Comment on Looking to move on from Unraid, need suggestions.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month agoSometimes you need a VM. They’re not overkill, just useful for different things.
Examples; Running Windows, Running OSX, Passing through hardware to use isolated from the host (PCIe devices, USB, etc), Linux guests where you need a full kernel and permissions (for example to run Docker without issues caused by being nested inside a container).
VMs don’t really have much more overhead than a container in most use cases too. For example a VM with debian installed uses about 30MB of RAM.
fishpen0@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I was replying specifically in the context of the original question. Unraid already has their services tooling built out over containers so this person already is probably using containerized versions of the arr services. It would be overkill to go build vms for these services specifically for what you said. They don’t need to be windows or osx, they don’t need hardware passthrough, they don’t need a full kernel.
That aside. You absolutely can run containers as a full isolated kernel and directly map hardware to them. CGroups absolutely allows for those use cases. You may not be using docker anymore but docker is more of a crutch for beginners who probably dont need those things.
One example of this in the real world are COS and Bottlerocket which are literally distributions of Linux where even core is components are individually running under different containers via cgroups. COS runs on every GKE cluster in the world and bottlerocket on most EKS clusters.