FreeBSD Jails in Depth. An Implementation Walkthrough and Usefulness Example

Matteo Riondato

Jails are probably one of the best known features of FreeBSD, not only between the BSD aficionados, but also between external people. Introduced in FreeBSD 4.0 by Poul-Henning Kamp, they were greatly enhanced in 5.x and 6.x and became a useful and flexible sysadmin tool. During the talk, the implementation of the Jail Subsystem will be analyzed, starting from the userland binaries that permit to start and administrate jails. In-kernel implementation will be discussed in depth, showing the elegant design of the subsystem. Pratical use of a jail will be studied, with particular attention to jail's fine tuning to improve security.

About the Author

Matteo Riondato was born in the foggy northern Italy, about 20 years ago. After having spent his youth playing with LEGOs and any sort of nerdish games, he discovered computers and have never left them since he was 14. UNIX lover since the very beginning of his computer interest, he is a FreeBSD enthusiast and has focused his interest in system and network security, following the dream of keeping the bad guys out of his playground. He studies Information Engineering at the Padua University and writes BSD-related articles for the main italian *NIX magazine. Staff member of the Italian FreeBSD Users Group (GUFI), he tries to help the FreeSBIE project as a developer, bugmaster and documentation writer. Since 17th June 2005 he is also a FreeBSD Bugmaster and, similar to Pulp Fiction's Mister Wolf, he enjoys solving Problem Reports (aka PRs).

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