Future development of Jail (was Re: corporate backers of freebsd)

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Andy Dills
> Sent: Monday, December 31, 2007 5:52 PM
> To: Colin Percival
> Cc: Pollywog; Giorgos Keramidas; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Future development of Jail (was Re: corporate backers of
> freebsd)
>
>
> Over the next 2-3 years, as cheap commodity hardware continues to explode
> with numerous processors with numerous cores and several gigs of memory,
> fast busses and standard multiple gige ports, inexpensive solid state
> disks...down the road I think it will become best common practice
> to setup
> any service on a virtual server, if for no other reason than to abstract
> the operating environment from the hardware to enable greater levels of
> redundancy and to better leverage the unused horsepower of these boxes in
> such a way that doesn't increase exposure and vulnerability.
>

I don't.  In the entire history of computers every time there has
been a horsepower increase, the "normal" software that people run
on the system has bloated to consume all available additional horsepower.

What you are doing is akin to saying that since the modern
CPU can virtualize hundreds of 1MB 8086 real-mode "sessions"
that we ought to be able to run hundreds of instances of
WordPerfect for DOS on a typical modern PC.  Well guess what - WE
COULD!  If someone wrote the software to do it, of course.

In the future I predict that ordinary standard desktop software is
going to require:

"numerous processors with numerous cores and several gigs of memory,
fast busses and standard multiple gige ports, inexpensive solid state
disks"

as a MINIMUM system configuration, and people will think NOTHING of
it.

Code always bloats to fill all available machine power.

> We seem to be very close to having the ability to completely
> segregate the
> control-plane from the data-plane (using router terminology).

We had that ability with commodity cheap desktop hardware a decade
ago.  But, nobody wrote software to take advantage of the commodity
cheap desktop hardware to do this back then, for the same reasons
that the jail developer lost interest today.

> This is such
> a huge improvement over the status quo that I'm a little bit sad and
> confused why it seems to be such a low priority with the developers. But
> they have their hands full and nobody seems to be driven to steer that
> particular ship.
>

In short, and don't take it wrongly, your a young pup.  You have not
had the experience with the computer business that someone older
and more jaded has.  Once you have another 20 years under your belt
and you start seeing that it's the same old, same old, you will
understand why this is a pipe dream.

The day will never come that a corporation can go to Kmart and buy
a $299 PC and use it as a server to run their entire 1000 person
operation.  Yet, a $299 commodity PC that you buy from Kmart today,
has about 100 times more power than a mainframe that this same
corporation was using 2 decades ago to run their entire 1000 person
operation.  Using your logic, the sensible thing would be to take
that 20 year old software and run it on the $299 PC today.  Yet,
nobody's doing this.  Think for a while about why this is and you
might begin to understand what is really going on.

Ted