4 ms·
Virtual Machines (VMs) is 1960's technology. Started out on the mainframes. x86 virtualization came along in the 1990's. VMware Desktop everybody knows today w
by clan 3y ago
Virtual Machines (VMs) is 1960's technology. Started out on the mainframes.
x86 virtualization came along in the 1990's. VMware Desktop everybody knows today was released around 1999. Other players have been around.
This is the same year jails was introduced with FreeBSD 4.
The funny thing is that jails are often referenced as "virtualization without the overhead".
Jails are really fast as it is the same shared kernel. Hardware VMs have additional security advantage as a guest kernel vulnerability will (normally) not affect ofter guests. But it comes at a cost.
- bayindirh 3y agoThanks for the trip down the memory lane. While I didn't use any mainframes, I know the partitioning on these beasts existed when I was running VMWare on my desktop around 2000. However, I remarked that the quote is dated before hardware virtualization, namely VT-x/AMD-V, VT-d, etc., hence hardware segmentation of processors and I/O devices were not possible on that era's x86 hardware. I have no qualms against jails and/or BSD. I'm not a flamewar person. As I said, this was a quote from our System/BSD guy, nothing else. Maybe the hardware was saturated, maybe that kernel had a regression, maybe without hardware virtualization/offloading there was some kind of overhead in these days, I don't know. All in all, they are nice technologies, and I like/support them all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]