Restoring Uniqueness in MicroVM Snapshots · HackerPapers discussions

Restoring Uniqueness in MicroVM Snapshots — mentioned by mjb

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 23:20:25 GMT

It's always great to see different ways folks are using Firecracker. Snapshot-and-restore is a particularly cool capability, especially if you solve the data movement problems (like these folks have). One challenge to clone-and-restore that they don't talk about here is making sure that clones don't behave too similarly (like returning the same cryptographic random numbers). We wrote a paper about that a while back (https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12892), and the Linux kernel community has been doing some great work in that area recently too.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Restoring Uniqueness in MicroVM Snapshots — mentioned by mjb

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 19:53:04 GMT

That's a good question! Accelerating cold starts with checkpoint and restore is a good idea. There's been a lot of research in academia around it, and some progress in industry too. It's one of those things, though, that works really well for specific use-cases or at small scale, but take a lot of work to generalize and scale up. For example, one challenge is making sure that random number generators (RNGs) don't ever return the same values ever after cloning (because that completely breaks GCM mode, for example). More details here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12892 As for CRIU specifically…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.