Virtualizaton for Sparc

[imcsk8]

Hello,

I recently installed gentoo on a niagara machine and i want to use vservers in order to have more isolated environments for my applications and for having the ability to copy the the vserver to other machine for testing or expanding the capabilities.

In the <a href="http://linux-vserver.org/Installation_Considerations#Hardware_Compatibility">linux vserver website sparc is listed as a supported arch</a> but it marked with a '*' in portage, also checked openvz which is only markes as "~" in portgage but i got an "unsupported architecture" error (kernel/cpt/cpt_context.c:134:2: error: #error Arch is not supported).

I have a few questions about this:

¿should i download the vanilla kernel and apply the vserver patches??
( I really would like to use the gentoo-sources)

¿are the vserver-sources marked with '*' because they don't work in sparc at all??
(if the can work i would like to help the gentoo-vserver team with the testing on sparc)

¿are there any equivalent solutions with more stability for sparc (i don't really want to use solaris if i can avoid it)??


I would like to know the alternatives i have for using vservers or if i should not use this technology in sparc at all.


Thanks for your help.
_________________
Ignorance, the plague is everywhere
-- Guttermouth

[nadir-san]

I know you might not want to .. but I suggest you install Solaris with logical domains, using solaris nevada preferably, I think opensolaris also has support.
Then partition your systems resources and install gentoo on the guest domains, if you require any help/advice please ask.
I am currently about to test gentoo with logical domains, this is definately the best option for virtualisation on the niagra processor.
I also can assure you, you will not be disappointed with the results/performance, this is a true hardware virtualisation solution and in my experience vastly outperforms xen based systems.

[Weeve]

To the best of my knowledge, packages marked with -* to help indicate two things.

The first is to indicate that a package may only work on a select set of architectures (think binary only packages like mozilla-firefox-bin).

That a package has only been tested on select architectures and may be unusually problematic on architectures that are not explicitly mentioned in the KEYWORDS line.

If you've searched Gentoo's Bugzilla for vserver and SPARC and nothing has come up, I'd give it a shot. If it appears to work for you, let the SPARC team know by filing a bug indicating that it works for you and could use a keyword. As always, the output of emerge info and anything special you had to do to get it working is greatly helpful.