Linus Thinks Virtualization Is 'Evil' 330
Front page first-timer crdotson writes "Linus said in an interview that he thinks virtualization is 'evil' because he prefers to deal with the real hardware. Hardware virtualization allows for better barriers between systems by running multiple OSes on the same hardware, but OS-level virtualization allows similar barriers without a hypervisor between the kernel and the hardware. Should we expect more focus on OS-level virtualization such as Linux-VServer, OpenVZ, and LXC?"
Some might argue (Score:2, Insightful)
That your OS being tied to a particular piece of hardware without a ton of effort is also "evil." Migration is one of the best things ever.
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Sounds like your OS needs fixed. I have migrated linux boxes with dd.
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As have I, and ended up going through a real pain in the ass with udev. Not as bad as migrating Windows, of course, at least Linux almost always boots (in the old days when I used Slackware I used to compile a braindead generic kernel that would pretty much boot on anything and add it to the LILO menu), but still, depending on the hardware, it can be a hastle.
With virtualization, as long as I stick to a particular virtualization system (generally KVM), so far as the guest OS is concerned, it doesn't know t
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Very informative, thank you (HINT: I was raised by a pair of untrained monkeys) :-)
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Only if you have a non-rhotic accent.
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Hi, "hassle" rhymes with "castle" but is spelled differently. Your helpful grammar Ally.
Nono, you're mistaken. It's from an old Hippie saying:
A man's comb is his hastle.
Re:Some might argue (Score:4, Funny)
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Sounds like your OS needs fixed. I have migrated linux boxes with dd.
But did you do that while there were live users on the system?
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# wall server migration reconnect in 5 minutes
# shutdown -h +5
<3 Virtualization
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"Sounds like your OS needs fixed. I have migrated linux boxes with dd."
In 2 to 10 seconds? Live? Without people even losing their current open sessions?
I really don't think so.
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He was 99.99% likely referring to migrating a live VM to another host, not imaging your desktop to another hard drive. In the enterprise, downtime is often not well tolerated (not something I agree 100% but whatever) and live migration (aka VMware VMotion for example) enables you to take a virtualization host and vacate all of the *still running* VMs off to another host when you need to do maintenance or whatever else to the physical hardware. In the case of VMotion, there is a loss of about one ping on t
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Actually I run a vmware setup at work.
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Except that's what it did mean. Keep digging that hole though.
Re:Some might argue (Score:4, Insightful)
He's only wasting his time if it doesn't work.
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The biggest problem with that is trying to migrate to dissimilar hardware. Changes to the storage adapter or disk size (smaller) make for real problems.
<shameless plug>Storix [storix.com] is good for migrating to different hardware.</shameless plug>
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If it's running just use tar/rsync.
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I think you missed the point.
You can migrate a server in virtualization to new host hardware without shutting it down.
This is not the same as "copy, shutdown the old, bring up the new". This is live migration without a shutdown.
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Re:Some might argue (Score:4, Insightful)
Which smells badly designed service. It being running should be tied to any specific hardware/vm/os running.
As yes...the old all software ever written is just badly designed argument. We just need to fix all software ever written and then we won't need OS virtualization.
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Do not forget to fix customers so they use the services at regular intervals, so there are no more peak hours or days.
I suggest trying with a hammer (it does not work very well, but is very satisfactory).
All thing old are become new dept. (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of some discussion back (IIRC the late 1970s) when the US Social Security dept. was upgrading. They finally had to rewrite their code for the new 3000 series (3090?). Supposedly, the code that they were running was originally written in Autocoder (a kind of assembly language) for the IBM 702 or IBM 705. Then it was moved to a 1620, which ran an emulation of the 702. Then it was moved to an IBM 360, which simulated the 1620 running the emulation. Then it was moved to VM, which could run multiple instances of the 360 program simultaneously. Then, finally, they were going to have to rewrite the program because there were so many changes to it and nobody knew how to write Autocoder any more, and anyway the emulations took up too many cycles. It's apocryphal, but I'll bet it's not far off the truth.
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datacentres use virtualization merely to squeeze more servers out of their existing hardware (equals more paying customers) so virtualization for anything else is really just a fad
Lot more uses than that.
unless you use windows in which case the operating system is the single point of failure).
Funny. But bashing windows servers stopped being funny a while ago.
but the simplest approach would be to disconnect the network cable from the old server and plug it into a ready-configured new replacement.
Really? And
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Multiverse: Replace Hardware, go to sleep.
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Application level migration would be even cooler. Why should migratable resources be arbitrarily glued together into "system images"?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm no expert on ABI, but it looks like there's some projects related to it that are at a higher level than the kernel (e.g. Gnome, KDE etc) which is presumably due to the difficulty of having an ABI on a kernel that supports multiple processor archit
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Wow. I would love to discuss this with you at a coffee shop or something. I mean holy shit you're insane (and really really ignorant).
Are you on youtube?
Linus is right (Score:2, Insightful)
The shift towards virtualization represents a further shift in control away from each person towards a reliance on the honest of others.
No. (Score:4, Informative)
Cloud computing != virtualization
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Suuuuure, you have 2 CPUs, Mr. Guest OS. *wink*wink*
-l
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In the case of VirtualBox, that would be to Oracle.
Can you say with certainty that they will support Windows 9 guests or Linux 3.4, or have you given up the control over upgrades to them?
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No you aren't, you can't be. Oh they probably will, but then again, VirtualBox and kvm will probably support the next few releases of the major OS's as well. So again, what have I given up, other than 2 keyboards and at least one mouse of course? There are many tools out there to convert virtual disks from one format to another
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Can you say for a certainty that your current hardware will support Windows 9 or Linux 3.4? Certainly now. Are you CERTAIN unreleased future OS's will support your current hardware?
No, but I am certain that I can buy hardware that is compatible.
With a VM, there are no such guarantees, because there's a lack of purveyors of virtual hardware. It's pretty much only the virtual machine vendors, so yeah, you have to trust them to upgrade whenever necessary.
There are many tools out there to convert virtual disks from one format to another so moving data to another VM package (if you just had to keep it local to that VM for some reason) is easy, and much cheaper than buying adapters for hardware interfaces.
Switching to another VM isn't always an option either. So far, none of the VM vendors have provided drivers compatible with Gnome Shell, for example. (Not that gnome shell is essential, but it proves the point by example, I should thi
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(Not that gnome shell is essential, but it proves the point by example, I should think.)
It doesn't.
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If I run Linux as a host and FreeBSD and Windows in kvm or VirtualBox, to whom have I given up my control too?
The Chinese government, of course.
(ducks)
Re:Linus is right (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF? I've built three production Linux KVM servers now. Other than relying on the KVM team (backed mainly by Redhat), I'm not relying on anybody else. And if Redhat is a problem for you, then you've got bigger issues than the KVM virtualization modules in the kernel.
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If you are talking virtualization in it's relationship to cloud computing, then I agree.
Virtualization on your own hardware though... not much difference from the current state. It's just another (sometimes open source) piece of software we learn to trust (along with all the other software we use).
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Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
- Mark Twain
You are forgiven. Now pick me and put me in some water.
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I am not following you?
Virtualization is just taking your own Hardware and sharing some resources and partitioning others so you can run Multiple OS's on your hardware...
It is not much more of a jump of putting your faith on the OS who will manage your hardware, and give you an interface level to the hardware.
Virtualization you can think of it as a OS for your OS.
The main value in Virtualization is from an Old computer science process... Keep you hardware running at high utilization doing something producti
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I hope one day Linus or RMS states they like the taste of poo, just to see how many nuts out there will just blindly go along and do it because these guys have an opinion and because they have done or are doing great things they must be always right.
It's a good thing you put that at the end, or most people would never read past it.
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The shift towards virtualization represents a further shift in control away from each person towards a reliance on the honest of others.
And who exactly are you to tell me what I can and can not do with my own hardware?
If I choose to run zero, one, or a hundred OSs on my virtualized hypervisor on the hardware I purchased, what right do you have to say it is a bad thing?
If anything, you dictating that I shouldn't virtualize my own hardware because it is evil, is what would be taking control away from me. Virtualization gives me control. MUCH more control than the hardware itself can.
And what are you going on about relying on the honesty of
Screws are evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I'm used to working with a hammer.
Linus is not a god, just a guy, with his own prejudices.
Re:Screws are evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's not confuse two completely different things: if Richard Stallman said something was "evil," it would mean he was morally opposed to it and wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. But Linus calling hypervisor virtualization "evil" just means he'd rather work on hardware, but hey, you want virtualization, go ahead and take your pick of the ones Linux provides.
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Virtualization is an ugly band-aid. But it's a band-aid for real shortcomings in current OSes.
And solving those shortcomings would lead you to separating the OS into 2 layers akin to a hyper visor and OS... and you'd be right back where you started.
And someone would still need to run a *nix server along side a Windows one, or find they need to run two different distros or two different kernel versions... and still need traditional virtualization to do it.
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Why can't I suspend an entire app, TCP stack state, files, and all?
Why can't I, in that state, dump it, then restore it?
Why can't I migrate said dump, including the IP address (that I would have bound to the app instead of the machine), to another server? Then unsuspend it.
Why can't I do that seamlessly?
Because networking is bound by factors external to the app, not the least of which that IPs are machine bound, not app bound. Or did you forget that a router somewhere needs to know where that IP is routed so it can route packets to you?
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That's not different from moving a VM from one host to another, the router needs to change its ARP table in that case as well. There's no reason the IP couldn't be app bound instead of machine bound, if you're willing to assign one IP per app (IPv6 would help). But we're lacking the tools to migrate an IP from one host to another, including the TCP sessions. That's a software problem though, and could be implemented if there's demand for it.
Virtualization is expensive in compute ressources (Score:2, Interesting)
but its cheap in human resources since it is the ultimate reuse of code.
Good for beginners (Score:2, Interesting)
Virtualization is good for new junior programmers learning how to program firmware, sinceeany low level calls can not really destroy the real hardware, since protection can bee built right in.
It's a crutch, but since we have a generation of programmers who can't do "the hard stuff" becuase "java does it for them", its certaintly good to have around.
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Sorry sir, but you are in the wrong thread.
Fortunately, nothing of value has been lost.
"Hardware virtualization"? (Score:2)
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You go out and buy a Dell blade cluster, it contains 16 identical blades with 2 sockets of 6 cores each and 24 GB of RAM. You hook this blade cluster to an Equalogics array for storage. Install ESX on 15 servers, vcenter on 1, now you can install whatever servers you need, and they are entirely fault tolerant.
Oops, there is smoke coming from one of the ESX systems, and it seems to be unresponsive; vCenter detects the failure and moves the virtual machines without downtime. I don't know what crack Linus i
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an entire server for vcenter? Eat your own dog food!!
hypervisors are a necessary evil (Score:2)
VMware makes a hetrogenous environment far, far easier to deal with - we have some 70 odd servers running on 5 physical servers. It makes it much easier to single-task a given server/VM, spread the load without having to invest far more in server hardware, and allows having backup/redundant servers to allow for patching/upgrades of servers with much more minimal effort.
While in-OS virtualization is great if you only require a single OS to do everything; but if you have hetrogenous servers to handle differen
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Not at all. Put all the linux boxes in openvz or something like it and windows servers can go into their hypervisor until MS smartens up.
Then you just need the linux boxes all on one set of hardware and windows on another. Vmware has other attractions, this is not really one of them.
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Accept now you need a Linux Vitalization admin and a Windows Virtualization admin.. You have just doubled the number of "platform specific" gotchas you need to learn, plus unlike having a single VMWare cluster you now have two clusters, probably increasing your hardware cost per vm by needing both platforms to maintain a proper save resource overhead to handle failures.
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And can be hired to replace the Windows admin who gets palpitations at the site of a CLI.
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I agree (Score:2)
It's hard enough to get stuff to run reliably when you are dealing with real hardware.
Adding another layer just increases the number of dark corners where bugs can hide.
I disagree. (Score:2)
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That's not been my experience. In many respects virtualization simplifies things. Unless you're dealing with paravritualization, generally you're dealing with a much more "dumbed-down" environment; some limited number of emulated NICs, video cards, mass storage controllers, bus controllers and the like, and these are almost inevitably taken from widely-understood hardware. Yes, there could be bugs lying in wait within the virtualized drivers, but then again, it's not like real hardware has any lack of on
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Hardware failures in our VMWare environment tend to go almost completely um-noticed by server admins and en users... We have had network cards fail, Host power loss, and ram failures... The VMWare brings the VMs back on line so fast that there is rarely an alarm on the service, instead just something we need to fix on the back-end.
This goes extra for storage where we regularly shift VMs between SANs by different manufacturers using storage VMotion, LIVE.
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Conversely, a virtualization environment presents a somewhat "neutral" hardware profile to installed OSs. This makes it useful for installing legacy software on new hardware.
And adds a new load of bugs in the process.
When I was writing PC emulators years ago there were a lot of obscure bugs in the emulated applications when the fake hardware we gave it didn't quite work the same way the real hardware did and there was no way to emulate it precisely.
For example, suppose you have Linux running with an ext4 filesystem that's emulated by a disk file on a real Linux system using an ext4 filesystem on RAID. Do filesystem barriers work?
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Yes, it works. Never mind the filesystem, you'd use a real hypervisor on real hardware with real operating systems designed for real virtualization, with real drivers that all work really, really well.
There's a big, big difference between, say, Xen, ESX or Hyper-V running your enterprise apps, and, say, getting Leisure Suit Larry running on Bochs. It's really, really nice to be able to move a running Linux guest with a few hundred users over to another server without a hiccup.
Heck, even at the workstation
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Yes, it works. Never mind the filesystem, you'd use a real hypervisor on real hardware with real operating systems designed for real virtualization, with real drivers that all work really, really well.
In other words, if you don't go to a great deal of trouble to ensure that you're running the right software on the right hardware, you risk corrupting your virtualised disk because the OS you're running in the virtualised server thinks that filesystem barriers work but the kernel it's running on is old enough that LVM doesn't support fileystem barriers or the real ext4 filesystem is mounted with barriers disabled so it doesn't even try to use them.
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It is always the responsability of the "server" code (let it be hypervisor, sandbox, whatever) to ensure that the host system only has access to its assigned resources. If a host goes crazy and formats its hard drive, it should not affect any other host.
Could you point us to any instances where a host system corrupted another host system? There is always the probability of a bug but I have neither found it nor heard of it, maybe I have been just lucky...
wrong, OS level Implementation is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wrong, OS level Implementation is the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Man this and the reactions to it are dumb.
"Ask the world's most famous kernel developer what he thinks of the virtualization wars going on the Linux community between KVM and Xen and you'll hear a condemnation (of a sort) of them both. "I'm not a virtualization kind of guy. I think virtualization is evil," Linus Torvalds told the crowd at LinuxCon on Wednesday during his keynote interview session with Greg Kroah-Hartman."
Linus doesn't like using and probably really doesn't like dealing with this war.
If you read more. ""I built a kernel because I wanted to get my hands grubby with things like I/O ports.""
Really this headline is taken so out of context that it isn't funny. But it got people to flame on Slash and probably a lot of hits.
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The title is a bit on the FUD style. PROPER virtualization is not criticized by Linus, but improper implementation, namely cheap OS-level virtualization wich could lead to lazy shortcuts to patches and features implementation.
The article may be misleading, but it really seems like Linus really cares little for either KVM, which is more hardware-oriented, or Xen, which is more software-oriented. He has accepted both into Linux because they are good quality and many want them, but he doesn't personally care for either. I think it's odd that he used the word "evil" but I think he meant it purely tongue-in-cheek.
Evil is on the other foot (Score:2)
It's actually Evil to not virtualize, because you waste electricity! It requires additional power for each physical server to run a single OS, plus the airconditioning costs for all those servers. This means your poluting the planet more by not virtualizing!
40+ years of experience (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to see where virtualization is going, check out where VM370 was in 1977 or so. That is about as far as the current virtualization technology has gotten. Bare metal has its place, as does virtualization.
It's mostly true (Score:4, Interesting)
Linus has never been diplomatic, but it's mostly true. A huge amount of virtualization done today involves the same host and guest OS, and in most of those cases, using something slimmer than full blown virtualization would make a whole lot more sense, even if only for the improved performance. One of the problems is familiarity, container type isolation isn't applicable to as many cases, so fewer people are familiar with it. One of the other problems is the perception that full virtualization is more secure (which is probably untrue).
There is however, a large swath of problems that aren't solved well by container type isolation that virtualization does solve well. If you need to simulate different physical systems (with separate IP addresses), that's much easier with virtualization. Likewise if you need very different guest and host OSes, that's not a strong point of container type isolation. Also, if your guest OS is sensitive to hardware changes, virtualization makes a lot of sense. There's more, but you get the idea.
Get better informed (Score:2)
You know what else is evil? (Score:2, Insightful)
Having to reboot to play video games.
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You don't need to reboot to play video games. You just need a Kazzo or a Retrode so that you can copy your 8- and 16-bit game cartridges into the computer and run them on an emulator.
FreeBSD vps "hot migration" (Score:4, Interesting)
For those of you that look at FreeBSD jails, Linux OpenVZ, etc etc and say "but I want to migrate between servers!!!" there is an example of this being a possibility.
http://www.7he.at/freebsd/vps/
This guy did it with FreeBSD, but the real problem is that he needs funding to continue polishing it before it can ever be implemented into a FreeBSD release. I wish more people knew about this as we'd love to have it at work.
Idiotic, that's what OS's do (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole point of a modern OS is to virtualize the hardware so that each software application can play nice with each other.
The hypervizor is the new ring 0. And it's going to evolve into a microkernel and user mode drivers. It's the new operating system and that what he should be working on if he likes hardware bits. The "Operating Systems" of old are evolving into plug in Operating Environments. It's the future, the revolution, get over it.
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It would require a layer on top of graphic hardware first though.
Re:Idiotic, that's what OS's do (Score:4, Insightful)
Virtualisation is, in many ways, trying to do what the OS should already be doing, namely isolation between processes (though protected memory), providing an abstraction layer for the hardware (though drivers) and allocating resources (through the CPU/IO schedulers).
Unfortunately, a certain OS has been so bad at doing this (historically) that people turn to virtualisation and you end up with a form of inner-platform effect [wikipedia.org]. We have Linux implementing the virtio drivers to interface with the hypervisor which implements real drivers to talk to the real hardware. We have the guest's scheduler trying to manage "virtual CPUs" without any real information about what resources are actually available. We have hypervisors trying [vmware.com] to re-implement copy-on-write [wikipedia.org] for memory pages that the OS already does out-of-the-box.
Virtualisation is used as a "one size fits all" sledgehammer, often where it isn't the appropriate solution.
Isn't that the difference between KVM and XEN? (Score:2)
I thought that was exactly the difference between XEN and KVM. KVM uses the Linux kernel as ring 0, whereas XEN creates it's own 'sort of' kernel as ring 0.
And, I don't think this approach is the best, because Linux and Unix still outperform any other approach by a long shot and have a lot of stability. So I prefer OpenVZ, Linux-Vserver.org and, since it is now the officially sanctioned solution: LXC. On the server side everything is Linux anyways. So why should I virtualize hardware, when I can use the per
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The whole point of a modern OS is to virtualize the hardware so that each software application can play nice with each other.
The hypervizor is the new ring 0. And it's going to evolve into a microkernel and user mode drivers. It's the new operating system and that what he should be working on if he likes hardware bits. The "Operating Systems" of old are evolving into plug in Operating Environments. It's the future, the revolution, get over it.
The trend over the last decade to single task each OS instance, because they are hard to configure to support multiple applications. A single tasked operating system is still a HUGE, HUUUUGE amount of administrative overhead. The admin overhead involved with managing one ESX hypervisor running twenty discrete VM's is lower than one operating system (pick any one) running twenty discrete applications. Why is that?
From ESX, we have programmatic, WUI, GUI, and CLI interfaces that can clone a live system, sn
So is he going to buy me a room full of computers? (Score:3)
Linus Torvalds is... (Score:2, Interesting)
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... the John Carmack of Open Source *nix Kernels. Seriously, what has he personally done in the past 5 years other than fsck us with first Bitlocker and then Git, a decade long string of incompatible 2.6.x releases, and finally, in order to 'me too' bad judgements by other open source companies, releasing a half baked kernel as 3.0 that might as well have been called 2.7 or 2.8 for all the new features it provides. (That is to say... none?)
I think that doing "a decade long string of [...] releases" in just 5 years is quite an accomplishment.
(Ducks)
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Let's see, for starters Linus continues to effectively manage the evolution of the Linux kernel after 20 years - that in itself is an amazing accomplishment. Not only that, but he took a couple of months off to write git, which is an amazing distributed source code management system that is free for everybody to use. He's already accomplished more than most computer scientists accomplish in one lifetime, and Linus is in his early 40's.
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He's personally responded to a couple of emails I've written to the list about issues, one a change that wasn't compatible with our usage and one an actual nasty corruption bug. In both cases he responded very quickly with a very precise description of what was going on, and took charge of making sure it got fixed (in one case guiding me to make a patch for the usage I needed)
He's managed to keep a large project putting out regular releases and not regressing badly in any way. That's a bigger accomplishme
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Armchair quarterback: I bet if I added up your accomplishments against those of Linux Torvalds, you would be found wanting.
You don't need to be a baker to know when the bread is stale.
And while I think vranash is mostly off-base, I find your counterpoint to be of a class much worse than his criticisms because it doesn't attempt to bring about a better understanding of the situation, all it does is try to shout down someone you disagree with.
And now on future slashdot... (Score:2)
So now in the future of Slashdot, except a bunch of people praising Virtualization we are going to get a bunch of mindless sheep now condemning it.
Much like how RMS got Slashdot to loose its love for Cloud computing.
Grandpa Simpson (Score:2)
Perhaps I really am strange then.
Linus doesn't really think it's Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Linus likes to say things that are a bit over-the-top. He trusts that his audience can detect the tongue-in-cheek nature of the comments.
I do the same thing. If I say something like "I hate and fear Perl", I don't mean it literally.
Some people were upset about Linus's presentation about Git where he bashed Subversion. I thought it was pretty clear that he was exaggerating his comments for comedic effects, and I was entertained rather than outraged.
Linus does sometimes say things I disagree with. He resisted having an official kernel debugger for years, because he said kernel developers should be able to hold everything in their heads and not need a debugger to help them. (Did he ever give in on that?) But this current issue is a non-issue.
steveha
Greed (Score:2)
Virtualization is a stopgap measure (Score:2)
Virtualization is a stopgap measure, it helps work around the inadequacies of current operating systems by introducing a new layer of granularity and security.
The purpose of an operating system is to share hardware in a secure and efficient manner. Unfortunately the security of systems is lacking, so you can never be sure of the side effects of installing or running an given application. Using a VM to allow damage to be rolled back is a hack to make the risks acceptable.
If the operating systems did their jo
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Re:A Hypervizor IS AN OS most don't need! (Score:2)
Virtualization / Emulation belongs back in its niche. The whole point of unix is to abstract and remove the hardware and balancing resources between software and users. The over use of visualization outside of its niche is an indication that our OS and practices have failed to perform their task. Its not good that something lets you avoid fixing real problems by putting it off into a virtual failed OS.
The old mainframe I got to play with had more hardware protected memory spaces so drivers couldn't mess u