[Aissen]

Indeed, this seems very similar to kata+runv+kvmtool(lkvm). I'm curious why they don't provide a comparison. Here's what I gathered:

- it seems to boot faster (how ?)

- it does not provide a pluggable container runtime (yet)

- a single tool/binary does both the VMM and the API server, in a single language.

Can anyone else chime in ?

[coder543]

> I'm curious why they don't provide a comparison

They do, if you read the FAQs: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/#faq

[Aissen]

I did, and it does not answer my question, because they only address the runv+qemu usecase, not the runv+kvmtool one:

Kata Containers is an OCI-compliant container runtime that executes containers within QEMU based virtual machines

[justincormack]

From memory the original version of Intel Clear Containers had its own kvm based vmm but they moved back to qemu (or a more minimal patched version they maintain). They are working on containerd support so should be similar to Kata soon.

[Aissen]

That's what I thought, too, but re-reading the articles, they were using a patched kvmtool: https://lwn.net/Articles/644675/

So this is exactly what runv's lkvm backend is doing (except kvmtool isn't patched anymore). And Intel Clear Containers do not exist anymore(many broken links on clear linux's website subsist, though), since they moved to Kata as well:

https://01.org/blogs/2017/kata-containers-next-evolution-of-...