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The new hypervisor LXD

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Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#41

Post by shykes »

peterwwillis wrote: post #36
nl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that Docker is easier to deploy than Openstack :) However...

It always astounds me how some people massively over-estimate the size and influence of Docker's marketing... Why yes, of course! The way we got Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM to integrate it in their products is by ghost-writing PR fluff. That's also how we got 600 people to contribute 9,000+ pull requests over 18 months [1] [2] [3]. Not bad for marketing monkeys!

Seriously - after seeing so many hackers work so hard to improve the project every day, the "it's all marketing fluff" crap always gets to me. It's just plain disrespectful. How much legitimate engineering work do you need to see before you start respecting other people's work?

[1] https://github.com/docker/docker/pulse/monthly

[2] https://github.com/docker/libcontainer/pulse/monthly

[3] https://github.com/docker/docker-registry/pulse/monthly

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#42

Post by diltonm »

druiid wrote: 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…

I get your points and see it like this, Red Hat is like Ford. Solid, reliable, sometimes quite innovative. Yet the desktop Linux market slipped right by them for like ... years. One has to wonder what could cause such slippage. Ubuntu is more like Samsung to me than Sony. The innovation is off the chart, not everything hits, a lot doesn't but what it does do is cause others to strive and that is leadership.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#43

Post by nl »

peterwwillis wrote: post #36
nl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Docker's initial marketing consisted of posts on the blog of a fairly unpopular PAAS vendor, and some meetups in SV. I think they made some T-shirts at one point fairly early on too.

Compare that to the combined marketing budgets of HP, Dell, Rackspace, Redhat etc. I've probably had more spent on me by OpenStack marketing (taking flights & lunches etc into account) than the marketing budget of Docker prior to their recent funding round.

If you take "marketing" to mean random 3rd parties writing how they use Docker to solve actual problems, then yeah - I see a lot more of that than I do for OpenStack.

I agree Docker is easier to deploy though!

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#44

Post by rdtsc »

bcantrill wrote: post #18

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…

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

Today most OS based virtualization is using "hardware assistance". Those are for often for memory and IO device managment (even passthrough). Not sure if this is _the_ assistance they mention but just an example of how it could work.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#45

Post by robryk »

derefr wrote: post #40
bcantrill wrote: post #18

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.)

How would you use hardware virtualization tech (other than a normal MMU) to separate processes that run on the same kernel from each other?

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#46

Post by derefr »

robryk wrote: post #45
derefr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

How would you use hardware virtualization tech (other than a normal MMU) to separate processes that run on the same kernel from each other?

VT-d in particular gives you the ability to expose one piece of hardware (that knows how to partition itself in some way) as multiple devices on the PCIe bus. With cgroup support, a container could be assigned one of the split devices, and act within the container as if it were the whole device. This is what regular hypervisors do, but they require a full set of virtualized devices (a virtual CPU, a virtual memory, etc.) while this approach allows you to virtualize only the resources your containers actually want to contend over.

So you could have, say, one virtual ethernet card per container (letting you run a container as a promiscuous-mode packet filter for its own VPC subnet, while still not being able to snoop on other VPCs' traffic) or one virtual GPU per container (allowing you to containerize OpenCL apps), while still having your containers acting like regular processes otherwise.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#47

Post by api »

Containers are far, far more efficient. The superficial benchmarks that suggest that the difference is small are misleading.

At a data center where I worked a while back I saw thousands of VZ containers on boxes that could only manage maybe sixty KVMs. If the issues around security and flexibility can be fixed, there is opportunity for orders of magnitude improvements in density and power utilization.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#48

Post by bcantrill »

rdtsc wrote: post #44
bcantrill wrote: post #18

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…

> If using OS-based virtualization, why would you need hardware assistance for "security and isolation"?! Today most OS based virtualization is using "hardware assistance". Those are for often for memory and IO device managment (even passthrough). Not sure if this is _the_ assistance they mention but just an example of how it could work.

No, actually OS virtualization doesn't generally use any hardware assistance. And my questions don't stem from ignorance; I have extensive experience with the implementation of both OS virtualization[1] and HW virtualization[2] -- which is why I find the LXD specifics so peculiar. (All the more so that they imply that the support is forthcoming, not current -- and that they are talking to "silicon companies" not microprocessor vendors.)

I think the best guess is what derefr posited, above: that they are using HW network virt as a way of avoiding building in proper network stack virtualization like that found in Crossbow.[3] Then again, given the degree to which LXD appears to be aspirational rather than actual, we might be overthinking it: perhaps the conversations with "silicon companies" are like LXD itself -- a daydream about what might be rather than a concrete reality.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/os-virtualization-407006...

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/experiences-porting-kvm-...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris_Network_Virtualizat...

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#49

Post by tribaal »

amluto wrote: post #13
xorcist wrote: 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…

The top committer to LXC seems to work for Canonical: https://github.com/lxc/lxc/graphs/contributors

Not only the top contributor, but several others in the top of that list.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#50

Post by cbsmith »

xorcist wrote: 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…

This really looks to me more like "Ubuntu wants to compete with OpenVZ".
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