[tra3]

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I can't tell whether this is a promotional piece for something..

That said, I do agree with the premise of the article that it's hard to learn "the stack", especially with the advent of generative AI.

"Back in the day", when google spat out a link to something resembling your problem, you still had to deconstruct the answer given to apply it to your particular case. That required some sort of understanding, or a mental model of the domain. With ChatGPT I find myself copying/pasting error messages between two browser windows, or a terminal, not really understanding what is going on.

No learning is happening. Does not bode well for new folks coming in.

[plam503711]

Hi!

It's not a promotional piece of something, it's my personal experience as a CEO and co-founder of a company using Xen as the core of our stack. I like to share my views in a transparent fashion on how it's hard to do very technical stuff, not just for technical reasons, but due to the lack of people trained for.

[theamk]

It is a promotional piece - for Xen-based stack (the most popular hypervisor decades ago). That author laments that few people are interested in bare-metal hypervisors, like Xen.

But hypervisors did not disappear, they just got replaced. When we run virtual machines, they are usually backed by KVM (low-level) and qemu (higher layer). Sometimes there is libvirt on top of it too, but running qemu directly is not that hard.

And there is plenty of exciting research about this stack, for example KVM can be driven by things like firecracker and crosvm, and there are some rust projects targeting it too. There is also BSD's bhyve which

My impression is that it's not that people find hypervisors in general are boring, but just Xen specifically (or maybe all classic Type-1 ones? hard to tell with Xen being the only open-source representative).

[plam503711]

Hi,

I respectfully disagree with much of your comment.

First, this wasn't intended as a promotional piece. It's a personal blog post where I share some of the challenges involved in building a full virtualization stack — a stack that happens to be fully open source. It's unfortunate that sharing real-world experience is sometimes immediately perceived as promotional.

Second, I think there's some confusion between using a hypervisor and mastering one — or building and maintaining an entire stack around it. KVM/QEMU is widely used, but it has significant issues, especially regarding security, performance, and latency consistency. Very few groups in the world are actively trying to tackle these challenges holistically (even major players like VMware have made some questionable shortcuts).

When it comes to low-latency, real-time use cases with a strong security model, Xen remains unique among open-source hypervisors. It's definitely not boring — in fact, it's one of the few that enable certain classes of critical applications at all.

We also work closely with academic research labs, and I can tell you: there’s still a lot of exciting work happening around Xen — even if it's less visible than buzz around newer projects like Firecracker or crosvm.

[dgfitz]

It made me smirk a little, I've been doing almost exactly this line of work at $dayjob for the past few weeks/months, trying to prove out a concept as a solution to solve a problem. Actually really enjoyed the work, it has been a neat problem to solve.

Sadly, the program I was supporting just had all of its funding yanked, I expect to get laid off tomorrow.

[maximumgeek]

If you find that to be the case when you use ChatGPT, maybe you should quit using ChatGPT.

Sometimes, probably most of the time, it is better to work through it and understand an issue than to blindly copy pasta.

[pier25]

> No learning is happening. Does not bode well for new folks coming in.

Recently got into a completely new language/framework and used Copilot to understand what was going on. I still made all the big decisions and wrote most of the code myself.

You can definitely use AI to avoid learning though (up to a point).

[dingnuts]

doesn't bode well for you either

[tra3]

"A problem well stated is a problem half solved", is all I got for now.