FreeBSD jails: going native

A piece of history

FreeBSD jails were introduced in June 2000. They were the first open-source solution for lightweight virtualization, and proved to be foundational to the container revolution that took off later on, preceding the emergence of linux-vserver in October 2001, or LXC containers at the end of 2008.

The jail technology inspired Sun’s engineers, who refined and further elaborated on its concepts through the development of Solaris Zones in 2004, as this talk by Bryan Cantrill amusingly evokes.