Comment by benatkin
6 hours ago
> The hard part of it was making the VM large and powerful while making snapshotting/forking instant, which required a lot of custom VMM work.
I don't find "large and powerful" in reference to a VM to sound compelling. What should be large? The memory? The root disk? As I alluded to in my comment, I'm more curious about what can be made small.
Also I'm skeptical that if I forked a vm running a busy Gas Town that it would be very light or fast in how it forks. A well behaved sqlite I could see, but then I'd wonder why not just fork the storage volume containing the database...
So thats what we did. We've made forking a whole gas town performant in 100s of milliseconds. Try it — you can definitely see it working on free tier.
In respect to large and powerful RAM + Size is important but I was more-so referring to full Linux power. The ability to run nested virtualization, ebpf, fuse, and the powerful features of a normal Linux machine instead of a container.
Well that does sound pretty impressive then. And as a champion of open source it wouldn't make me feel like I was getting locked in because the regular speeds I could live with (on a server with KVM or a nested virtalization setup).