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How to make firecracker faster to start Chromium in < 20ms

26 points by juecd

by rgarcia

0 subcomment

Linux userfaultfd is fascinating and seems like a slam dunk when running a large fleet of mostly homogenous VMs. For a kernel feature that's been around for over a decade it's surprising how little content there is out there about how it's used in practice, so great to see this post.

0 subcomment

by torginus

1 subcomments

Okay I'm getting weird vibes from this whole project. While the whole thing looks interesting from an engineering perspective, I feel like this startup's preferred approach of offering cloud browsers by running Chrome on bare metal (??) inside a VM is a very circuitous route to achieve their designated goals of low-latency and overhead rentable browsers.
First, why chrome? I imagine putting this amount of engineering into slimming down an existing browser engine would yield much better results (using CEF/whatever as starting point).
Second, Chrome already has a multiprocess architecture with renderers, why not just rent a boring server, and use renderer sandboxing (as in multiple tabs).
Third, Chrome as a huge OS footprint with GPU, sound, threading etc., non-optional multiprocess sandbox as of late, not sure how they managed to make all that work without a full-fat OS underneath. Cool if they did, but seems excessive.
Fourth, it seems to me they basically rely on 'hot pools' to actually achieve the stated perf goals, I don't really know if the majority of performance of this wouldn't be achievable via running a Chrome process on a boring Linux box, with X renderers running in the background, and dynamically handing them out to requests?
Edit: Also sorry, but please fix that paragraph formatting, it might work on mobile, but on a 1080p screen, it's hard to ready.
Also PS: By looking around on the website, they're demoing Doom 3 compiled to WASM. While an impressive technical feat, and may be the best demo for their usecase, I really hope the future isn't running a WASM sandbox, inside a chrome sandbox, inside a firecracker sandbox, inside whatever cloud sandbox this things runs on top of.

by Jayko001

1 subcomments

Kernel clearly seems to be winning against vanilla firecraker, but im curious how it compares to other browser infra providers that also use firecraker?