13 items tagged “virtualization”
2023
Lima VM—Linux Virtual Machines On macOS (via) This looks really useful: “brew install lima” to install, then “limactl start default” to start an Ubuntu VM running and “lima” to get a shell. Julia Evans wrote about the tool this morning, and here Adam Gordon Bell includes details on adding a writable directory (by default lima mounts your macOS home directory in read-only mode).
Why We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU (via) Hocus are building a self-hosted alternative to cloud development environment tools like GitPod and Codespaces. They moved away from Firecracker because it’s optimized for short-running (AWS Lambda style) functions—which means it never releases allocated RAM or storage volume space back to the host machine unless the container is entirely restarted. It also lacks GPU support.
2008
Amazon takes EC2 to the next level with persistent storage volumes. You can store a snapshot of a storage volume to S3 with a single API call, making backups trivial.
EC2: Introducing Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones. Big news from Amazon: EC2 can now provide static IP addresses which you can dynamically map to one of your instances, along with “availability zones” so you can specify that instances run in different data centres. Hosting an entire application on EC2 just got a whole lot more practical.
2007
Django GridContainer. Media Temple’s virtualized Django hosting is now accepting applications for beta testers.
VMware Fusion Review (via) It looks like VMware are finally catching up with Parallels.
How to convert a VMWare virtual appliance to work with Parallels. Anyone know the best option for creating a virtual machine that can easily be used by Parallels and VMWare alike?
VirtualBox. GPL licensed virtualization software; they recently released an OS X version.
Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image (via) Microsoft have made free VPC images of IE 6 and IE 7 available for testing, but they expire in August.
JPC (via) Pure Java emulation of an x86 PC, running at 10% native speed. No code to download yet, but there’s a neat applet that lets you play Lemmings (and other games) running on FreeDOS.
[...] I'm a fan of the virtual machine future. We should treat our operating system like a roll of paper towels. If you get something on it you don't like, you ball it up and throw it away, and rip off a new, fresh one.
Linus Torvalds: Super Kernel Sunday! Linux kernel version 2.6.20 is out, and includes virtualization thanks to KVM.
2006
VMWare Fusion (virtualization for Mac). Competition is good. The race is on between VMWare and Parallels as to who can get 3D acceleration virtualized first (and let me play Half-Life 2 without using BootCamp).