|
|
|
|
|
|
by mjb
2316 days ago
|
|
|
> QEMU is a complex program, as demonstrated by the complexity of measuring it accurately For sure. Our goal was a fair comparison, but any comparison by one set of criteria is going to paint an incomplete picture, especially of something like QEMU that does a lot and has a lot of buttons and knobs. This is further complicated by doing the comparison over a time span where both are moving targets (which is a good thing, both groups have been building cool stuff). Comparing software qualitatively is hard. All the details of our comparison methodology are here, if you are interested in the details of exactly what we ran and how: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/nsdi2020-data I'm very excited about Firecracker and rust-vmm. I'm mostly excited about the amount of energy and excitement in this space right now. That's only going to lead to good things down the road, and there's plenty of room for multiple threads of innovation. > The NEMU project mentioned in the paper is inactive exactly because it was a dead end: it was possible to achieve all their goals directly in QEMU without the need for a fork. That's very interesting, I didn't know that background. I saw the loss of velocity in the project, but couldn't find any details of why. |
|
|
I am and this is awesome! Thanks for sharing it. And thanks for using the latest version of QEMU and the microvm machine type, that did make the comparison much fairer already.
> I saw the loss of velocity in the project, but couldn't find any details of why.
The Intel people moved on to work on Cloud-Hypervisor and a lot of the stuff done on NEMU was reworked (leading e.g. to the microvm machine type) and added to QEMU (such as disabling TCG on ARM). Before that however we collaborated to complete the configuration mechanism for disabling unwanted devices. [1] And we are still collaborating on rust-vmm, which is taking inspiration from QEMU for the more advanced parts of the design!
[1] https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/stable/devel/kconfig.html