Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 9, 2007 22:31 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
Parent article: Quotes of the week

Virtualization vs. containers: virtualization is ahead and pulling away. Why? "Worse is better." (google that phrase if you haven't heard it)

Virtualization is huge and heavy. It carries along a ton of garbage (drivers, system logging, etc) that will never be used. Having 1 virtual machine per application is very wasteful of memory, CPU and disk space.

Containerization is nascent, poorly-defined, and still all too prone to DLL and resource sharing issues. But it's pretty darned efficient.

It's a shame that there's no middle ground.

Application streaming on windows is supposed to come near this on the Windows platform but, so far, it's suffering all the same problems of Unix containers, plus it costs a lot more money. I expect to see some big improvements in the next few years.

Personally, I wish I could bet on containers. I really hope a strong engineer steps up and ensures that containers become *really* useful. I should be able to launch an app on my computer, move it to my phone, and then to my set-top box at home, all without the app knowing or caring what's going on outside. Alas, there's very little motion on this front so I'm thinking we won't see anything like this until at least 2015.

Until strong containerization arrives, I'll be content with virtualization. So, even thoug virtualization is an overengineered disgusting hack, it will see FAR more traction this decade than microkernels ever did. Sorry Linus!

(Log in to post comments)

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 10, 2007 16:37 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

"It's a shame that there's no middle ground."

What about para-virtualization and hybrid-virtualization? They are not the same as full virtualization (in fact have more in common to containers than full virtualization).

Current efforts on the virtualization "scene" are for the para-virtualization and hybrid-virtualization fronts (VT-x is a para-virtualization hardware helper). Full virtualization exists for ages and hasn't changed much.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 10, 2007 21:25 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

You're right that paravirt is a step in the right direction. It still carries a ton of crap along with it though. You still need a full kernel with all the drivers, logging infrastructure, cron, inetd, and so on... If the paravirt crews do a really good job at getting rid of this unimportant junk (where unimportant means "not directly related to the application I'm trying to run"), I'll definitely sit up and take notice.

At the moment, though, there's little appreciable performance difference between Xen and KVM (for my apps anyway). And KVM is sooooo much easier to set up and run. So, although it doesn't improve my life much today, I agree that paravirt could potentially become an excellent solution in a few years.