We are releasing the first version (0.1.0) of our clone of vmadm for FreeBSD jails today. It is not done or feature complete, but it does provides basic functionality. At this point, we think it would be helpful to get it out there and get some feedback. As of today, it allows basic management of datasets, as well as creating, starting, stopping, and destroying jails.

Why another tool to manage jails

However, before we go into details let’s talk why we build yet another jail manager? It is not the frequent NIH syndrome, actually quite the opposite. In FiFo 0.9.2 we experimented with iocage as a way to control jails. While iocage is a useful tool when used as a CLI utility it has some issues when used programmatically.

When managing jails automatically and not via a CLI tool things like performance, or a machine parsable interface matter. While on a CLI it is acceptable if a call takes a second or two, for automatically consuming a tool this delay is problematic.

Another reason for the decision was that vmadm is an excellent tool. It is very well designed. SmartOs uses vmadm for years now. Given all that, we opted for adopting a proven interface rather than trying to create a new one. Since we already interface with it on SmartOS, we can reuse a majority of our management code between SmartOS and FreeBSDBSD.

What can we do

Today we can manage datasets, which are jail templates in the form of ZFS volumes. We can list and serve them from a dataset-server, and fetch those we like want. At this point, we provide datasets for FreeBSD 10.0 to 11.1, but it is very likely that the list will grow. As an idea here is a community-driven list of datasets that exist for SmartOS today. Moreover, while those datasets will not work, we hope to see the same for BSD jails.

After fetching the dataset, we can define jails by using a JSON file. This file is compatible with the zone description used on SmartOS. It does not provide all the same features but a subset. Resources such as CPU and memory can be defined, networking configured, a dataset selected and necessary settings like hostname set.

With the jail created, vmadm allows managing its lifetime, starting, stopping it, accessing the console and finally destroying it. Updates to jails are supported to however as of today they are only taken into account after restarting the jail. However, this is in large parts not a technical impossibility but rather wasn’t high up on the TODO list.

It is worth mentioning that vmadm will not pick up jails created in other tools or manually. Only using vmadm created jails was a conscious decision to prevent it interfering with existing setups or other utilities. While conventional tools can manage jails set up with vmadm just fine we use some special tricks like nested jails to allow for restrictions required for multi-tenancy that are hard or impossible to achieve otherwise.

Whats next

First and foremost we hope to get some feedback and perhaps community engagement. In the meantime, as announced earlier this year, we are hard at work integrating FreeBSD hypervisors in FiFo, and as of writing this, the core actions work quite well.

Right now only the barebone functions are supported, some of the output is not as clear as we would like. We hope to eventually add support for behyve to vmadm the same way that it supports KVM on SmartOS. Moreover, the groundwork for this already exists in the nested jail techniques we are using.

Other than that we are exploring ways to allow for PCI pass through in jails, something not possible in SmartOS zones right now that would be beneficial for some users.

In general, we want to improve compatibility with SmartOS as much as possible and features that we add over time should make the specifications invalid for SmartOS.

You can get the tool from gitlab.