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FreeBSD Leftovers
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Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ FreeBSD Foundationals: Jails - From Chroot on Steroids to Full Virtual Networks
FreeBSD Jails have been around since FreeBSD 4.0, released in the year 2000. That makes them older than Linux cgroups, older than LXC, older than Docker, and older than most people’s understanding of what “containers” even means. Yet they remain one of the most elegant and underappreciated isolation mechanisms available on any operating system.
This article is the first in a series called FreeBSD Foundationals - covering core FreeBSD concepts that deserve more than a man page skim. We start with Jails because they’re central to how FreeBSD is deployed in practice: from hosting providers to Netflix’s CDN to small mail servers on rented hardware.
If you’ve used Docker or LXC on Linux, some concepts will feel familiar. But Jails are not Linux containers with a different name. The design philosophy, the networking model, and the security boundaries are fundamentally different. Understanding those differences is the point.
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DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2026/03/01
No theme! Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD is the next NYCBUG meeting, 3 days from now. Go, if you are near. On pressing the space bar for the cabinet. The state of GNU/Linux music players in 2026.