[nextaccountic]

> I mean, I get it. But shaving 4.5ms does seem to fall into the realm of not most peoples problems?

If whoever is fixing this depend on quickly launching instances in Firecracker, it's their problem. And that's how open source is usually done

[taeric]

Sorta. They have to rely on this on a repeated basis such that it matters. And there, if startup time is still 10x this, roughly, why push for solutions that require that many kernel startups?

[vasco]

Why do anything, we're all going to die!!

Super fast boots of containers is a good effort, would be cool to be as fast as spawning a process or a thread!

[taeric]

That is silly. I already said I do not intend this as a criticism of the folks working on it. Kudos on the improvement.

That said... for most people, you are better off learning to use threads or processes. It is almost certainly less effort than spinning up a VM. Not to mention everything else you will, by necessity, have to do if you are using VMs for everything. Unless you find ways to do shared network connections across VMs and such, but... I'm curious how we can make things closer to threads, without eventually bringing all of the dangers of threads along with it?

[rcoveson]

Why make "for most people" points when we're already talking about FreeBSD?

There's a sort of uni-/light-kernel race quietly happening right now since the industry doesn't really fully trust process isolation within an OS for running completely untrusted code. At least not as much as it trusts VT-X/AMD-V. In that race, kernel startup time is just like JVM startup time, or Julia startup time, or Python startup time, all of which are things that people work on shaving milliseconds from.

[taeric]

Ouch. That feels even harsher to the idea than what I'm saying. :D

To your point, my "for most people" is aimed at this forum. Not the folks doing the work. Is incredibly cool that the folks doing this are also on the forum, but I think it is safe to say they are not most of the folks on here. That not the case?

[rcoveson]

Say the post had been "How Netflix uses FreeBSD to achieve network latencies less than 10 microseconds" or something. How helpful would it be to comment about how "for most people" this doesn't matter?

Did anybody who read the tweet think it mattered to them when it didn't? It mentions Firecracker explicitly. How many people on HN do you think upvote this because they themselves are running FreeBSD on Firecracker, versus the number who upvoted because it's just interesting in and of itself?

[nextaccountic]

Isn't fast startup the point of firecracker? It's supposed to scale down to zero when there are no users, and quickly ramp up when needed.

[taeric]

I mean... sorta? Yes, it is the point. But, the goal is to make it so that you can do this scale up/down at the VM level. We have been able to do this at a thread or even process level for a long long time, at this point.

[lacrosse_tannin]

why not boot a good os in firecracker instead?