Re: uClibc

[Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@diku.dk>]

Kip Macy wrote:

> At the risk of starting the construction of a bikeshed, what kind of
> hardware are you running on? The reason for the increased appeal of
> virtual machines over the past few years is that hw performance and
> memory availability has increased faster than applications' needs.

I am running on 2.4GHz Dell Optiplexes with 512MB of memory and no swap 
configured for dom0. Currently I have 16 of them, but in the long run I 
am hoping to run this on 1000+ nodes with similar config. That means any 
memory I waste I can multiply with an arbitrarily large number to make 
it sound scary.

My approach has (to me) many other nice properties, apart from the 
memory footprint, some of the more important ones being security (much 
reduced trusted computing base) and performance+isolation (not using 
shadow page tables, not relying on an external checkpointing service in 
dom0, being able to delay scheduling badly behaving processes during 
migration, knowing who is in my ARP cache, etc.), as well as overall 
better alignment with Saltzer's end-to-end argument.

I would like to create a platform where anyone can purchase resources, 
without any kind of trust that customer are playing nice, and I think 
that I am on the right path.

Before Xen came along, I created a similar platform (called NomadBIOS), 
based on L4, sporting what I now call hosted or managed migration. The 
system I am building now is my 'second system', for better or worse ;-) 
  I probably spent more time thinking about these issues than most 
people (though that is no guarantee that my conclusions are correct).

 > -Kip

Jacob


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