[HN Gopher] Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM ___________________________________________________________________ Fakecracker: NetBSD as a Function Based MicroVM Author : yankcrime Score : 107 points Date : 2020-06-18 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (imil.net) (TXT) w3m dump (imil.net) | winrid wrote: | NetBSD is so fun to play with. Highly recommended. | lbhdc wrote: | I don't really know much about NetBSD. Where is a good place to | jump in? | inetsee wrote: | The NetBSD Project has its own collection of tutorials here: | https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/ | bch wrote: | Start at the beginning, continue until the end, then stop. | | NetBSD-9 was just released; grab appropriate install img[0] | and dive in! | | When you need help or community, #netbsd on freenode[1] is | just a few keystrokes away. | | [0] http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.0/ | | [1] irc.freenode.org w your favourite IRC client | api wrote: | I'd like to see a small lean kernel like NetBSD ported to WASM. | You could run services in the browser or in a relatively safe and | portable local WASM VM. Would be an interesting way to distribute | certain kinds of software. Performance wouldn't be up to par with | native, but it wouldn't be too bad. | gen3 wrote: | I was thinking the same thing. I didn't see the size of the | image after his optimizations anywhere. | | I found a project that emulates an x86 processor, and they | already have two BSD images built. https://copy.sh/v86/ | greenshackle2 wrote: | And then let's ship desktop apps in electron running NetBSD. | And we will finally have come full circle :) | hultner wrote: | Intersting, always fun to read some BSD content. One thing that | bothered me though is that no bootup times are specified anywhere | in the article which after all focuses on exactly this, it would | be very nice to see boot time of Fakecracker vs Docker vs NetBSD | amd64 w. bootloader (and unmodified), and compared to the minimal | Linux kernel menitoned in the begining. | flatiron wrote: | the animation at the bottom shows netbsd + nginx starting in 1 | second | sigjuice wrote: | Docker is not exactly "booted" in the traditional meaning of | starting a (real or virtual) computer. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | One limitation of this system as it currently exists seems to be | that you need a working i386 NetBSD host to built the filesystem. | It might not be worth the effort once pkgin gets involved, but in | theory I would expect this to be perfectly possibly to get | around; after all, NetBSD's own build.sh is perfectly happy to | build a full system image for ex. i386 NetBSD from source on ex. | an amd64 Linux host. Or, if you didn't want to deal with cross- | compiling, perhaps it would make things easier to build a | Fakecracker VM that itself builds root filesystems, analogously | to building docker images from a container using dind. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-06-18 23:00 UTC)