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Is OpenVZ obsoleted?

Oh, such a provocative subject! Not really. Many people do believe that OpenVZ is obsoleted, and when I ask why, three most popular answers are:

1. OpenVZ kernel is old and obsoleted, because it is based on 2.6.32, while everyone in 2013 runs 3.x.
2. LXC is the future, OpenVZ is the past.
3. OpenVZ is no longer developed, it was even removed from Debian Wheezy.

Let me try to address all these misconceptions, one by one.

1. "OpenVZ kernel is old". Current OpenVZ kernels are based on kernels from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL6 for short). This is the latest and greatest version of enterprise Linux distribution from Red Hat, a company who is always almost at the top of the list of top companies contributing to the Linux kernel development (see 1, 2, 3, 4 for a few random examples). While no kernel being ideal and bug free, RHEL6 one is a good real world approximation of these qualities.

What people in Red Hat do for their enterprise Linux is they take an upstream kernel and basically fork it, ironing out the bugs, cherry-picking security fixes, driver updates, and sometimes new features from upstream. They do so for about half a year or more before a release, so the released kernel is already "old and obsoleted", as it seems if one is looking at the kernel version number. Well, don't judge a book by its cover, don't judge a kernel by its number. Of course it's not old, neither obsoleted -- it's just more stable and secure. And then, after a release, it is very well maintained, with modern hardware support, regular releases, and prompt security fixes. This makes it a great base for OpenVZ kernel. In a sense, we are standing on the shoulders of a red hatted giant (and since this is open source, they are standing just a little bit on our shoulders, too).

RHEL7 is being worked on right now, and it will be based on some 3.x kernel (possibly 3.10). We will port OpenVZ kernel to RHEL7 once it will become available. In the meantime, RHEL6-based OpenVZ kernel is latest and greatest, and please don't be fooled by the fact that uname shows 2.6.32.

2. OpenVZ vs LXC. OpenVZ kernel was historically developed separately, i.e. aside from the upstream Linux kernel. This mistake was recognized in 2005, and since then we keep working on merging OpenVZ bits and pieces to the upstream kernel. It took way longer than expected, we are still in the middle of the process with some great stuff (like net namespace and CRIU, totally more than 2000 changesets) merged, while some other features are still in our TODO list. In the future (another eight years? who knows...) OpenVZ kernel functionality will probably be fully upstream, so it will just be a set of tools. We are happy to see that Parallels is not the only company interested in containers for Linux, so it might happen a bit earlier. For now, though, we still rely on our organic non-GMO home grown kernel (although it is already optional).

Now what is LXC? In fact, it is just another user-space tool (not unlike vzctl) that works on top of a recent upstream kernel (again, not unlike vzctl). As we work on merging our stuff upstream, LXC tools will start using new features and therefore benefit from this work. So far at least half of kernel functionality used by LXC was developed by our engineers, and while we don't work on LXC tools, it would not be an overestimation to say that Parallels is the biggest LXC contributor.

So, both OpenVZ and LXC are actively developed and have their future. We might even merge our tools at some point, the idea was briefly discussed during last containers mini-conf at Linux Plumbers. LXC is not a successor to OpenVZ, though, they are two different projects, although not entirely separate (since OpenVZ team contributes to the kernel a lot, and both tools use the same kernel functionality). OpenVZ is essentially LXC++, because it adds some more stuff that are not (yet) available in the upstream kernel (such as stronger isolation, better resource accounting, plus some auxiliary ones like ploop).

3. OpenVZ no longer developed, removed from Debian. Debian kernel team decided to drop OpenVZ (as well as few other) kernel flavors from Debian 7 a.k.a. Wheezy. This is completely understandable: kernel maintenance takes time and other resources, and they probably don't have enough. That doesn't mean though that OpenVZ is not developed. It's really strange to argue that, but please check our software updates page (or the announce@ mailing list archives). We made about 80 software releases this year so far. This accounts for 2 releases every week. Most of those are new kernels. So no, in no way it is abandoned.

As for Debian Wheezy, we are providing our repository with OpenVZ kernel and tools, as it was announced just yesterday.

Debian kernel packages

Good news, everyone!
Prof. Farnsworth


Many people use OpenVZ on Debian. In fact, Debian was one of the distribution that come with OpenVZ kernel and tools. Unfortunately, it's not that way anymore, since Debian 7 "Wheezy" dropped OpenVZ kernel. A workaround was to take an RPM-packaged OpenVZ kernel and convert it to .deb using alien tool, but the process is manual and somewhat unnatural.

Finally, now we have a working build system for Debian kernel packages, and a repository for Debian Wheezy with latest and greatest OpenVZ kernels, as well as tools. In fact, we have two: one for stable, one for testing kernels and tools. Kernels debs are built and released at the same time as rpms. Currently we have vzctl/vzquota/ploop in 'wheezy-test' repository only -- once we'll be sure they work as expected, we will move those into stable 'wheezy' repo.

To enable these repos:

cat << EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openvz.list
deb http://download.openvz.org/debian wheezy main
deb http://download.openvz.org/debian wheezy-test main
EOF
apt-get update


To install the kernel:
apt-get install linux-image-openvz-amd64

More info is available from https://wiki.openvz.org/Installation_on_Debian and http://download.openvz.org/debian/

openvz for Debian Squeeze

I am still at the OpenVZ booth at LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin. At least two people asked me about the status of OpenVZ kernel for the upcoming Debian Squeeze. Specifically, they said, there is no openvz kernel in "testing" repository (i.e. what will become Squeeze when it will be released). My guess is some more people interesting in that, so here's the public answer.

We are working pretty close with the Debian kernel team, you can see some traces of that on either debian-kernel AT lists.debian.org or debian AT openvz.org mailing lists. Specifically, we work together to bring good quality OpenVZ kernel to Squeeze, and this was one of the main reasons for us to port to 2.6.32.

But yesterday we tried to search for openvz linux-image on packages.debian.org and it gave us no results for testing. I then emailed Max Attems (who maintains our kernels in Debian) and this is his response:
it should be there now, the switch to libata did uphold testing
transition of linux-2.6 for quite some time, so testing had an
outdated linux-2.6 for quite some while


Indeed, the kernel is now there. So yes, Squeeze will have OpenVZ kernel, and I guess it can also be used by people who switched to Ubuntu 10.4.

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