[Discuss] systemd sucks and containers suck and language-specific package repos suck

[Rich Pieri]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:20:54 -0400
markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:

> There are things called "paravirtualized drivers" that allow VMs to
> access hardware directly. A VM running a native instruction set has
> virtually no impact on performance. Azure even offers network
> offloading ala mellenox drives if you install the mellanox
> paravirtual driver. Devices shared to the VM through a
> paravirtualized driver access the device directly.

We do extensive testing on a variety of different hypervisor and
virtualization platforms. When implemented correctly, running a VM on a
type 1 hypervisor typically has a net impact of less than 0.5%.

> I can't think of any large production environment today that is not
> based on VMs. I haven't set up a server system that isn't based on
> VMs in almost 20 years. With KVM on linux being so good and free,
> there is no point.

Hello, Nutanix. Their Acropolis Hypervisor is a patchy Linux KVM.

> That's not true. Most large server clusters are connected to a SAN of
> some kind. The VM image is presented via fibre or iscsi and can be
> marked read-only at the SAN. Which is how you do it in a secure
> environment.

Quibble: at the high end they're switching to NVMe over TCP. But
otherwise correct.

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