HyphaJailrun's built-in mesh network opens up some truly fantastic possibilities. Like spinning up a private Matrix server on your laptop, accessible to your peers worldwide. No domain or cloud, just a few simple configs.
Ian Wagner@hyphatech Ok, I'm positively fascinated by Jailrun! I can't beleive I didn't hear about this project sooner TBH. It looks super ergonomic from the docs so far and the fact that I could run it on macOS too is a plus for sharing reproducible environments! Wow!
But one thing in the docs has me super confused: you say that on FreeBSD systems, the QEMU setup is hardware accelerated by TCG on FreeBSD. I am not a QEMU expert but my read is that TCG is (slow, not hw accelerated) software emulation.
@hyphatech digging deeper, it sounds like QEMU itself uses the terminology “accelerator” which adds to the confusion 😅 But as far as I can tell, TCG is in fact not hardware accelerated. Which leaves things in what looks like a strange position to me as FreeBSD is actually not a good host for Jailrun 🧐
Am i misunderstanding things?
@ianthetechie Strictly speaking, you’re right about TCG. Jailrun started as a PoC to bring jails to macOS, and I personally use it instead of Colima + Docker Compose for my local development needs. I later added Linux support because I also use Fedora and wanted the same environment there. FreeBSD as a host has its own use cases, Jailrun runs everything in QEMU, fully isolated from the base system. Better wording would be “with a fallback to TCG”. Does that address your concern?
@hyphatech that’s so cool! I’ve been an on and off FreeBSD user since the early ‘00s, but daily drive a Mac for various reasons so your path feels similar haha. I played around with it yesterday and this is so cool! I hope this gets more Mac people to try and develop for FreeBSD.
Yeah that clarification text sounds good. It was just initially really confusing 😅
@ianthetechie Our current top priority is “remote targets” support, including FreeBSD as a native host. QEMU will soon be just one of several supported targets, with Jailrun able to provision and orchestrate host, QEMU, bhyve, and remote setups the same way, with the same ergonomics. You’ll even be able to “move” or “join” jails between them, starting locally and moving to remote when needed. Keep an eye on upcoming updates.
@hyphatech cool! Yeah I definitely understand wanting to have a VM wrapper for each “application.” I was also going to suggest bhyve as an option.
The remote target support and moving hails is also super interesting! Seems like that would also fit nicely with the mesh networking you’ve already built.