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by antonvs 1315 days ago
It’s written specifically to host the Linux kernel, and doesn’t use a bios or a boot loader. If you backported that into another hypervisor, it would probably have to be something like “are we loading a compatible Linux? If so switch to Firecracker mode”. But of course you can do that yourself, with a small shell script that either starts the traditional VM or Firecracker.

Or they could do what QEMU has done and put out a separate product/mode: https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/a082fab9d25/docs/system/i3...
2 comments
skissane 1314 days ago
That QEMU doc says:

> The recommended way to trigger a guest-initiated shut down is by generating a triple-fault, which will cause the VM to initiate a reboot

Doesn’t that mean it can’t distinguish an intentional triple fault to trigger reboot from an accidental triple fault caused by a guest kernel bug which corrupts the IDT? I think it would be better if there was some kind of call the guest could make to the hypervisor to reboot-one is less likely to invoke that service by accident than to triple fault by accident.

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solarkraft 1315 days ago
I'm used to QEMU VMs being slow and annoying to work with due to them being full VMs, so I was quite surprised to see that this is really just as fast as Firecracker!
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