Top all-time · #5034
Daniel P. Berrangé
Personal blog · berrange.com/postssystemsprogramming
Daniel P. Berrangé's personal blog at berrange.com covers systems and programming. Since 2011, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Versioning in the libvirt library”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Daniel Berrangé's posts on Linux virtualization and containers, including libvirt's backward compatibility, QEMU disk images, application sandboxing and Fedora installs. One commenter calls the libvirt versioning post a great overview.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Versioning in the libvirt library2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-14
What Hacker News says?
> I am intimately familiar with eWLM and I think it's quite unfair to call it containers. I feel like you're strawmanning me, here. I specifically avoided calling WLM "containers." I said they're building blocks that, combined with MAC-style service isolation (which also existed on 1980s mainframes), allow containerized isolation of consolidated services on a single OS image. It also wouldn't be fair to directly cal…
Comment linking /posts/2013/05/13/a-new-configurable..
on “Containers, Not Virtual Machines, Are the Future Cloud”Submitted Libvirt: Adoption of GLib library to replace GNULIB and home grown code as a story · 79 points
HN discussion> Workload Manager (WLM) [1] has been a part of IBM z/OS since before it was even called z/OS. WLM implemented something like cgroups scheduling, in that existing utilization samples feed into future scheduling to ensure responsiveness and fair access to resources under contention. I am intimately familiar with eWLM and I think it's quite unfair to call it containers. > It's your turn to provide some citations. You…
Comment linking /posts/2013/05/13/a-new-configurable-cgroups-layout-for-libvirt-with-qemu-kvm-lxc/
on “Containers, Not Virtual Machines, Are the Future Cloud”Submitted Bye Bye BIOS: a tool for when you need to warn users the VM image is EFI only as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLibvirt is not needed to use KVM but the purpose has been to provide stability (and an abstraction as you mentioned) over the changes QEMU has had in various releases. Update: Here's a blog related to your very question that was written just a few days ago: http://berrange.com/posts/2011/06/07/what-benefits-does-libv...
Comment linking /posts/2011/06/07/what-benefits-does-libvirt-offer-to-developers-targetting-qemukvm/
on “VMWare Screw Customers”Submitted New libvirt project Go language bindings as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOr Fedora: https://www.berrange.com/posts/2012/11/30/installing-fedora-... Or countless other Linux distros.
Comment linking /posts/2012/11/30/installing-fedora-17-arm-on-a-samsung-google-chromebook/
on “Chromebook: Ubuntu alongside stock Chrome OS”Submitted Analysis of techniques for ensuring migration completion with KVM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDLL hell is mostly an issue of incompatible CRTs (aka libc in Unix parlance) on Windows. Historically (until circa 2015) Windows programs (particularly those compiled with Visual Studio) often loaded a multiplicity of incompatible CRTs. It was often the case that malloc'd memory from one DLL could not be free'd from another DLL because each linked to a different CRT. Compounding matters, applications would often glo…
Comment linking /posts/2011/01/13/versioning-in-the-libvirt-library/
on “Fully static, unprivileged, self-contained, containers as executable binaries”Submitted Versioning in the libvirt library as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYour web browser is designed to sandbox and safely run code. Your shell isn't. (People are working on it though, see for example http://berrange.com/posts/2012/01/17/building-application-sa... )
Comment linking /posts/2012/01/17/building-application-sandboxes-with-libvirt-lxc-kvm/
on “Show HN: ASCII Animals in Your Terminal”Submitted Building application sandboxes with libvirt, LXC & KVM as a story · 2 points
HN discussionglibc has really good backward compatibility. But, yeah, few other libraries even bother, let alone make a serious attempt at this. One of the major exceptions is libvirt, which promised 100% backward compatibility from day 1. Here's a great overview (2011) of how they accomplish that: https://www.berrange.com/posts/2011/01/13/versioning-in-the-... Note that it wasn't until GCC 10 (2020) that you could implement ELF…
Comment linking /posts/2011/01/13/versioning-in-the-libvirt-library/
on “Linux Sucks 2020 [video]”Submitted The libvirt & virtualization tools software development platform as a story · 2 points
HN discussion1. "Testing: Termux, vmtest, and QEMU": https://gist.github.com/NoteAfterNote/7614b0137ac6959e3bba35... (gist.github.com/NoteAfterNote/7614b0137ac6959e3bba35df66eaa75a) 2. "The surprisingly complicated world of disk image sizes": https://www.berrange.com/posts/2017/02/10/the-surprisingly-c... (www.berrange.com/posts/2017/02/10/the-surprisingly-complicated-world-of-disk-image-sizes/)
Comment linking /posts/2017/02/10/the-surprisingly-complicated-world-of-disk-image-sizes/
on “An Overview of QEMU Storage Features (2020)”Submitted Libvirt: Split of the Monolithic Libvirtd Daemon as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIndeed ... http://berrange.com/posts/2011/06/22/firefox-form-data-histo...
Comment linking /posts/2011/06/22/firefox-form-data-history-a-goldmine-of-unencrypted-sensitive-personal-data/
on “Poll: What database does your company use?”Submitted Libvirt: Abort() when seeing ENOMEM errors as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building application sandboxes with libvirt, LXC & KVM as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The pain of dealing with passwords for online services as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
