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A Brief Look at the Roots of Linux Containers

By 2017-05-228月 22nd, 2017Blog

In previous excerpts of the new, self-paced Containers Fundamentals course from The Linux Foundation, we discussed what containers are and are not. Here, we’ll take a brief look at the history of containers, which includes chroot, FreeBSD jails, Solaris zones, and systemd-nspawn. 

Chroot was first introduced in 1979, during development of Seventh Edition Unix (also called Version 7), and was added to BSD in 1982. In 2000, FreeBSD extended chroot to FreeBSD Jails. Then, in the early 2000s, Solaris introduced the concept of zones, which virtualized the operating system services.

With chroot, you can change the apparent root directory for the currently running process and its children. After configuring chroot, subsequent commands will run with respect to the new root (/). With chroot, we can limit the processes only at the filesystem level, but they share the resources, like users, hostname, IP address, etc. FreeBSD Jails extended the chroot model by virtualizing users, network sub-systems, etc.

systemd-nspawn has not been around as long as chroot and Jails, but it can be used to create containers, which would be managed by systemd. On modern Linux operating systems, systemd is used as an init system to bootstrap the user space and manage all the processes subsequently.

This training course, presented mainly in video format, is aimed at those who are new to containers and covers the basics of container runtimes, container storage and networking, Dockerfiles, Docker APIs, and more.

You can learn more in the sample course video below, presented by Neependra Khare (@neependra), Founder and Principal Consultant at CloudYuga, Docker Captain, and author of the Docker Cookbook:

Want to learn more? Access all the free sample chapter videos now!

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