kernel level virtualisation requirements.

[Julian Elischer]

After PHK added jails, FreeBSD found a multitude of new
applications, and they have served us well for quite some time.

However since then Solaris and Linux have provided newer and more
extensive virtualised abstractions, and it's probably time to 
think abut where we go from here.

Marco Zec has been working on his network virtualisation, and Andre
has spoken of what would be a subset of that, with policy based routing
capacities (multiple routing tables etc.)

I have been doing some private work on machines with multiple routing 
universes but that is not generally applicable.

Some people have talked about cpu partition, resource sub partitioning 
and other aspects that could be considered to be part of 
presenting the appearance of many machines in one way or another.

My reason for writing this is to see if as a group, we can come to 
a definition of what is needed, and how it can be organised.

I'll start the ball rolling by stating that I'd like to see
the vimage code merged with a general framework (it already has some 
aspects of this.. Marco has done a great job) and put in the new head branch.

What I'd like to see is a bit of a 'a-la-carte' virtualisation
ability.

I'd like to be able to say..
I want to share the filesystem, and unix domain sockets but 
have a separate routing domain for my processes, or maybe just
for some sockets.  But someone else may want to have
complete separation with everything up to and including
separate userID spaces.

My question to you, the reader, is:
what aspects of virtualisation (the appearance of multiple instances
of some resource) would you like to see in the system?

Even a discussion as to how to frame this question is up for discussion.

We don't even have a taxonomy to discus the issue.

Julian