Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
> Xen: Large and complicated (by dom0) codebase, discarded for KVM by AMZN

  1. Xen Type-1 hypervisor is smaller than KVM/QEMU.
  2. Xen "dom0" = Linux/FreeBSD/OpenSolaris. KVM/bhyve also need host OS.
  3. AMZN KVM-subset: x86 cpu/mem virt, blk/net via Arm Nitro hardware.
  4. bhyve is Type-2.
  5. Xen has Type-2 (uXen).
  6. Xen dom0/host can be disaggregated (Hyperlaunch), unlike KVM.
  7. pKVM (Arm/Android) is smaller than KVM/Xen.
> The Service Management Facility (SMF) is responsible for the supervision of services under illumos.. a [Linux] robust infrastructure product would likely end up using few if any of the components provided by the systemd project, despite there now being something like a hundred of them. Instead, more traditional components would need to be revived, or thoroughly bespoke software would need to be developed, in order to avoid the technological and political issues with this increasingly dominant force in the Linux ecosystem.

Is this an argument for Illumos over Linux, or for translating SMF to Linux?

loading story #41527348
loading story #41524896
Talking about "technological and political issues" without mentioning any, or without mentioning which components would need to be revived, sounds a lot like FUD unfortunately. Mixing and matching traditional and systemd components is super common, for example Fedora and RHEL use chrony instead of timesyncd, and NetworkManager instead of networkd.
> Talking about "technological and political issues" without mentioning any

I don't know why you think none were mentioned - to name one, they link a GitHub issue created against the systemd repository by a Googler complaining that systemd is inappropriately using Google's NTP servers, which at the time were not a public service, and kindly asking for systemd to stop using them.

This request was refused and the issue was closed and locked.

Behaviour like this from the systemd maintainers can only appear bizarre, childish, and unreasonable to any unprejudiced observer, putting their character and integrity into question and casting doubt on whether they should be trusted with the maintenance of software so integral to at least a reasonably large minority of modern Linux systems.

loading story #41525549
loading story #41525702
The Oxide folks are rather vocal about their distaste for the Linux Foundation. FWIW I think they went with the right choice for them considering they'd rather sign up for maintaining the entire thing themselves than saddling themselves with the baggage of a Linux fork or upstreaming
I read it as "we can sit in this more quiet room where people don't rave about systemd all day long".
But do they? Oxide targets the enterprise, and people there don't care that much about how the underlying OS works. It's been ten years since a RHEL release started using systemd and there has been no exodus to either Windows or Illumos.

I don't mean FUD in a disparaging sense, more like literal fear of the unknown causing people to be excessively cautious. I wouldn't have any problem with Oxide saying "we went for what we know best", there's no need to fake that so much more research went into a decision.

loading story #41518819
loading story #41523764
loading story #41525911