FreeBSD Jails – Deep Dive into the Beginning of FreeBSD Containers

canopic jug writes:

Klara Systems has an article with a deep dive into the origins of FreeBSD jails. These ideas have been around for many decades and taken form in several stages and finally became part of FreeBSD over 20 years ago. FreeBSD jails share the main system's kernel and are therefore a relatively light weight means for userspace isolation, compared to "containers". Within the jail, the environment appears as a normal system and processes within the jail can not see upward into the host or laterally into other jails.

In the late 1990s, [Poul-Henning] Kamp was contacted by a man from South Carolina named Derrick T. Woolworth. Woolworth had a problem and was looking for a solution. He ran a web hosting company named R&D Associates Inc and he had this idea for running multiple different versions of Apache and MySQL on the same server". Woolworth complained about the fact that different customers in his webhotel needed different versions of apache, mysql, perl etc, and that this forced him to run many machines, each almost idle, just for these different software loads."

Woolworth offered to pay for the development of such a feature. The deal was that he would pay for the development and then after one year I would commit them to FreeBSD." With that Jails were born. After Woolworth's year of exclusivity expired, Jails were included in FreeBSD 4.

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