Although not very versed in BrandZ technologies, I tried the lx brand
in the past, with success. But the fact is, the just supported release
of the lx brand in the Solaris 8/07 release will not really help us,
since it can only provide a 2.4 Linux kernel working environment which
is now a bit outdated (yes, I know the most recent Linux distributions
will be supported via the Xen open-source
hypervisor ).
Interestingly, two recent news will certainly (hopefully?) change this
in the future.
The first one is the availability of an experimental Linux 2.6 support in OpenSolaris. The work has been done by a summer intern (!) in the Solaris kernel group, Evan Hoke. What a hard work done in so little time, really impressive. I just hope that the community will follow and will enhance the proposed experimental branded zone extension.
The second news is really exciting too. This is the upcoming availability of a SPARC-only brand designed to emulate the Solaris 8 kernel. Although not yet ready for use, this news is really, really amazing since this enable a more soft-upgrade to Solaris 10 by enabling the use of all the great features provided to us with this version (DTrace, ZFS, FMA, SMF, etc.) on the global zone, while running a Solaris 8 branded zone... on top of the most recent hardware (say Sun Fire V215, T1000, T2000, etc.). Wow. I just can't wait to try this out, in particular since it will be available for the last supported Solaris 8/07 release.