From: Herbert Poetzl (herbert_at_13thfloor.at)
Date: Mon 16 Jun 2003 - 15:01:26 BST
On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 01:24:28PM +0100, Sam Stickland wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been lurking on this list for a while, but I'm still
> a bit confused about the multiple versions of vserver that
> seem to exist.
it's okay to be confused, I guess even
the vserver developer themselves are sometimes
confused by the multitude of branches/patches ...
> There appears to be two concurrent projects (Jacques' and
> Alex's?) plus various sets of extra patches for differing
> functionality.
actually, currently there are three projects
addressing the 'virtual' server issues ...
I) Jacques' VServer (solucorp.qc.ca) which is the
'original' project which first introduced the
concept of virtual contexts, not interfering
with each other, and later (in version 0.6)
added the IMMUTABLE-LINK-INVERT code written
by Sam Vilain, to allow file sharing between
different vservers ...
Jacques does solid development (which tends to
progress very slowly; 0.22 release date was
7 Dec 2002) and no development/cvs branch ...
[Jacques, please correct me if I'm wrong]
II) Alexeys VServer (ttn.ru) is a branch which was
done in need of a vserver solution for RedHat
kernels (which use the O(1) scheduler introduced
by Ingo Molnar) and very fast developed a life
of its own, because Alexey added many features
not known to the 'original' version, including
quota support and real network separation ...
[Alexey, please correct me if I'm wrong]
III) Recently I started the third project in this
area, by rewriting the basic virtualization
architecture, in the hope to simplify future
vserver development ...
additionally there are several (some) patches and
improvements to Jacques code, which are not (yet)
included in the mainstream, like
- vroot devices (example implementation, security)
- virtual quota support and context quota
- quota capability (CAP_QUOTACTL)
- others?
and a continuous rediff efford to keep Jacques code
up to date with the 2.4.x kernel development ...
for a detailed list of features, see Jacques pages,
Alexeys postings and if you are interested in my
VServer work http://www.13thfloor.at/VServer/
> Could someone give a quick rundown of the various projects
> and how they fit together?
hth,
Herbert
> Thanks,
> Sam
>