Howdy, I saw this little tidbit in the 8.0 Release Notes... ---- The jail(8) subsystem has been updated. Changes include: Compatibility support which permits 32-bit jail binaries to be used on 64-bit systems to manage jails has been added. ---- I know prior to 8.0 with some fancy footwork you could do some interesting things (for example, I have a jail running a bunch of 32-bit 4.11 stuff on a 7.2 amd64 box), but it was not easy. Looking at the jail manpage and handbook entries, I'm not seeing anything that further explains the changes. I've been able to get some things working in a test setup, but not everything. Any pointers to what exactly that blurb in the release notes actually means? Google is getting me nowhere. My current scenario is this... I have a backups server with a ton of space. Nightly backups run to this and get zfs-snapshotted each night. I also have created jails for a number of important hosts so that should I lose a host, I can bring up a jail on this box to replace it while I repair things. One host is a 7.2/i386 box. The backups host is 8.0/amd64. Ideally I'd like to copy everything, including the base OS into this jail, except for perhaps "ps", "top" and other utilities that might have issues. Any pointers appreciated... Thanks, Charles ___ Charles Sprickman NetEng/SysAdmin Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net spork@bway.net - 212.655.9344
Charles Sprickman wrote:> Howdy, > > I saw this little tidbit in the 8.0 Release Notes... > > ---- > The jail(8) subsystem has been updated. Changes include: > > Compatibility support which permits 32-bit jail binaries to be used on > 64-bit systems to manage jails has been added. > ---- > > I know prior to 8.0 with some fancy footwork you could do some > interesting things (for example, I have a jail running a bunch of 32-bit > 4.11 stuff on a 7.2 amd64 box), but it was not easy. > > Looking at the jail manpage and handbook entries, I'm not seeing > anything that further explains the changes. I've been able to get some > things working in a test setup, but not everything. Any pointers to what > exactly that blurb in the release notes actually means? Google is > getting me nowhere. > > My current scenario is this... I have a backups server with a ton of > space. Nightly backups run to this and get zfs-snapshotted each night. I > also have created jails for a number of important hosts so that should I > lose a host, I can bring up a jail on this box to replace it while I > repair things. One host is a 7.2/i386 box. The backups host is > 8.0/amd64. Ideally I'd like to copy everything, including the base OS > into this jail, except for perhaps "ps", "top" and other utilities that > might have issues.(freebsd-jail@ was added in to Cc:) I think it is nothing new to 8.0, it is the same as release note for 7.2. I didn't test it, but I think you can install (copy) i386 jail (or whole system) in to amd64 host and just run it as any other jail. Miroslav Lachman
On Thursday 21 January 2010 1:51:36 am Charles Sprickman wrote:> Howdy, > > I saw this little tidbit in the 8.0 Release Notes... > > ---- > The jail(8) subsystem has been updated. Changes include: > > Compatibility support which permits 32-bit jail binaries to be used on > 64-bit systems to manage jails has been added. > ---- > > I know prior to 8.0 with some fancy footwork you could do some interesting > things (for example, I have a jail running a bunch of 32-bit 4.11 stuff on > a 7.2 amd64 box), but it was not easy.The comment is a bit misleading, it just means you can use an i386 /usr/sbin/jail binary on an amd64 system (presumably the same is true for other jail-related programs like jls). It's probably not useful for the vast majority of folks. Perhaps with nested jails it could be useful as a 32-bit jail on a 64-bit host can create child jails w/o needing to copy the 64-bit jail binary from the host into the jail. There are still several binaries such as ps that need to be 64-bit, even in a 32-bit jail. -- John Baldwin