actuated VS QEMU

I've been following along with Actuated and it seems to address many of the issues I have with GitHub hosted runners... But I'd really rather have GitHub improve their product and stop chasing the magical money tree that is Copilot.

IDK if you noticed this, but actuated.dev is a service that addresses this concern on the top line of their elevator pitch. (That's the same site which this very blog is posted on.)

Hi, I'm Alex the founder of actuated. We've been following the monetizing innovation and The Right It playbooks here, and only investing as much time and money as it seems to make sense given customer interest.

It was great to see our message resonate so much on the front page a couple of weeks ago. Thanks for your support.

Here's the next iteration, our website. It's made with Tailwind UI and there'll be more to come.

If what we're building resonates with you, please reach out for a quick user interview and to get started with actuated.

We have live customers and they've had good results. But we want to prove that we can help more teams like yours.

https://actuated.dev/

This is really cool. I've also been working with Firecracker, but for isolated CI runners with Docker and KinD/K3s support. Starting with GitHub Actions [1] I've also had interest in making OpenFaaS use pause/resume from Gatsby.js who wanted to reduce their hosting costs. The main challenges were around the networking - if you use CNI and the Go SDK [2] then restores simply don't work. Not sure if you're working with netlink and IMAP directly to get around it?

My question is how are you guaranteeing uniqueness, or do you only clone snapshots for a single tenant? [3]

[1] https://github.com/self-actuated/actuated

Another important tool from the same organization is Vagrant, which provides extra help in running VMs built with Packer. Of course, the choice of a VM provider is also very important, as some VM providers may not be supported on certain platforms. For example, there are no VMware or VirtualBox releases that support Apple Silicon. However, QEMU is supported on most platforms, including Apple Silicon, which is why this provider was chosen here.

My most-wanted QEMU feature: https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commit/a2260983c6553

Using `gic-version=3` on macOS you can now use more than 8 cores on ARM chips.

A better solution is just to write a plain ass shell script that tests if various C snippets compile.

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/configure

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/build/detect-pwe...

Not an unholy mix of m4, shell, and C, all in the same file.

---

These are the same style as a the configure scripts that Fabrice Bellard wrote for tcc and QEMU.

They are plain ass shell scripts, because he actually understands the code he writes.

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/configure

https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc/blob/mob/configure

OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”.

You don’t have to copy and paste thousands of lines of GNU stuff that you don’t understand.

(copy of lobste.rs comment)

Related:

A fast Pascal (Delphi) WebAssembly interpreter:

https://github.com/marat1961/wasm

WASM-4:

https://github.com/aduros/wasm4

Curated list of awesome things regarding WebAssembly (wasm) ecosystem:

https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm

Also, it would be nice if there was a WASM (soft) CPU for QEMU, which (if it existed!) would go here:

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/tree/master/target

> architectural registers are always updated

In tiny code, the guest registers (global TCG variables) are stored in the host's registers until you either call an helper which can access the CPU state or you return (`git grep la_global_sync`). This is the reason why QEMU is not so terribly slow.

But after a check, this also happens when you access the guest memory address space! https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/include/tcg/tcg-opc... (TCG_OPF_SIDE_EFFECTS is what matters)

But still, in the end, it's the same problem. What QEMU does, can be done in LLVM too. You could probably be more efficient in LLVM by using the exception handling mechanism (invoke and friends) to only serialize back to memory when there's an actual exception, at the cost of higher register pressure. More or less what we do here: https://rev.ng/downloads/bar-2019-paper.pdf

Um, in case you don't know, UTM (based on QEMU) is out for quite a while.

Some of these tools include Oracle VM VirtualBox (that I've used since before the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle), VMWare Workstation Player, and QEMU, but last year, I found out about Multipass.

For C/C++ projects that use meson as the build system, there is an excellent way to manage dependencies:

https://mesonbuild.com/Wrapdb-projects.html

https://mesonbuild.com/Wrap-dependency-system-manual.html

meson will download and build the libraries automatically and give you a variable which you pass as a regular dependency into the built target:

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/tree/005ad32358f12fe9313a4a0191...

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/tree/main/subprojects

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/37457412b3212463c5...

Or, if you're using proper operating systems, they're managed by the usual package manager, just like everything else.

For all the users of the Linux platform, QEMU is the VM that you should go for. This software comes without any price tag and works as an emulator of various machines with utmost ease and completion; the software uses dynamic translations to emulate hardware peripherals and enhances its overall performance. If you are using QEMU as a virtualizer, then it will function exactly like the host system (provided you have the right set of hardware).