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Concept
Chroot
Summary
chroot is an operation on Unix and Unix-like operating systems that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot name (and therefore normally cannot access) files outside the designated directory tree. The term "chroot" may refer to the system call or the wrapper program. The modified environment is called a chroot jail.
The chroot system call was introduced during development of Version 7 Unix in 1979. One source suggests that Bill Joy added it on 18 March 1982 – 17 months before 4.2BSD was released – in order to test its installation and build system. All versions of BSD that had a kernel have chroot(2). An early use of the term "jail" as applied to chroot comes from Bill Cheswick creating a honeypot to monitor a hacker in 1991.
The first article about a jailbreak has been discussed on the security column of SunWorld Online which is written by Carole Fennelly; the August 1999 and January 1999 editions cover most of the chroot() topics.
To make it useful for virtualization, FreeBSD expanded the concept and in its 4.0 release in 2000 introduced the jail command.
By 2002, an article written by Nicolas Boiteux described how to create a jail on Linux
By 2003, first internet microservices providers with Linux jails provide SAAS/PAAS (shell containers, proxy, ircd, bots, ...) services billed for consumption into the jail by usage
By 2005, Sun released Solaris Containers (also known as Solaris Zones), described as "chroot on steroids."
By 2008, LXC (upon which Docker was later built) adopted the "container" terminology and gained popularity in 2013 due to inclusion into Linux kernel 3.8 of user namespaces.
A chroot environment can be used to create and host a separate virtualized copy of the software system. This can be useful for:
Testing and development A test environment can be set up in the chroot for software that would otherwise be too risky to deploy on a production system.
Official source
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