> each container only needs the libs and kernel services that it needs to do its job. It doesn't need the whole OS and doesn't benefit from the whole OS being present.
Yes, but the kernel services are the part that's incompatible between systems. Containers do not run their own kernel, but instead run on their host OS kernel.
A Linux/UNIX ABI is probably the minimum cost of entry for an OS to participate in this idea, at least in the short-term, since everything for the server is currently built primarily for Linux.
This idea would mean you're not running the OS's kernel, and you are only running the userspace components that were written against Linux emulation, which are often just Linux binaries copied from some Linux distribution.
I don't know that Oracle Solaris supports the Linux ABI. The revival of Linux ABI support in zones (containers) is a SmartOS (and illumos) thing, and we've diverged significantly from Solaris at this point.
SmartOS is really just a distribution of illumos; so are OmniOS, OpenIndiana, etc. We are all very similar as we push and pull from our common source base.
When Oracle took the source closed again, they essentially forked their own private product. They have diverged significantly enough from everybody else that it's not really helpful to include them in the same family anymore.
I will bet lots of places in the enterprise, which didn't care how Solaris was developed in first place, and were already Sun customers before they open sourced it.
But where I was it seemed like it was open sourced there was a lot of excitement about its future, and after being bought by Oracle and closed source, not so much.
Yes, but the kernel services are the part that's incompatible between systems. Containers do not run their own kernel, but instead run on their host OS kernel.