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FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

theregister.com

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Re: FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

#4

Post by butterisgood »

Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here?

Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest.

Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?

Re: FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

#5

Post by magicalhippo »

eimrine wrote: post #2

How does bubblesort happened in FreeBSD? Can my laptop boot in 25 milliseconds now?

It was discussed[1] in the previous thread on the topic.

Essentially limited stack and input known to be bounded to reasonable size, along with low complexity of implementation.

And no, AFAIK, as your PC has to wait for hardware to initialize and such. This is for booting VMs.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205552

Re: FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

#6

Post by CodesInChaos »

butterisgood wrote: post #4

Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?

> So what’s the use case here?

Spinning up additional "servers" in the cloud when you receive many incoming requests. If requests are held in a queue waiting for the new server to start, a fast boot process will reduce the latency for those requests.

> Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?

Cloud providers run VMs of different customers on the same physical machine. Hypervisors like Firecracker minimize the attack surface (smaller risk of local privilege escalation) and VM overhead (run more instances on one machine).

Re: FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

#8

Post by butterisgood »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #6
butterisgood wrote: post #4

Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?

> So what’s the use case here? Spinning up additional "servers" in the cloud when you receive many incoming requests. If requests are held in a queue waiting for the new server to start, a fast boot process will reduce the latency for those requests. > Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this? Cloud providers run VMs of different customers on the same physical machin…

Ah alright. I’ve seen this done with an Erlang VM on Xen where Erlang is the “OS”. To me that seems a little more natural. But Unix as an “API” can work too though the processes are not as lightweight as Erlang’s.

Re: FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

#9

Post by Semaphor »

butterisgood wrote: post #4

Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?

Besides what sibling said, they mention a more general use case towards the end:

> We can see a lot of potential uses for microVMs, not just in cloud scenarios. The ability to run a single program built for one OS on top of a totally different OS, without the overhead of running a full emulated environment all the time, could be very handy in all kinds of situations.

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