I'd be extremely interested to see if this brings greater security to the "container" model. Something resembling BSD jails is sorely lacking in the Linux world.
The new hypervisor LXD
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Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#12Is it me or is Ubuntu kind of like the Sony of server software? It always seems like they are developing concurrent solutions to fit into their model of doing things. Where Sony pushes their own special formats like Memory Stick, Ubuntu pushes Upstart, Juju and now LXD. I think in the end this isn't entirely helpful to the ecosystem as a whole when you have Ubuntu attempting to push their special formats of things wh…
I think you nailed it. I was trying to articulate this point to a colleague the other day and couldn't do it but that is perfect.
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#13What? My first thought was "cool, Ubuntu backs LXC". My second was "waitaminute, Ubuntu actually wants to compete with Docker?". Docker, as you all know, is a farily well established LXC management solution. They then go on to state that LXC is a "real hypervisor" with live migrations and such. What? Did they take an established Linux household name, with wikipedia article and everything, and name their new semi-rela…
The top committer to LXC seems to work for Canonical:
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#14I'd be extremely interested to see if this brings greater security to the "container" model. Something resembling BSD jails is sorely lacking in the Linux world.
I'm a BSD guy and have pretty shallow knowledge of Linux but isn't that what LXC is?
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#15What? My first thought was "cool, Ubuntu backs LXC". My second was "waitaminute, Ubuntu actually wants to compete with Docker?". Docker, as you all know, is a farily well established LXC management solution. They then go on to state that LXC is a "real hypervisor" with live migrations and such. What? Did they take an established Linux household name, with wikipedia article and everything, and name their new semi-rela…
Docker, well-established? It may get a lot of press but it's not even two years old. It was just merged into OpenStack about 1 year ago.
Edit: You know Docker doesn't use LXC by default anymore, right? It uses a different container library called libcontainer.
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#16Is it me or is Ubuntu kind of like the Sony of server software? It always seems like they are developing concurrent solutions to fit into their model of doing things. Where Sony pushes their own special formats like Memory Stick, Ubuntu pushes Upstart, Juju and now LXD. I think in the end this isn't entirely helpful to the ecosystem as a whole when you have Ubuntu attempting to push their special formats of things wh…
It sounds to me that this is hardware assisted docker containers, which would be a good thing.
Intel processors have VT-x that provides hardware to help speed up virtualization, isolate memory, etc. AMD has something similar. You can break out of a docker container and get to the host OS and other containers. With a hardware assisted hypervisor, it is possible to hide container memory from other containers at a level lower than the "host" os.
If I understand docker and VT-x correctly, hardware assisted virtualization can be used run N instances of a container while only having 1 instance in memory. VT-x can rewrite memory reads/writes transparently and deny writes to certain locations of memory.
Docker containers share the kernel with the host and depend on it for isolation. This would add the hardware assisted isolation of containers without the overhead of another kernel per container, plus the other benefits of docker.
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#17I'd like to read up on the technical docs. At first, it looks like a Docker rival. One of the concerns I have about LXC is that it isn't using hardware paravirtualization. It seems like that is what Ubuntu is trying to do with LXD (that is, LXD provides a hypervisor backend for LXC), but I am not sure. If this, then that's a much more compelling argument for me to use LXC over something like VirtualBox or ESX, or wha…
You may be waiting a while. Ubuntu doesn't produce useful technical documentation like Red Hat and Oracle (neé Sun) does.
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#18I am, like many here, totally confused. Is this OS-based virtualization, HW-based virtualization, para-virtualization, or something completely different? On the one hand, there are clear indicators that this is OS-based virtualization ("there is a catch; however, LXD is only for Linux on Linux"). That's fine; that would essentially boil down to bringing the complete containment model of FreeBSD jails and illumos zones to Linux -- which I'm sure would be welcome by Linux folks dealing with the structural problems of the current (piece-meal) Linux containment model.
But then there's the line about "working with silicon companies to ensure hardware-assisted security and isolation for these containers" -- WTF?! If using OS-based virtualization, why would you need hardware assistance for "security and isolation"?! And if that "hardware assistance" is being used for something so basic as proper containment, what happens if you don't have that assistance? Is LXD then vulnerable to privilege escalation? And who are the "silicon companies" we're talking about (like, is this Intel or is this not Intel?), what is the ISA, when does it tape out, how is it being validated, etc. etc. etc.
It's very frustrating for an announcement to be so putatively technical and yet provide so few answers; is there a deeper technical explanation of LXD somewhere?
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#19Is it me or is Ubuntu kind of like the Sony of server software? It always seems like they are developing concurrent solutions to fit into their model of doing things. Where Sony pushes their own special formats like Memory Stick, Ubuntu pushes Upstart, Juju and now LXD. I think in the end this isn't entirely helpful to the ecosystem as a whole when you have Ubuntu attempting to push their special formats of things wh…
At this point systemd has grown way beyond the mission parameters of upstart or similar.
Re: The new hypervisor LXD
#20Is it me or is Ubuntu kind of like the Sony of server software? It always seems like they are developing concurrent solutions to fit into their model of doing things. Where Sony pushes their own special formats like Memory Stick, Ubuntu pushes Upstart, Juju and now LXD. I think in the end this isn't entirely helpful to the ecosystem as a whole when you have Ubuntu attempting to push their special formats of things wh…
Upstart predates systemd by 4 years and had made it into a good number of other distros before systemd took over. Apart from upstart, I see your point.
> and had made it into a good number of other distros before systemd took over.
Including Red Hat, which is where systemd was developed!