Few side notes on zones. Zone support is a great deal for any installation technology. I am pretty sure that installation support for zones was even more complicated in development then zone isolation support on OS level. Zone support for any install project takes way more then a half time of coding and design. So I will really appreciate if you check recursive patching for zones.
For somebody who is not quite familiar with zones this is simple way to create some on your system - it is really easy. (It require root permissions) 1. Create some directory where zone will live #mkdir /export/z1 Of course it may be any local directory (but not nfs). 2. Then simple sequence of command will create zone in this directory: # zonecfg -z z1 >> create >> set zonepath=/export/z1 # zoneadm -z z1 install Zone Installation will clone (copy) current system package set over new zone and reconfigure each package as it is just installed. It will be same Solaris on new zone at this point and after this it can be packaged and patched independently if it does not affect shared parts of the zone (kernel in memory and /usr directory for spare zones). Synchronization of shared part is what make zone support for install so complicated, even it looks easy from use point of view. Zone root in global zone will be available in /export/z1/root (This is the place to copy alternative OS image from recursive patching demo README). 3. To start zone # zoneadm boot z1 4. To login to the zone if you need to do something in it. # zlogin -C z1 (console login) or # zlogin z1 (normal login) 5. Try zoneadm help for more zone operations. Hope it helps. vassun. This message posted from opensolaris.org
