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Developing inside a virtual machine

blog.disintegrator.dev

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Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#91

Post by TheTxT »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #84

Curiosity: is anyone here developing inside a VM, with GPU passthrough, and with the monitor directly connected to the GPU used by the VM? (as in: showing the UI of the VM, without any need for RDP or the like) Such a setup works (I'd know for I have one at home doing just that but it's not my main PC) but how's it like to work like that? The GPU hooked to the hypervisor can either be on another monitor or on another…

I used such a setup for gaming using a windows and a Linux (later proxmox) host. With everything passed through you basically don’t realize that you’re sitting in front of a VM, it’s great.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#92

Post by moritonal »

elcritch wrote: post #80
psyclobe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh if you can work around ALL its weird quirks, especially on windows.

Having supported team members where we were all running this setup there was constant fiddling with docker. Containers would freeze and often required restarting docker directly. Especially with WSL on windows. It’s slick when it works.

I noticed similar things, and found most these problems went away with more memory, and less usage of the "{}.features[]" in the `devcontainer.json` file.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#94

Post by urronglol »

psyclobe wrote: post #62
moritonal wrote: post #2

Thr Dev Container ecosystem for VsCode really is quite impressive at the moment. All your dev dependencies, wrapped up in a docker image per repo.

Heh if you can work around ALL its weird quirks, especially on windows.

What quirks have you come across. The only annoyance for me was ssh agent having to uninstall the windows store version

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#95

Post by disintegrator »

urronglol wrote: post #93

Devcontainers running as non root. Trivial t set up. Don’t need to fanny around with a Vm

I've tried devcontainers in the past and the performance compared to my current setup was pretty bad. This was a few years ago when it was known that filesystem-heavy workloads on Docker for Mac were sub-optimal. I remember having to define several bind mounts which improved the overall performance. I do intend to revisit this solution next time I need to set up a dev environment but rest assured there was nothing substantially more complex about a VM versus devcontainers.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#96

Post by IsTom »

lizknope wrote: post #90

Are most companies this flexible in allowing developers to install whatever they want? > My physical machine is a 2023 MacBook Pro with M2 Pro CPU > I’m using VMWare Fusion Pro > Quite often I’ve found developers frowning up Ubuntu and preaching for folks to use NixOS, Arch, Debian or other distros. The reality for me was Ubuntu was the fastest way to get set up and now I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor desig…

There's typically a list of dependencies of a specific project as a part of it, (hopefully) handled automatically by some part of build pipeline.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#97

Post by urronglol »

disintegrator wrote: post #95
urronglol wrote: post #93

Devcontainers running as non root. Trivial t set up. Don’t need to fanny around with a Vm

I've tried devcontainers in the past and the performance compared to my current setup was pretty bad. This was a few years ago when it was known that filesystem-heavy workloads on Docker for Mac were sub-optimal. I remember having to define several bind mounts which improved the overall performance. I do intend to revisit this solution next time I need to set up a dev environment but rest assured there was nothing su…

So why are you commenting on it now as if it hasn’t changed or evolved since then? Give it another try now. It is really good.

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#98

Post by amelius »

cachvico wrote: post #40
amelius wrote: post #4

Beats developing inside a docker container.

Does it though? I've developed in remote VMs before and the advantages are clear, but having a fully containerized development environment is really nice too because you can tear the whole thing down and rebuild at the drop of a hat. You can achieve that with a VM and scripts, but a Dockerfile is very lightweight and standard. Edit: Unless you literally mean "editing code in a container with vi". In which case yes I'…

Well, if what you're developing is an editor, you'll be editing inside the docker container either way ...

Re: Developing inside a virtual machine

#100

Post by vladvasiliu »

daghamm wrote: post #67
bitwize wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think last year's Clownstrike incident would put the lie to the efficacy of the fucking-for-virginity approach to endpoint security favored by organizations but no. At the enterprise level, security isn't really about security, it's about having an audit trail so bad actors can be caught after the fact.

You would be surprised how much of corporate cybersecurity is done like this. It has not in anyway improved sine crowdstrike, on the contrary EDR shenanigans has probably grow 100% since last year. These security companies must have really good salesmen. Or maybe IT departments are always ran by clueless fools, who knows?

> Or maybe IT departments are always ran by clueless fools, who knows?

I think IT has its fair share of clueless fools, but what I've noticed is that when the "security department" is separate, people there tend to have no idea what they're talking about and rely on checklists. Plus, "everybody uses X, that means we're missing out".

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