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If I'm reading this right, that's pretty major. The isolation benefits of a VM with a bootspeed faster than docker?
I haven't been on the server side in a while, but 1) isn't Xen falling out of favor and 2) is docker boot speed a big problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s called Zones (on illumos, prev. on Solaris)
I'm a huge fan of Illumos and SmartOS and think that Zones + LX Branding are a far superior technology than the hodgepodge of cgroups + namespaces + userland container technology. HOWEVER---the amount of driver support in the OpenSolaris forks, the awful package management system, the ancient IPF system etcetera make it a non-starter for most environments. I have used SmartOS in production (along with the Triton ecos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s called Zones (on illumos, prev. on Solaris)
I'm a huge fan of Illumos and SmartOS and think that Zones + LX Branding are a far superior technology than the hodgepodge of cgroups + namespaces + userland container technology. HOWEVER---the amount of driver support in the OpenSolaris forks, the awful package management system, the ancient IPF system etcetera make it a non-starter for most environments. I have used SmartOS in production (along with the Triton ecos…
Xen is very much inspired by exokernels (you could even make the argument that it is an exokernel), so it makes sense that someone would push it more in that direction. That being said, if you're going to go that way,it's to bad that there isn't more inspiration from the past 20 years of OS design. A capability based security/object management interface would nice. I also really like Akaros's VM threads model; IMO th…
Agreed and seL4 comes to mind. It's capability based, quite fast and secure. For that matter, it's also quite small.
If I'm reading this right, that's pretty major. The isolation benefits of a VM with a bootspeed faster than docker?
I haven't been on the server side in a while, but 1) isn't Xen falling out of favor and 2) is docker boot speed a big problem?
Obviously Xen will have a long life due to AWS, but I am failing to see anything that machined and kvm don't offer here on the performance oriented side.
There is probably be some use case but the xen time slice model doesn't seem to know enough about frequency binning or the impacts of high energy/heat instructions on them to be very competitive in the applications I can think of.
Dockers main problem is an increasing number of use cases, and their engineering decisions not meeting everyone's needs. To be honest if it wasn't for faux container support needs on windows/osx I am betting that systemd-nspawn would take over that market due to this.
For the most part docker performance is mostly limited by concurrency and amdahl's law (including fs perf). I don't see Xen solving these issues, but there are very real security benefits.
One very real use case I can think of is that any person or process that can launch a container on Docker is effectively given password-less sudo access, particularly because you can't disable the privileged flag. The attack surface on Xen would be much lower in that case but once the exploits start arriving docker could change that choice and reduce their attack surface quite a bit.
If I'm reading this right, that's pretty major. The isolation benefits of a VM with a bootspeed faster than docker?