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by theamk
411 days ago
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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). |
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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.