One of the requests we get from time to time is for SmartOS to look more like GNU/Linux in layout and behaviour. For example, config files in /etc instead of /opt/local/etc, binaries under /usr instead of /opt/local/{s,}bin, GNU userland by default, etc.

Whilst we believe in the technical merits of our current implementation and the clean separation and upgrade possibilities it provides, we do recognise that some users just don’t care about those things and would prefer a system which looks as close to the GNU/Linux environments they are used to.

Ordinarily this simply wouldn’t be possible given that /usr is a read-only mount from the global zone, however with the highly flexible SmartOS Zones architecture, coupled with Joyent employing Zones guru Jerry Jelinek, we are able to provide you with an option to do exactly this. As Jerry says, at Sun there was even a native Linux brand, so pretty much anything is possible!

We call it ‘SNGL’ (pronounced ‘snuggle’), which is an acronym for ‘SmartOS is Not GNU/Linux’. Currently it is somewhat experimental, but we’d love for people to try it out and provide feedback.

Here’s how you can get it running.

Install the latest platform

You need to be running SmartOS 20130222 or later. Older platforms can be coerced into working, you will just need to work around the lack of this commit by creating an empty sngl_base.tar.gz or so.

As usual, follow the instructions here to upgrade an existing install.

Get the SNGL dataset

: Fetch the dataset image and manifest files.  The image is 107MB.
$ mkdir -p /usbkey/images
$ cd /usbkey/images
$ curl -O http://pkgsrc.smartos.org/datasets/sngl-0.99.0.dsmanifest
$ curl -O http://pkgsrc.smartos.org/datasets/sngl-0.99.0.zfs.bz2

: Import it
$ imgadm install -m sngl-0.99.0.dsmanifest -f sngl-0.99.0.zfs.bz2

Create a new dataset

The important point to note here is that brand is set to sngl.

: Create a new zone using the dataset (change your json to suit).
$ vmadm create <<EOF
{
  "brand": "sngl",
  "image_uuid": "4bf9530a-7ae5-11e2-bb4e-3bad5fbc3de9",
  "ram": 256,
  "quota": 10,
  "alias": "sngl-0.99.0",
  "nics": [
    {
      "nic_tag": "admin",
      "ip": "dhcp"
    }
  ]
}
EOF

At this point you should be able to log in and start using pkgin etc to install new software (there are over 2,000 packages available) as normal, but notice that:

• binaries are running from /usr/bin

• configuration files are in /etc

• the default userland tools are GNU variants (ls, sed, awk, grep, etc.)

For those that are interested, here is some further detail on how this is all implemented.

Brand configuration

The main setup is in /usr/lib/brand/sngl. Firstly, platform.xml defines the mount points to be used inside the zone, and here you can see how we are able to use /usr:

        <global_mount special="/lib" directory="/system/lib"
            opt="ro,nodevices" type="lofs" />
        <global_mount special="/sbin" directory="/system/sbin"
            opt="ro,nodevices" type="lofs" />
        <global_mount special="/usr" directory="/system/usr"
            opt="ro,nodevices" type="lofs" />

We are transplanting the main system directories and mounting them under /system. This leaves /usr free for us to write packages to.

In order to support having the OS under /system there is some additional configuration in config.xml.

        <initname>/system/sbin/init</initname>
        <login_cmd>/system/usr/bin/login -z %Z %u</login_cmd>
        <forcedlogin_cmd>/system/usr/bin/login -z %Z -f %u</forcedlogin_cmd>
        <user_cmd>/system/usr/bin/getent passwd %u</user_cmd>

This is where the flexibility of Zones really shines. We are able to redefine the path to init(1M) and others so that the zone can boot correctly.

In addition, we copy in the crle configuration files ld.sys.config and ld.sys64.config so that binaries will look in /system/usr/lib for their runtime libraries.

Runtime and packages

The brand configuration is enough to set the zone up, but in order to make it boot we need additional files available under /usr, there are simply too many hardcoded paths. For this we just symlink back to /system/usr from /usr any files required.

Finally, we are able to perform a full pkgsrc bulk build with LOCALBASE set to /usr within a chroot which emulates this layout, and when those packages are installed they overwrite the compatability symlinks we have configured and replace them with files from the packages.

Not all symlinks will be overwritten, though, which is why standard SmartOS utilities such as prstat(1M) are still available, as the symlink for it still exists.

Reporting issues

As I mentioned, this is currently experimental, and there will be plenty of problems. However, at least from some initial testing, a reasonable amount of things appear to work fine, and for users who want this particular layout it may be good enough.

Please feel free to give it a try and report issues against our GitHub project. Once we have it working with a reasonable amount of stability we may be able to offer it as an option in the Joyent Public Cloud.