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Review: NetBSD jails
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
About a month ago we shared that there is an effort underway to bring jails, a popular isolation technology used by FreeBSD, to the NetBSD operating system. This Jails for NetBSD project is not yet an official part of NetBSD, but the implementation of jails has reached a point where it can be run and tested.
A jail, for people who have not had a chance to use one, is an isolated section of the filesystem which acts like a lightweight virtual machine. The jail is like it's own, self-contained operating system which has its own copies of programs, configuration files, and user accounts. Any processes or services run inside the jail cannot see or interact with the host operating system. A jail shares the kernel of the host operating system, making it lighter than a virtual machine, while offering most of the same benefits of running processes in an isolated space.
A jail on FreeBSD or NetBSD is somewhat similar to running a container on Linux. A jail offers similar benefits in terms of security and portability, allowing programs and operating environments to be ported between host machines.
I had some time this week and, as a fan of FreeBSD jails, wanted to try out the new Jails for NetBSD tools. The Jails for NetBSD project offers ISO files which are based on NetBSD 11 and include the new jail utilities, saving us from manually installing the technology. I downloaded the 621MB ISO file for x86_64 machines and set out to explore jails on NetBSD.