Kata Containers: Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers

• kata-containers

  12 5,017 10.0 Rust

  Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. https://katacontainers.io/

  

Kara used “DAX” to directly share access of the host filesystem to the guest kernel. I thought this was pretty interesting, but it sounds like a possible spot to start a jailbreak.

> Mapping as a direct access device allows the guest to directly access the host memory pages (such as via Execute In Place (XIP)), bypassing the guest kernel's page cache. This zero copy provides both time and space optimizations.

> Mapping as a direct access device inside the VM allows pages from the host to be demand loaded using page faults, rather than having to make requests via a virtualized device (causing expensive VM exits/hypercalls), thus providing a speed optimization.

> Utilizing mmap(2)'s MAP_SHARED shared memory option on the host allows the host to efficiently share pages.

From https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/tree/main...

• kubernetes

  667 107,528 10.0 Go

  Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management

  

> The big problem with Katacontainers is not whether or not they are slightly faster or slower than containers, but the fixed memory allocation which means you must first know and then allocate the maximum amount of memory they might ever need up front.

Conversely the problem with containers is that memory allocation including the OS page cache is not guaranteed. That's bad for a lot of applications, especially databases. It seems Docker has some support for shared page cache but it's not in the Kubernetes pod spec as far as I can see. [0] You would probably need some kind of annotations and a specialized controller to make this work.

[0] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/43916

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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