While it’s interesting that Dom0 avoids Spectre-style branch prediction attacks it’s not clear from TFA exactly why that is so. How does the architecture of the hypervisor avoid an attack that seems to be at the hardware level? From my limited understanding of Spectre and Meltdown, swapping from a monolithic to a microkernel wouldn’t mitigate an attack. The mitigations discussed in the VMscape paper [0] are hardware…
Maybe this is the problem with LLMs, Using them feels great, But having them be used on you is highly unpleasant.
sound like a problem of cognitive dissonance, not of LLM
Nowadays you can run your VMs inside LXC, SmartOS also run them inside zones by default. I wonder if the same exploits could be used accross the container layer of both technologies or if it would protect from leaks.
Maybe because xen is a type 1 hypervisor in its original meaning and all the other ones are type 2? (yes, ESX(i) doesn't use linux but it also brings its own os on which it runs on top)
If anyone was looking there are still some Xen VPS providers around, one of the oldest being Tornado VPS (formerly prgmr.com). https://tornadovps.com/about The founders literally wrote the book on xen: https://nostarch.com/releases/xen.html
I enjoyed seeing what I could do with a tiny tiny (64 MB RAM) NetBSD VPS on prgmr.com back in the day.
If anyone was looking there are still some Xen VPS providers around, one of the oldest being Tornado VPS (formerly prgmr.com). https://tornadovps.com/about The founders literally wrote the book on xen: https://nostarch.com/releases/xen.html
This made me curious to find out reasons why KVM is so much more popular than Xen. I wasn't able to find anything concrete beyond "KVM is the standard and supported by out tooling", which obviously is the case nowadays, but still leaves me wondering what KVM did so much better than Xen when it first released or if this was just a concidence.
If anyone was looking there are still some Xen VPS providers around, one of the oldest being Tornado VPS (formerly prgmr.com). https://tornadovps.com/about The founders literally wrote the book on xen: https://nostarch.com/releases/xen.html
This made me curious to find out reasons why KVM is so much more popular than Xen. I wasn't able to find anything concrete beyond "KVM is the standard and supported by out tooling", which obviously is the case nowadays, but still leaves me wondering what KVM did so much better than Xen when it first released or if this was just a concidence.
KVM was made because Citrix made moves against Xen that spooked Linux community, hence KVM. Then Red Hat ran with it and based its virtualization platform on it.
Citrix involvement has subsided in meantime and the ecosystem is much healthier (governance is actually under Linux Foundation), but the damage was done.
This made me curious to find out reasons why KVM is so much more popular than Xen. I wasn't able to find anything concrete beyond "KVM is the standard and supported by out tooling", which obviously is the case nowadays, but still leaves me wondering what KVM did so much better than Xen when it first released or if this was just a concidence.
KVM was made because Citrix made moves against Xen that spooked Linux community, hence KVM. Then Red Hat ran with it and based its virtualization platform on it. Citrix involvement has subsided in meantime and the ecosystem is much healthier (governance is actually under Linux Foundation), but the damage was done. Xen to this day lacks in features, also.
KVM was launched before Citrix acquired XenSource. But Redhat had also tried to acquire XenSource and threatened its founders that if they did not come along Redhat would
“rip off their heads and shit down the hole”, because “Redhat was the only company allowed to make money off open source”. In that light it made sense for Redhat to back a competitor to Xen.
This made me curious to find out reasons why KVM is so much more popular than Xen. I wasn't able to find anything concrete beyond "KVM is the standard and supported by out tooling", which obviously is the case nowadays, but still leaves me wondering what KVM did so much better than Xen when it first released or if this was just a concidence.
KVM was made because Citrix made moves against Xen that spooked Linux community, hence KVM. Then Red Hat ran with it and based its virtualization platform on it. Citrix involvement has subsided in meantime and the ecosystem is much healthier (governance is actually under Linux Foundation), but the damage was done. Xen to this day lacks in features, also.
Also, Xen's main clame to fame was that para-virtualization allowed it to host Linux and *BSD VMs at close to zero overhead, but at time what everyone was looking for was a way to host Windows VMs, which is where all the pain points and the money was. CPUs were evolving to support this use-case, making para-virtualization less important, and Xen had to evolve quite quickly to include QEMU in the mix, leaving a bit of convoluted mess initially, and causing a lot of friction during the attempts to get merged into the Linux kernel. On top, the Xen management tool-stack had been written by happy amateurs in Python and Twisted, before any of those technologies where near ready for production use, with massive slowness and unfixable memory leaks as results.
KVM provided a fresh take built with the benefits of hindsight, got merged into Linux on the first attempt, and gained the backing of Redhat, and the rest is more of less history.
So this requires the two VMs to be sharing execution on a core? Or perhaps a shared cache? Or would it work across VMs "pinned" to different CPUs? It's weird to me that cloud hosts aren't absolutely swimming in cores now, but with Intel struggling and AMD somewhat resting on its laurels, which it stupidly did in the Hector Ruiz days, nothing is pushing the envelope. In 2010, fifteen years ago, we had 12 core CPUs. In…
Modern Windows is already using two VMs as well, or even more if WSL is being used.
Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, when enabled, which is required for many security measures in modern Windows, the first Windows instance is a privileged guest, just like with Xen.
Additionally anyone using WSL 2.0, is running another set of VMs alongside Windows, depending on how many flavours of Linux and containers are configured.
It's not necessarily a sign of AI slop — could be just proper typography! :3
It's not the em dash, but the negative parallelism ("not X, but Y"). This is a pattern which some LLMs really like using. I've seen some LLM-generated texts which used it in literally every sentence. (The irony of opening with this pattern is not lost on me.) As an aside, Wikipedia has a fascinating document identifying common "tells" for LLM-generated content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writ…
Does using Grammarly count as AI-assisted writing?
I use Grammarly because it helps fix speech recognition errors. One of the challenges of speech recognition use is that it is a bit difficult at times to construct grammatically correct sentences in your head, then speak those sentences, and then proofread them before you start the next bit of writing.