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I read somewhere (?) that firecracker has poorer io performance than KVM/qemu. Is that still the case, or has it been fixed?

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You can read about its IO performance against QEMU in their NSDI paper (table 8,9): https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20-paper-agache.pdf

Even though the startup times are fast, the IO performance is poor compared to native. This is primarily because of IO emulation. We've been working on a new hypervisor that can directly run isolated containers (no VMs). Email me if you are interested in learning more.

Hi can you post more info on this new hypervisor publicly? Who's involved?

We will post more publicly soon.

I am not so sure about that. Amazon uses Firecracker because of its performance and how lightweight it is. Qemu VMs used to be heavier and I think Qemu devs started a project to have a lightweight version like Firecracker recently.

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