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ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

bmalehorn.com

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Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#81

Post by marmaduke »

armagon wrote: post #35
user5994461 wrote: post #5

Didn't think of that. If running Docker is 10 times slower on ARM and virtual box doesn't support the architecture at all, this might indeed end developers using Mac.

I've been developing on a Mac for years, and I've never needed to use Docker or virtualisation to do it. (I've been doing game development, and now web front end development. I'm sure the major game engines and browsers will be ported to run on ARM chips (although it may take a while)). Honest question: What sort of development regularly requires using docker or virtualized OSes?

Honest answer: almost not much. Except, virtualization is a big trend, since it's a hugely convenient way to package a complex thing into a black box and run it with minimal attack surface.

If you sit back for a second, you can see that things like systemd provide nearly everything you'd want from a container, that, like, who cares is the approach you could have, for the top ten languages.

If you are running a massive stack then maybe you do need Docker and VirtualBox but at this point, shouldn't you be using a staging server anyway?

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#82

Post by ryandvm »

octorian wrote: post #40
m000 wrote: post #3

Apple will singlehandedly make 2021 "the year of Linux on the desktop".

Every time Microsoft or Apple majorly screws something up, people say this. It still hasn't happened yet. However, I think Apple has been a far greater threat to Linux adoption than Microsoft. Why? Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux. There is real value in proprietary commercial end-user application software. Most companies wh…

> Because it gives techies the *nix environment they want, with the software and hardware support no one will give them on Linux.

The UNIX experience on the Mac is pretty shitty. Ancient versions of all the tooling. Command-line utils have that weird BSD well-water flavor. No package management. Funny Docker quirks.

The hardware used to be pretty nice, but honestly I'm still having trouble forgiving them for getting rid of the physical ESC key and turning volume control into a two-step routine on the TouchBar.

Honestly if I'm doing server-side development, I much prefer using my ThinkPad (Ubuntu) over my MacBook. About the only thing I miss is the far superior touchpad on the Macbook. That's it.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#83

Post by bmalehorn »

snapetom wrote: post #51

A lot of developer-centric focus discussion on how Docker would work (hint: it does), but VirtualBox is still pretty common in the sysadmin world and other industry circles. Moreover, there seems to be no way it will ever work. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.

Author here. That's a major point of the article - "are we screwed?" I'm not an expert on virtualization but I wanted to see some discussion on this topic, because it feels like we might be screwed and nobody is talking about. Anyway I was happy to see Docker worked, at least on a basic level.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#84

Post by bazizbaziz »

This seems like a weird benchmark, reading from /dev/urandom and gzipping random data does not seem like something most folks will want to do. It even appears like /dev/urandom speeds differ greatly on various architectures [0] and there are issues with /dev/random being fundamentally slow due to the entropy pool [1] (but I guess this is why the author uses /dev/urandom).

It would be better to measure something more related to what docker users will actually do, like container build time of a common container, and/or latency of HTTP requests to native/emulated containers running on the some container.

One reason to feel positive about the virtualization issues is that Rosetta 2 provides x86->ARM translation for JITs which an ARM-based QEMU could perhaps integrate into it's own binary translation [2].

[0] https://ianix.com/pub/comparing-dev-random-speed-linux-bsd.h... [1] https://superuser.com/questions/359599/why-is-my-dev-random-... [2] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#85

Post by thayne »

smspf wrote: post #71

So many wrong assumptions ... 1. If emulating aarch64 (arm64) on x86_64 is 6x slower (on your system, btw, it's not an universal constant), it doesn't mean emulating x86_64 on aarch64 will be 6x slower. It'd probably be worse, or at least that's my gut feeling. 2. Generic container images like the Ubuntu mentioned usually have aarch64 (arm64) support, so running the x86_64 image makes no sense for the presented use-c…

> Generic container images like the Ubuntu mentioned usually have aarch64 (arm64) support, so running the x86_64 image makes no sense for the presented use-case.

I think the argument here is you can't build your own docker images that you use in production and run them on your mac without emulation (unless your production workload also runs on ARM).

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#86

Post by buildbot »

maxmcd wrote: post #6
lachlan-sneff wrote: post #2

This is ridiculous. Your code will just have to support multiple architectures, which is very easy with modern languages and tooling.

Yeah, ARM is coming and docker will move to support it. We already have this: https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/ Things like the pinebook pro (and hopefully more linux ARM devices) will keep pushing this further.

I know of several in production embedded devices running docker, and have worked on a few...It's already here and works great.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#87

Post by m000 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #24
m000 wrote: post #3

Apple will singlehandedly make 2021 "the year of Linux on the desktop".

When was the year of the macOS desktop?

It's not about stealing users from macOS. It's about stealing developers. Hell, Apple is at the mercy of Microsoft and Adobe right now. I'd bet they had to line their pockets very well, so that they don't get any funny ideas.

But Apple can't just pay-up every cross-platform software developer. Smaller developers will have to re-evaluate whether macOS remains a viable target platform for them. Which can translate to a dev-gain for Linux. The catch is that Linux is in much better position to translate an influx of developers to an influx of new users: Linux runs on what you have, while macOS requires you buy Apple hardware.

And let's not forget about macOS as a gaming platform. Linux has made a huge leap forward with Steam Proton. On macOS there's still a ton of games not supporting x86_64 (Catalina), and situation won't get better by transition to ARM.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#88

Post by user5994461 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #78
user5994461 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to say Oracle database clients as an example. My company definitely had problems to get database drivers to work generally speaking and on both 32 bits and 64 bits. Have a look at postgres, oracle, cassandra, redis, sybase to name a few, I am not sure which one was worse, it wasn't me doing the work. But I've seen some of the C and C++ dependencies that needed to compile with the errors that happened and that…

That’s a good moment to make your c/c++ code more robust, and cross-platform, like the languages they are

The problem wasn't in our code, it was in the database code that was either from open source or from a vendor.

If you want a sample. Try to install the cassandra client library in python. It will pull in and compile all sort of shit. That's supposed to be python and easily cross platform.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#89

Post by snapetom »

bmalehorn wrote: post #83
snapetom wrote: post #51

A lot of developer-centric focus discussion on how Docker would work (hint: it does), but VirtualBox is still pretty common in the sysadmin world and other industry circles. Moreover, there seems to be no way it will ever work. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.

Author here. That's a major point of the article - "are we screwed?" I'm not an expert on virtualization but I wanted to see some discussion on this topic, because it feels like we might be screwed and nobody is talking about. Anyway I was happy to see Docker worked, at least on a basic level.

Cool. Thanks for writing it. It summarizes and collects a lot of issues we were all grumbling about here and there. The main hurdles for Docker are organization, not technical. However, the other issues you bring up are going to be more technical (same as you, though, not a hypervisor expert and/or we're going to be at the mercy of big vendors like Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft. Those are much harder problems to overcome.

Re: ARM Mac: Why I'm Worried About Virtualization

#90

Post by 8K832d7tNmiQ »

grahamlee wrote: post #4

It didn’t take months, the time I did it (running Docker on a Pinebook, which was not a great experience). It took a couple of hours to flip some base images away from Alpine, as Debian already has a load of ARM packages built.

That’s under a case where all libraries you need supports aarch64 architecture, which is sort of true for popular libraries, but not all libraries.
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