We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU

Re:We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU by tjoff on Monday July 10, 2023 @10:56AM (#36667378)

Doubt it is worth the hassle. How many do you really expect to be identical?

An OS isn't large. Your spotify/slack/browser instance is of comparable size. Says more about browser based apps but still.

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Re:We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU by londons_explore on Monday July 10, 2023 @11:34AM (#36667942)

Basically all code pages should be the same if some other VM has the same version of ubuntu and running the same version of spotify/slack.

And remember that as well as RAM savings, you also get 'instant loading' because there is no need to do slow SSD accesses to load hundreds of megabytes of a chromium binary to get slack running...

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Re:We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU by drbawb on Monday July 10, 2023 @04:23PM (#36672420)

> An OS isn't large. Your spotify/slack/browser instance is of comparable size.

A fairly recent Windows 11 Pro image is ~26GB unpacked and 141k dirents. After finishing OOBE it's already running like >100 processes, >1000 threads, and >100k handles. My Chrome install is ~600MB and 115 dirents. (Not including UserData.) It runs ~1 process per tab. Comparable in scope and complexity? That's debatable, but I tend to agree that modern browsers are pretty similar in scope to what an OS should be. (The other day my "web browser" flashed the firmware on the microcontroller for my keyboard.)

They're not even close to "being comparable in size," although I guess that says more about Windows.

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Re:We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU by cthalupa on Monday July 10, 2023 @05:15PM (#36673057)

My reading was that the "comparable in size" was more about memory footprint and less about usage of storage

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