAxMDA

[carbs]

Am I right in assuming this is similar to Solaris Zones/Containers? Cause they are awesome.

[kobblestown]

Am I right in assuming this is similar to Solaris Zones/Containers? Cause they are awesome.

Similar - yes. As mature and full featured - hardly. Linux has had container support for quite some time but until LXC it came as big intrusive kernel patches - OpenVZ and Linux-VServer. I think OpenVZ is the most full featured but incurs a performance hit. I seem to recall a benchamrking paper from the Ottawa Linux Symposium (maybe 2008) where OpenVZ was slower than XEN. Linux-VServer is damn fast but you cannot configure iptables inside the container (IIRC). You can actually do that with LXC but it still has a long way to go in terms of features (e.g. UID namspaces, /proc namespace, etc). What you cannot beat is the fact that the support is already in the kernel, so it's very easy to experiment with. But it's quite hard to find documentation. It took me several hours to configure my first container. The next one can be up and running in minutes, though.

I'd very much fancy a benchmarking comparison of OpenVZ, Linux-VServer and LXC. Michael recently did similar shootout for virtualization. I hope it's not too much trouble to do it for containers too.

[bmullan]

regarding lxc documentation

I agree documentation is skimpy and hard to come by for LXC on any linux. I've been working the last couple weeks to learn lxc on ubuntu and here are some good web blogs/sites for information, scripts and tools:

Arkose- is a python app...
This tool has a Ubuntu PPA and is built by Stephane Graber.
This article is 3 years old but gives you an idea of Arkose
another from Stephane's blog on LXC activities

ActiveState's blog on LXC using Ubuntu on EC2
ActiveState's writeup of how to configure LXC in Ubuntu on Amazon's EC2

Script to automate LXC use on Ubuntu
The following Blog includes a great script that does all of the LXC configuration for you. All you do is answer 3 questions - name of container, root/sudo user, location for containter
Philipp Klaus's Computing Blog
the script he built can be found here...

In the last 2 weeks I've tried them all and they all work well. ActiveState's includes private DNS which was cool and the fact that it configured LXC containers on one of my AWS EC2 instances was great.

Stephane Graber's Arkose tool is actually very interesting because it also supports creating containers for just single application launching (read his blog on launching the eyes app or gedit).

so it's very easy to experiment with. But it's quite hard to find documentation. It took me several hours to configure my first container.