Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello • Hacker News Board

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#41

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #40

zozbot234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KVM and containerization are not just "thin management veneers", they enable all sorts of new features.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. KVM and containers are the technology. The "new" stuff I'm talking about are thin management veneers over these features.

Strictly speaking, kernel-level namespaces are the technology. "Containers" are a pattern based on kernel-level namespaces, and "thin management veneers" help make sense of the underlying technology and implement that pattern.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#42

Post by qbasic_forever » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #36

qbasic_forever wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really worry about a startup taking a massive bet on their own custom hardware now in 2022. The world was much, much different in December 2019 when Oxide started than it is now. Let's hope the investment cash keeps flowing and the hardware gets to folks that purchased it.

Why? If anything, commodity/non-custom hardware is what's hurting right now. Fat margins on hardware imply a kind of inherent flexibility that can be used to weather even extreme shocks.

There are plenty of commodity chips that go into making a full server rack. If any little power regulator, etc. is backordered for months and years it's just more unexpected pain. And that's before we even get to the problems of entire factories shutting down, just look at what's happening to Apple & Foxconn of all companies in Shenzhen this week. If the big players are struggling the small fries are in for pain too.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#43

Post by skadamat » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

bcantrill wrote: post #35

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, on paper:) You, personally, are an amazing marketing department no matter what your official title is; "The Soul of a New Machine", for instance, is brilliant at getting mindshare. To be fair, I'm fairly sure you don't think of what you're doing as marketing, but the only difference I see is that this is much more natural/sincere than 99.99% of similar efforts - you're actually just that passionate and good at…

Ha, entirely fair! When we raised our initial round, we said that our podcasting microphones were the marketing department, which proved prophetic.

This is low key the Developer Relations playbook! I heard about Oxide thru the awesome On the Metal podcast y'all started :]

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#44

Post by monocasa » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

tonoto wrote: post #4

rob74 wrote: post #2

Only tangentially related: what I find strange about "Oxide" (styled as "0xide" - the first character is a zero) is that they got very close to actually having a valid hex number in C/C++/Rust notation (0x1de) as a logo, but stopped short...

It still amazes me that Oxide actually managed to grab the perfect PCI vendor ID https://pcisig.com/membership/member-companies?combine=01de

That's fantastic. And here I thought that Intel's vendor ID of 0x8086 was cute.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#45

Post by bcantrill » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

qbasic_forever wrote: post #42

zozbot234 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If anything, commodity/non-custom hardware is what's hurting right now. Fat margins on hardware imply a kind of inherent flexibility that can be used to weather even extreme shocks.

There are plenty of commodity chips that go into making a full server rack. If any little power regulator, etc. is backordered for months and years it's just more unexpected pain. And that's before we even get to the problems of entire factories shutting down, just look at what's happening to Apple & Foxconn of all companies in Shenzhen this week. If the big players are struggling the small fries are in for pain too.

The supply chain crisis is very, very real, but we are blessed with absolutely terrific operations folks coming from a wide range of industrial backgrounds (e.g., Apple, Lenovo, GE, P&G). They have pulled absolute supply chain miracles (knocking loudly on wood!) -- but we have also had the luxury of relatively small quantities (we're not buying millions of anything) and new design, where we can factor in lead times.

tl;dr: Smaller players are able to do things that larger players can't -- which isn't to minimize how challenging it currently is!

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#46

Post by stock_toaster » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

I use vm-bhyve on FreeBSD current. The little bit of propolis described in the post reminds me of it a bit, but in rust (with a service/api interface) instead of just cli and shell. Sounds neat!

I wonder how hard it would be to port to FreeBSD.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#47

Post by KerrAvon » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #33

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. Does it matter? Oxide is building the whole stack - their own hardware with their own firmware to run their own OS with their own virtualization layer. They don't need support for arbitrary devices, because they control the hardware.

They still have to write a bunch of drivers that they'd get for free with Linux. Clearly they think the tradeoff is worth it but it's not obvious why.

Possible better security/performance through better architecture?

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#48

Post by psanford » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:39 PM UTC

I've not looked at Illumos distros seriously in a long time, but the reason given for rejecting OmniOS seems really strange to me. My general impression was that OmniOS was a tight, server oriented distro that had a sane release schedule and up to date security patches. Who cares if they use the word "enterprise" in their marketing copy?

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#49

Post by wmf » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #47

wmf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still have to write a bunch of drivers that they'd get for free with Linux. Clearly they think the tradeoff is worth it but it's not obvious why.

Possible better security/performance through better architecture?

From what I've seen so far the same architecture could be achieved on Linux (e.g. Firecracker or Intel Cloud Hypervisor). To get great performance you often need to get elbow-deep in somebody else's driver and that may be just as much work as writing your own drivers.

Re: Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

#50

Post by mise_en_place » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

anaisbetts wrote: post #18

cmdrk wrote: post #16

I get that Oxide has a lot of ex-Joyent folks, but I can't help but wonder how much the choice of a Solaris-derived OS will hobble adoption, support for devices, etc. In many ways this feels like SmartOS all over again - a killer concept that will be eclipsed by a technically inferior but more tractable (for contributors, for management) solution.

I thought this too, but if the goal of the control plane software and blade host OS is solely to create VMs and not to actually be a general-purpose OS, this probably doesn't matter as much?

Idk, KVM/libvirt/qemu has worked fine for me. It is very lightweight compared to say VMWare. If I don't want VMs I could use Docker/containerd.

What problem does Oxide solve exactly?