Containers and PID virtualization

Containers and PID virtualization

Posted Jan 24, 2006 21:44 UTC (Tue) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385)
In reply to: Containers and PID virtualization by swiftone
Parent article: Containers and PID virtualization

If I make a few assumptions about process migration:

1. A container cannot be divided--all of its processes move, or none.

2. Moving a container is transparent--the processes have the same open files and network sockets when they arrive at their destination

then there's very little difference between a VM and a migratable process container. A plain process container isn't sufficient--you'd need to keep file descriptors, memory maps, and a bunch of other state to make migration work. VM's have all that, but need nothing else since they can defer the rest to their host kernel.

I suspect that the cost/capability curves of "light VM" and "heavy process container" will intersect each other at some point. The nice thing about VM's is that they start off isolated from the kernel and gradually intrude into the kernel, while process containers start out intrusive and gradually become less intrusive.

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