I wonder what happened to Siri. Not a single mention anywhere?
I actually loved Siri when it first came out. It felt magical back then (in a way)
Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
401–410 of 514 posts
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#402Okay, the AI stuff is cool, but that "Containerization framework" mention is kinda huge, right? I mean, native Linux container support on Mac could be a game-changer for my whole workflow, maybe even making Docker less of a headache.
It's impossible to have "native" support for Linux containers on macOS, since the technology inherently relies on Linux kernel features. So I'm guessing this is Apple rolling out their own Linux virtualization layer (same as WSL). Probably still an improvement over the current mess, but if they just support LXC and not Docker then most devs will still need to install Docker Desktop like they do today.
WSL doesn't have a virtualization layer, WSL1 did have but it wasn't a feasible approach so WSL2 is basically running VMs with the Hyper-V hypervisor.
Apple looks like it's skipped the failed WSL1 and gone straight for the more successful WSL2 approach.
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, here are the repos for the CLI tool [1] and backend [2]. Looks like it is indeed VM-based container support (as opposed to WSLv1-style syscall translation or whatever): Containerization provides APIs to: [...] - Create an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times. - Spawn lightweight virtual machines. - Manage the runtime environment of virtual machines. [1] https://github.com/apple/container [2] https://githu…
I'm kinda ignorant about the current state of Linux VMs, but my biggest gripe with VMs is that OS kernels kind of assume they have access to all the RAM the hardware has - unlike the reserve/commit scheme processes use for memory. Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS? Or maybe could Apple patch the kernel to do exactly…
> Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS?
Isn't this an issue of the hypervisor? The guest OS is just told it has X amount of memory available, whether this memory exists or not (hence why you can overallocate memory for VMs), whether the hypervisor will allocate the entire amount or just what the guest OS is actually using should depend on the hypervisor itself.
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#404Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, here are the repos for the CLI tool [1] and backend [2]. Looks like it is indeed VM-based container support (as opposed to WSLv1-style syscall translation or whatever): Containerization provides APIs to: [...] - Create an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times. - Spawn lightweight virtual machines. - Manage the runtime environment of virtual machines. [1] https://github.com/apple/container [2] https://githu…
I'm kinda ignorant about the current state of Linux VMs, but my biggest gripe with VMs is that OS kernels kind of assume they have access to all the RAM the hardware has - unlike the reserve/commit scheme processes use for memory. Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS? Or maybe could Apple patch the kernel to do exactly…
The short answer is yes, Linux can be informed to some extent but often you still want a memory balloon driver so that the host can “allocate” memory out of the VM so the host OS can reclaim that memory. It’s not entirely trivial but the tools exist, and it’s usually not too bad on vz these days when properly configured.
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, here are the repos for the CLI tool [1] and backend [2]. Looks like it is indeed VM-based container support (as opposed to WSLv1-style syscall translation or whatever): Containerization provides APIs to: [...] - Create an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times. - Spawn lightweight virtual machines. - Manage the runtime environment of virtual machines. [1] https://github.com/apple/container [2] https://githu…
I'm kinda ignorant about the current state of Linux VMs, but my biggest gripe with VMs is that OS kernels kind of assume they have access to all the RAM the hardware has - unlike the reserve/commit scheme processes use for memory. Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS? Or maybe could Apple patch the kernel to do exactly…
That's called memory balooning and is supported by KVM on Linux. Proxmox for example can do that. It does need support on both the host and the guest.
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#407Okay, the AI stuff is cool, but that "Containerization framework" mention is kinda huge, right? I mean, native Linux container support on Mac could be a game-changer for my whole workflow, maybe even making Docker less of a headache.
I’ve been using Colima for a long while with zero issues, and that leverages the older virtualization framework.
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#408Okay, the AI stuff is cool, but that "Containerization framework" mention is kinda huge, right? I mean, native Linux container support on Mac could be a game-changer for my whole workflow, maybe even making Docker less of a headache.
The containerization experience on macOS has historically been underwhelming in terms of performance. Using Docker or Podman on a Mac often feels sluggish and unnecessarily complex compared to native Linux environments. Recently, I experimented with Microsandbox, which was shared here a few weeks ago, and found its performance to be comparable to that of native containers on Linux. This leads me to hope that Apple wi…
Use Colima.
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm kinda ignorant about the current state of Linux VMs, but my biggest gripe with VMs is that OS kernels kind of assume they have access to all the RAM the hardware has - unlike the reserve/commit scheme processes use for memory. Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS? Or maybe could Apple patch the kernel to do exactly…
> Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS? Isn't this an issue of the hypervisor? The guest OS is just told it has X amount of memory available, whether this memory exists or not (hence why you can overallocate memory for VMs), whether the hypervisor will allocate the entire amount or just what the guest OS is actually us…
Just looked it up - and the answer is 'baloon drivers', which are special drivers loaded by the guest OS, which can request and return unused pages to the host hypervisor.
Apparently docker for Mac and Windows uses these, but in practice, docker containers tend to grow quite large in terms of memory, so not quite sure how well it works in practice, its certainly overallocates compared to running docker natively on a Linux host.
Re: Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, here are the repos for the CLI tool [1] and backend [2]. Looks like it is indeed VM-based container support (as opposed to WSLv1-style syscall translation or whatever): Containerization provides APIs to: [...] - Create an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times. - Spawn lightweight virtual machines. - Manage the runtime environment of virtual machines. [1] https://github.com/apple/container [2] https://githu…
I'm kinda ignorant about the current state of Linux VMs, but my biggest gripe with VMs is that OS kernels kind of assume they have access to all the RAM the hardware has - unlike the reserve/commit scheme processes use for memory. Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses to the host OS? Or maybe could Apple patch the kernel to do exactly…
It's still a problem for containers-in-VMs. You can in theory do something with either memory ballooning or (more modern) memory hotplugging, but the dance between the OS and the hypervisor takes a relatively long time to complete, and Linux just doesn't handle it well (eg. it inevitably places unmovable pages into newly reserved memory, meaning it can never be unplugged). We never found a good way to make applications running inside the VM able to transparently allocate memory. You can overprovision memory, and hypervisors won't actually allocate it on the host, and that's the best you can do, but this also has problems since Linux tends to allocate a bunch of fixed data structures proportional to the size of memory it thinks it has available.