gVisor is being donated to CNCF

33 points by carlana 19 hours ago on lobsters | 7 comments

rrampage | 7 hours ago

The systrap backend of gvisor is quite an interesting middle ground for process isolation - faster than the ptrace backend and does not need KVM support on the host

srcreigh | 7 hours ago

Thanks for mentioning this. This may be useful for my older homelab mini PCs.

sluongng | 13 hours ago

We have tried to address this by upstreaming Linux kernel patches that improve its performance, but have been turned down by kernel maintainers due to gVisor being a wholly-owned Google project.

This and the act of donating it to cncf / Linux Foundation made it looks like a hostage situation. I hope those patches will get merged soon. Anyone got a link

JulianWgs | 10 hours ago

It has always been the principle in the Linux kernel to only allow contributions which solve problems for multiple stakeholders, not just for one company and their project.

intelfx | 21 minutes ago

It has always been the principle in the Linux kernel to only allow contributions which solve problems for multiple stakeholders, not just for one company and their project.

This is a great principle! If only it was enforced consistently 🥲

ianloic | 7 hours ago

My recollection was that they dumped a giant patch set that wasn't even indented to kernel standards....

koala | 13 hours ago

I've always been fascinated by gVisor. The article mentions being able to run gVisor on macOS... but I guess it could go even further? I know Windows would be difficult, but maybe possible? Or perhaps other more-UNIX-like operating systems could use it to get Linux compatibility?

I've long wished a UNIX-like userland environment- ideally based on WASM. Imagine if there was a Debian port to such a WASM-based, UNIX-like userland environment. You could have development environments a bit like NixOS devshells, but that you could zip up and use across macOS, Linux, Windows, etc.