I’d be very interested in it if it started to approach VM style isolation without needing KVM access (or qemu).

But I’m not sure if that is really possible.

The use case I’m thinking about is a sandbox exec isolation on an HPC cluster without Docker. I know singularity/apptainer exist, but I’m always looking for something that could make that environment more flexible. It is a tight security environment, so we are always limited in what we can do.

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eddythompson80 2 days ago | parent [-]

It all becomes a religion to some people. hypervisor escapes are a thing. People always point to Vt-x or AMD-V as having stood the test of time, and that might be true, but the software layer on top certainly hasn’t. Yet you will have “security professionals” tell you that you can’t trust anything beyond a hypervisor. Or they might tell you that a user space kernel is just as secure. They might tell you KVM is a no-go because of bad Type1/Type2 hybrid architecture compared to Xen or HyperV Type1. All have had their fair share of vulnerabilities over the years. All less than Linux process isolation, but still.

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bayindirh 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I really like Virtualization to keep things separate, but I never thought of it as an impenetrable wall. For example, I'd not trust an AI agent even inside a VM in my own system.

OTOH, running a messy environment with rollback support is much easier with a VM than a container.

Containers are fun for packing messy executables into their own environment and run them now and then, though.

	▲	eddythompson80 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don’t find VMs to be that much easier to manage (in terms of rollback) than containers. The opposite in fact. VMs are these giant blobs that can be stateful or stateless or a mix of both. While containers have clear separation between the state (stored on volumes or in an external store like a db) and the “application” stored in immutable tags or digests. Rolling back is easy as long as you understand where the state, if any, is which is actually the hard part of any application. At least with containers you have all of them stored in a well defined registry, while with VMs you would be rolling your own VM snapshot storage system. Not super complicated to do in the grand scheme of things, but it’s another thing you need to get right. But VMs/applications that can rollback would be just as easy (if not easier) to rollback with containers.
	▲	imtringued 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>I really like Virtualization to keep things separate, but I never thought of it as an impenetrable wall. For example, I'd not trust an AI agent even inside a VM in my own system. Remember the submission about how Auto Review is safe? Their standard of safe is that it will take a playwright dependency of another project in your home directory and add playwright based tests to your current project that hasn't declared playwright as a dependency. Amazing. The issue literally isn't even about a hypothetical security argument anymore. Your sandbox is now a policy that tells the agent what it is allowed to do or not.

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yjftsjthsd-h 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> All less than Linux process isolation, but still.

.... Right. Exactly. Everything has some vulnerabilities, but if an attacker has to use a relatively rare VM escape, that's a huge win.