I like gvisor but I fear this is too little, too late. Microvms are crushing it right now. I believe even Modal, which is one of the few non-Google users deploying gvisor commercially, and heavily called out in TFA, are moving off gvisor in favor of microvms. Unreal!
Frankly I would never want to operate gvisor with customer defined workloads.
For one, performance isn't native, which makes it hard to determine workload characteristics. Second, it has a pretty long list of limitations that make it difficult to deploy transparently: cgroups aren't fully supported, no io_uring, etc.
They claim they test a wide array of workloads but there are still compatibility issues that take years to iron out. I once had a workload that was probably buggy, and crashed only on arm64 under gvisor, but as I lacked source access there was no viable path forward.
I hope I am wrong, I'd love to see gvisor really take off. I think finishing the macOS port would be wild: run Linux binaries on macOS without a VM! But I'm not confident.
xyzzy_plugh · · focus · HN ↗
Frankly I would never want to operate gvisor with customer defined workloads.
For one, performance isn't native, which makes it hard to determine workload characteristics. Second, it has a pretty long list of limitations that make it difficult to deploy transparently: cgroups aren't fully supported, no io_uring, etc.
They claim they test a wide array of workloads but there are still compatibility issues that take years to iron out. I once had a workload that was probably buggy, and crashed only on arm64 under gvisor, but as I lacked source access there was no viable path forward.
I hope I am wrong, I'd love to see gvisor really take off. I think finishing the macOS port would be wild: run Linux binaries on macOS without a VM! But I'm not confident.