Switching to OxCaml with exclave_ stack_ annotations drops
p99.9 latency from 29 ns to 9 ns per packet on the dispatch
hot path, and removes GC pressure entirely (394 minor GCs to
zero over 25 million packets). Throughput is comparable [...]
We first submitted the article to the CACM a while ago.
The review process takes some time and "Twelve years of
Docker containers" didn't have quite the same vibe.
"Docker, Guix and NixOS (stable) all had their first releases
during 2013, making that a bumper year for packaging aficionados."
They've now added a WSL-style virtual machine layer, but there's no x86 container story (Apple's killing Rosetta) so I imagine some qemu shimming will be required.
There's still no equivalent to VPNKit or GVisor for networking so you'll be bridging I think. See: https://cacm.acm.org/research/a-decade-of-docker-containers/ for how Docker for Mac does this
I can't spot any support for dynamic memory ballooning to prevent the hypervisor from gobbling up too much memory. We've had this in Xen since forever! https://xenproject.org/blog/ballooning-rebooting-and-the-fea...
And, most obviously: NO SUPPORT FOR MACOS. This is the single feature that only Apple can do, and they're choosing not to implement it deliberately, and it's so stupid given the pains we all have to go through to implement CI for macOS. In the land of OCaml, we were forced to implement a custom ZFS snapshotter to get reasonably cost effective macOS CI for our package repository: https://tarides.com/blog/2023-08-02-obuilder-on-macos/. This was fun to build, but it sucks to have to maintain it.
Also, I'm really curious what the GPU passthrough story here is for LLMs, since the Apple Silicon -> Linux kernel support is gated on Asahi's support, but that's been lagging beyond M2 due to the efforts of reverse engineering.
Do better for your developers, Apple. This is a half-baked sweep across third-party software without addressing the core needs around your own operating system.