wwilson

9 ms·

91.
by wwilson 3y ago
Yes, we are working on integrated debugging technology (what our customers mostly do these days is just run a conventional debugger inside the simulation, but that doesn't quite use our full power). You're correct that tiny things
92.
by wwilson 3y ago
I will let Dave and Nick chime in here if they want to, since they saw the Apple acquisition closer up than I did, but here are my views: (1) Your beliefs about what happened to FoundationDB's customers are incorrect. Everybody who had
93.
by wwilson 3y ago
Database vendors are very natural customers, because they're distributed systems for whom correctness and uptime are paramount. But they're far from our only customers! We have tons of people who are doing exactly what you describ
94.
by wwilson 3y ago
To be clear — many of us worked at FoundationDB, and we were certainly inspired by the testing technology we had there. But Antithesis is built from scratch, and WAY more general and WAY more powerful than the FDB simulator.
95.
by wwilson 3y ago
Thanks! But just you wait… the really insane stuff isn’t even public yet!
96.
by wwilson 3y ago
Antithesis co-founder here -- happy to answer any questions about the company, the technology, or this particular engagement!
97.
by wwilson 3y ago
Alex discusses this in the post. Performance counters were the first thing we tried, but alas they're non-deterministic about every one-in-a-trillion instructions.
98.
by wwilson 3y ago
You're sort of right, but we're actually sort of both. We use determinism to do controlled fault-injection and to explore your program's state space, but we can also use it for very powerful debugging. Look for future annou
99.
by wwilson 3y ago
What do you mean by a dead giveaway to malware? We're allowed to lie to the guest OS about how many CPUs there are!
100.
by wwilson 3y ago
You are correct. There's a set of concurrency bugs that require actual SMP setups to trigger (like stuff with atomic operations, memory ordering, etc.). If you're trying to build a very low-level lock-free data structure where thi
101.
by wwilson 3y ago
You are exactly correct. Our hypervisor grants you this power (and then we use the power to explore as many possible values of var_1 and var_2 as we can, in case some of them trigger a concurrency bug, e.g.)
102.
by wwilson 3y ago
We provide a bunch of different ways for you to express your test properties. (1) A lot of stuff we can detect automatically, like crashes, OOMs, etc. (2) You should turn on assertions in all the code you send to us. (3) We can write genera
103.
by wwilson 3y ago
Bitflips are an interesting form of fault-injection that we could add: https://antithesis.com/docs/applications/reliability/fault_i... If you know somebody who will pay money for us to prioritize this feature
104.
by wwilson 3y ago
A lot of us worked at FoundationDB, but this is a new company (Antithesis) which develops autonomous testing and debugging tools.
105.
by wwilson 3y ago
With most of our customers, they don't actually have to change their build system at all. We take their normal CI products, plus a small amount of special configuration, and run them. This is actually a good thing because we're te
106.
by wwilson 3y ago
We are not only aware of RR, we've had extensive conversations with Rob and Kyle! Big fans of their work at Pernosco.
107.
So you think you want to write a deterministic hypervisor?(antithesis.com)
200 points by wwilson 3y ago|53 comments
108.
Deterministic simulation testing for our entire SaaS(warpstream.com)
203 points by wwilson 3y ago|26 comments
109.
by wwilson 3y ago
As of now, we do not have the technical capability to deterministically virtualize a GPU. This is an area of interest for us, however. Anybody interested in helping with this should reach out!
110.
The Antithesis Open Source Giveaway Program(antithesis.com)
19 points by wwilson 3y ago|2 comments
111.
by wwilson 3y ago
Somebody once suggested to me that this could be very hand for the reproducible builds folks. I'm sure that now that we're out in the open, lots of people will suggest great applications for it. Disclosure: Antithesis co-founder.
112.
by wwilson 3y ago
Nope. We’re emulating a deterministic computer, so your software can’t act nondeterministically if it tries.
113.
by wwilson 3y ago
We can force any* software to be deterministic. * Offer only good for x86-64 software that runs on Linux whose dependencies you can install locally or mock. The first two restrictions we will probably relax someday.
114.
by wwilson 3y ago
Aww... crap, you're right. I knew we should have finished the UI testing product and run it on ourselves before launching. Disclosure: Antithesis co-founder.
115.
by wwilson 3y ago
Thanks for your kind words! As I mention in this comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39358526 ) we are planning to have pricing suitable for small teams, and perhaps even a free tier for FOSS, in the future. Disclo
116.
by wwilson 3y ago
Let's do it.
117.
by wwilson 3y ago
Post author here. Sorry it was vague, but there's only so much detail you can go into in a blog post aimed at general audiences. Our documentation ( https://antithesis.com/docs/ ) has a lot more info. Here's my
118.
by wwilson 3y ago
TigerBeetle is actually another customer of ours. You might ask why, given that they have their own, very sophisticated simulation testing. The answer is that they're so fanatical about correctness, they wanted a "red team" f
119.
by wwilson 3y ago
Pricing suitable for small teams, and perhaps even a free tier, is absolutely on the roadmap. We decided to build the "hard", security-obsessed version of the infrastructure first -- single-tenant, with dedicated and physically is
120.
Antithesis: Debugging Debugging(thediff.co)
3 points by wwilson 3y ago|0 comments

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