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The new hypervisor LXD

ubuntu.com

31–40 of 80 posts

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#31
post #24

more info from Stéphane Graber Ubuntu developer: ---------- '" ... The concept is relatively simple, it's a daemon exporting an authenticated REST API both locally over a unix socket and over the network using https. There are then two clients for this daemon, one is an openstack plugin, the other a standalone command line tool. '' The main features and I'm sure I'll be forgetting some are: - Secure by default (unpri…

Thank you; that's very helpful. And the tl;dr is that this whole announcement is describing something that doesn't really exist yet -- it's open source vaporware.

'"LXD ... will be ready for production use within six months."'

(source: http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-is-working-on-a-new-secure-conta... )

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#34
post #7

What? 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, as you all know, is a farily well established LXC management solution.

Well established within the last year or so.

But yeah, good to have more stuff. We'd still be talking on AT&T rotary dial phones from the 60s if we didn't competition.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#35
post #28

short video ( 2:07) "LXD - the Linux Container Daemon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-lXf85Mhno ''"Published on 4 Nov 2014 Dustin Kirkland, Product Manager at Canonical introduces LXD (lex-dee), a new hypervisor that delivers capabilities to LXC containers that cloud users demand in scale out infrastructure. LXD is a persistent system daemon developed to enable the secure management and live migration of LXC (lex-…

That summary makes LXD sound like a competitor to libvirt-lxc.

http://libvirt.org/drvlxc.html

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#36
post #26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet oddly for something so young, it's seeing more usage than OpenStack. Of course that may have more to do with the problems within OpenStack, but Docker has it's own attractions too.

They have waaaaaaay more marketing than OpenStack. They've probably written and sponsored more PR fluff than code for Docker. And it's easier to deploy.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#37
post #3

Is 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 is a bad example, for reasons that other have pointed out. It appears that LXD is being developed along with LXC, so I can't really see it as a "concurrent solution"; Juju is much the same, in that I don't think it's concurrent with any other project that does that same thing. So I don't think the comparison with Sony holds any water.

What about Mir?

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#38
post #4
post #3

Is 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.

There's a bit more to it than that, though. systemd as an init system was originally conceived as a way to improve Upstart; the reason that systemd decided to go its own way rather than contributing to Upstart is because of Canonical's CLA.

That I think is a key point to this discussion -- in order to contribute to an open-source project run by Canonical, they insist upon you giving them more rights to the code you give them than they're willing to give you. Many people are understandably put off by that.

The fact that systemd comes after Upstart is I think less germane to the point that parent was trying to make about Sony than the fact that Canonical insists on being in control of their projects, and puts up rather high barriers to anyone who wants to contribute patches. I am sure that I will hear responses about various patches systemd maintainers have refused or said they wouldn't be receptive to, but that's a difference of kind (not just degree) from insisting upon assigning Canonical the ability to re-license the code outside of the GPL.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#39
post #3

Is 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 seems like an odd example to give, given that it was the first sysvinit alternative that actually made it into major distributions. RHEL 6 (thus CentOS 6), ChromeOS and some of the earlier Fedora versions make use of it. This was after an attempt to port launchd failed, because of licensing issues. systemd came several years later. Red Hat is a different business model. Their venturing into the cloud is more…

Interestingly, upstart's first release was the same month that launchd's license problem went away. If Apple had been a little more responsive to the community, upstart may have never taken off.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#40

I 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 zone…

> WTF?! If using OS-based virtualization, why would you need hardware assistance for "security and isolation"?!

I would guess that Canonical is talking about getting companies to contribute Linux kernel patches for cgroup interfaces to various northbridge-managed hardware virtualization tech (e.g. IOMMU tech like Intel's VT-d.)

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