alt Hacker NewsNice to see this work! I experimented with this for exe.dev before we launched. The VM itself worked really well, but there was a lot of setup to get the networking functioning. And in the end, our target are use cases that don't mind a ~1-second startup time, which meant doing a clean systemd start each time was easier.
That said, I have seen several use cases where people want a VM for something minimal, like a python interpreter, and this is absolutely the sort of approach they should be using. Lot of promise here, excited to see how far you can push it!
Replies
indigodaddy • today at 2:07 AM
simonw seems like he's always wanting what you describe, maybe more for wasm though
➕ show 1 reply
The thing people tend to gloss over is how CoW shines until you need to update the base image, then you start playing whack-a-mole with stale memory and hotpatching. Snapshots give you a magic boot, but god help you when you need to roll out a security fix to hundreds of forks with divergent state.
Fast startup is nice. If the workload is "run plain Python on a trusted codebase" you win, but once it gets hairier the maintenance overhead sends you straight back to yak shaving.