Hypervisor

I am the lead developer on the Antithesis

Deterministic Hypervisor.

And it will become eminently clear in a moment why Alex is here, because our guests today are Peter and Nicholas, who have built a determinator and open sourced it.

And we're going to talk a little bit more about that as we go along.

But at the beginning, we start just trying to patch some of the stuff in Linux, even though it can show up later, technically.

If some other software does the same thing that Linux is doing, then we can't patch all software.

So we want to patch it in Hypervisor where it's possible.

But then it can work for something because Linux does weird stuff that other software doesn't do.

Moving on to Cloud Tools.

Docker is replacing its third-party virtualization layer with a first-party VMM built-in house, giving them full control over the stack that sits between host hardware and containers on Mac and Windows Docker desktop installs.

The switch targets concrete pain points, including faster container startup, quicker file IO for edit, compile, test loops, and memory that gets

returned to the host when containers are idle instead of being held indefinitely.

The same engine also powers Docker Sandboxes, so improvements in future enterprise admin controls for governance.

It features LANs in both products simultaneously, part of a stated longer-term goal of unified runtime across laptop, cloud, and on-premise environments.

It's included in the Docker Desktop version 4.86. I've been using the VMM on the Mac for quite a while now.

So I because the Mac virtualization with the old version was a lot of emulation.

There's lots of tweaks this year around.

And if you've got an M4 or later, there's even more AI hardware access stuff that they've built into the Hypervisor platform.

Of interest also to this is that Microsoft have said this week that Windows on ARM should now be considered a first-party version of Windows, rather than the sort of the also-ran behind the Intel AMD version that they view now as being... uh you know full fat no excuses no compromises and so forth uh which of course is very interesting as as we know there's forthcoming arm based with nvidia support hardware coming for windows and that will be windows on arm so windows alarm is getting better and now parallels is getting better as well everything's getting

better and i believe that mac manias and mac studios are getting better darian

This is a major breaking change I'm proposing to land soon.

It changes the VMM design to create a new file type for each VM.

Interesting.

When a VM is created, the caller gets a new file descriptor for using IO control calls against that VM.

Why do this? And he proposes three reasons.

Number one, better isolate which processes can manipulate a VM.

Today, it's a hacky combination of knowing the magic number and VMM tracking and owning PID.

The current design scares me.