Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

If you're not looking for GPU snapshotting the ecosystem is relatively mature. Specifically, CPU-only VM-based snapshotting techniques are pretty well understood. However, if you need GPUs, this is a notoriously hard problem. IIRC Fly also was planning on using gVisor (EDIT: cloud-hypervisor) for their GPU cloud, but abandoned the effort [1].

Kata runs atop many things, but is a little awkward because it creates a "pod" (VM) inside which it creates 1+ containers (runc/gVisor). Firecracker is also awkward because GPU support is pretty hard / impossible.

[1] https://fly.io/blog/wrong-about-gpu/



Ohh this makes sense now. Firecracker is good for compute related workflows but gvisor is more good for GPU related workflows, gotcha.

For my use cases usually, its Firecracker but I can now see why company like Modal would use gvisor because they focus a lot (and I mean a lot) on providing gpu access. I think that its one of their largest selling points or one of them, for them compute is secondary customer and gvisor's compute performance hit is a well worth trade off for them

Thanks for trying to explain the situation!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: