BRANDS(7) Standards, Environments, and Macros BRANDS(7)

brands - alternate operating environments for non-global zones

The branded zone (BrandZ) framework extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure described in zones(7) to include the creation of brands, which provide non-global zones that contain non-native operating environments.

The term "brand" can refer to a wide range of operating environments. All brand management is performed as extensions to the current zones structure.

Every zone is configured with an associated brand. The brand type is used to determine which scripts are executed when a zone is installed and booted. In addition, a zone's brand is used to properly identify the correct application type at application launch time. The default brand is determined by the installed distribution in the global zone.

A branded zone will support exactly one brand of non-native binary, which means that a branded zone provides a single operating environment. Once a zone has been assigned a brand, that brand cannot be changed or removed.

BrandZ extends the zones tools in the following ways:

A brand is an attribute of a zone, set at zone create time.
The zonecfg tool (see zonecfg(8)) is used to set a zone's brand type and configure the zone.
The zoneadm tool (see zoneadm(8)) is used to report a zone's brand type and administer the zone.

The devices supported by each zone are documented in the man pages and other documentation for that brand. The zones infrastructure detects any attempt to add an unsupported device and issues a warning to the administrator. If the administrator chooses to add an unsupported device despite that warning, that device might or might not work as expected. The configuration will be untested and unsupported.

Refer to the brand-specific manual page for further details.

BRAND DESCRIPTION
ipkg Runs a full copy of OmniOS with independently managed
software.
lipkg As ipkg but with system software linked to that
in the global zone.
sparse An lipkg zone which has several filesystems
directly shared with the global zone. sparse
zones are very small and quick to build.
pkgsrc A sparse zone which is pre-configured to use
Joyent's binary package repository.
lx An environment for running binary applications built
for Gnu/Linux.
bhyve A virtual machine instance running under the bhyve
hypervisor.
kvm A virtual machine instance running under the KVM
hypervisor.
illumos An independent illumos environment running under the
shared OmniOS kernel.

See attributes(7) for a description of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Interface Stability Evolving

attributes(7), bhyve(7), illumos(7), ipkg(7), kvm(7), lipkg(7), lx(7), pkgsrc(7), sparse(7), zones(7), zoneadm(8), zonecfg(8)

May 23, 2021 OmniOS