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Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilderBuilding custom appliance distributions with rBuilderPosted Aug 6, 2008 0:56 UTC (Wed) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587)Parent article: Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder If we take the "appliance" path to its natural conclusion, along with its alleged better security through sand-boxing, we would all end up running a system which has a virtual machine for each software package. Yes it's bloatware and much code repetition in each appliance, but it does abstract the underlying operating system and hence counteracts vendor lock-in.
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Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder Posted Aug 6, 2008 7:27 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] Maybe that's not that bad an idea. It's the natural evolution from running each and every process in a "virtual machine" that we have had for the last 30 years.
Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder Posted Aug 8, 2008 18:39 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] It's the natural evolution from running each and every process in a "virtual machine" that we have had for the last 30 years. I don't know that it's evolution, because in that time we've been moving the point of sharing both up and down the stack. At one time, it was considered a great step forward -- for management purposes -- to take a single computer shared by 100 users and split it into 100 single-person computers. Since then, we've been steadily moving to bind those 100 computers back together into a coherent system, until now we're actually back to having them share the same CPUs. I think running multiple one-application Linux systems on the same hardware vs running multiple applications on a one-Linux hardware platform is very much like the statically linked vs shared library question. The statically linked program is definitely simpler to install and simpler to maintain in that you can maintain two programs independently. But the shared library uses less memory and storage space and lets you improve a bunch of programs by updating a single library.
Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder Posted Aug 6, 2008 15:48 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] And if you use vservers and vhashify, some of this bloatware may actually be shared with special vserver COW, Copy On Write, hardlinks. This means that if different appliances use certain matching libraries they will actually be shared (yet isolated) on disk and in memory! I use vservers even without vhashify (since I want separate partitions for my vservers so that I can fail them over to other machines) on my systems at home, and it still seems worth the penalty to have isolated systems for each server application. This eliminates most software upgrade nightmares. Think about the natural version hell of using various php/database applications, all eliminated. ~300MB on debian per major application does not seem like a severe penalty to pay in the days when a standard HD is probably ~500GB and 4GB of memory is cheap even for the home user. The editor should not dismiss this as a unreasonable solution so easily. In fact I am beginning to believe that it is becoming the ONLY reasonable solution to managing server applications. ;)
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