gvisor VS for-mac

To be pedantic for a moment...

> You can't use Go to write a kernel ...

Not a production kernel, but MIT did use Go to "study the performance trade-offs of using a high-level language with garbage collection to implement a kernel" [1]

There is also gVisor [2] which implements, as best as I can describe, a kernel in user space. It's intent is to intercept syscalls made in containers and to redirect its execution in a sandbox.

> ... program a microcontroller ...

I'm not sure if one would classify this as a microcontroller, but USB Armory did write a, iirc, Go compliant runtime for bare metal ARM and RISC-V [3]

[1] https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit

[2] https://gvisor.dev/

[3] https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

Although the documentation also mentions "youki", that is mentioned as a "drop-in replacement" of the default runtime basically doing the same, so let's stick with runc. The second runtime will be Kata runtime from Kata containers, since it runs small virtual machines which is good for showing how differently it uses the CPU and memory. This also adds a higher level of isolation with some downsides as well. And the third runtime will be runsc from gVisor which is a perfect third runtime to see how we can run containers and still have a little more secure isolation. I will show how we can recognize the differences by running commands from the isolated environments and from the host.

I find the README of the repo much better to quickly understand what this software is and isn't.

https://github.com/google/gvisor

If you think about it virtualization is just a narrowing of the application-kernel interface. In a standard setting the application has a wide kernel interface available to it with dozens (ex. seccomp) to 100's of syscalls. A vulnerablility in any one of which could result in complete system compromise.

With virtualization the attack surface is narrowed to pretty much just the virtualization interface.

The problem with current virtualization (or more specifically, the VMM's) is that it can be cumbersome, for example memory management is a serious annoyance. The kernel is built to hog memory for cache and etc. but you don't want the guest to be doing that - since you want to overcommit memory as guests will rarely use 100% of what is given to them (especially when the guest is just a jailed singular application), workarounds such as free page reporting and drop_caches hacks exist.

I would expect eventually to see high performance custom kernels for a application jails - for example: gVisor[1] acts as a syscall interceptor (and can use KVM too!) and a custom kernel. Or a modified linux kernel with patched pain points for the guest.

[1] <https://gvisor.dev/>

Hillai: Following our research, Alibaba took several steps to address the vulnerabilities we discovered. They limited image pull secret permissions to read-only access, preventing unauthorized uploads. Additionally, they implemented a secure container technology similar to Google's gVisor project. This technology hardens containers and makes them more difficult to escape from, adding another layer of security.

If you want to use netstack without Bazel, just use the go branch:

https://github.com/google/gvisor/tree/go

go get gvisor.dev/gvisor/pkg/tcpip@go

The go branch is auto generated with all of the generated code checked in.

Isn't gVisor kind of this as well?

"gVisor is an application kernel for containers. It limits the host kernel surface accessible to the application while still giving the application access to all the features it expects. Unlike most kernels, gVisor does not assume or require a fixed set of physical resources; instead, it leverages existing host kernel functionality and runs as a normal process. In other words, gVisor implements Linux by way of Linux."

https://github.com/google/gvisor

I use containers on Mac and Windows for development (and we deploy on linux). Docker for Mac is _unusably_ slow in my experience. The VM that it runs is a giant resource hog and a battery hog, and doesn't support ipv6 [0] Docker Desktop itself is (another) resource hog, wildly buggy, and painfully slow. It's the epitome of "shitty electron app".

On windows, docker desktop has all of the same issues as it does on mac. Docker's concept of volumes and file permissions on windows are nonsense. Windows updates and Docker Desktop regularly decide to disagree, [1] It's networking support interferes with other applications (like OpenVPN and the Xbox Game Center) [2].

[0] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1432

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/599

[2] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1976

version: '3' services: graph-node: image: graphprotocol/graph-node ports: - '8000:8000' - '8001:8001' - '8020:8020' - '8030:8030' - '8040:8040' depends_on: - ipfs - postgres extra_hosts: - host.docker.internal:host-gateway environment: postgres_host: postgres postgres_user: graph-node postgres_pass: let-me-in postgres_db: graph-node ipfs: 'ipfs:5001' matic: 'matic:http://localhost:8545/' GRAPH_LOG: info ipfs: image: ipfs/go-ipfs:v0.10.0 ports: - '5001:5001' volumes: - ./data/ipfs:/data/ipfs postgres: image: postgres ports: - '5432:5432' command: [ "postgres", "-cshared_preload_libraries=pg_stat_statements" ] environment: POSTGRES_USER: graph-node POSTGRES_PASSWORD: let-me-in POSTGRES_DB: graph-node # FIXME: remove this env. var. which we shouldn't need. Introduced by # , maybe as a # workaround for https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/6270? PGDATA: "/var/lib/postgresql/data" POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: "-E UTF8 --locale=C" volumes: - ./data/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

This bug has been around years and still not fixed as far as I know - see https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3926

You're not wrong, and not the first to raise this https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/6061

https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/6867 This github issue might help. What worked for me was deleting the ~/.docker/buildx folder

There has been an outstanding bug [Docker Github] for years with the Docker team who do not seem to be able (or want to) address this - they have closed more than one issue but its still there.. The latest bug report is this one [Docker Github] but I honestly would not bother following it - no idea why they are not fixing this.

Have you checked if any of your other Docker containers become unresponsive at the same time? If so, it could be Docker. I had this issue on Docker for months until they finally came out with an update that works for me (Docker Desktop 4.19.0 for Mac).

It might have something to do with Docker? I was having issues a few months ago with all my containers becoming unreachable or very slow many times per day. I finally upgraded to Docker Desktop 4.19.0 (I’m on a Mac) and everything resolved. There were a few GitHub issues about it, too. You could try running a speedtest within different Docker containers and seeing if there’s a discrepancy. You could also check your RAM and CPU usage for different containers using something like Glances; it could lead to a clue.