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Comment by codex | Hacker News Reader

Does the hypervisor use multiple communicating CPUs? If so, how do the races inherent in concurrency not destroy the determinism? Is this a single CPU/thread/fiber hypervisor?

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Each container has a single process. Each Individual part is deterministic, so the entire system is composable deterministically.

That's not true if the processes communicate, or contain communicating threads. In one run, an input queue looks like {A, B}. In another, {B, A}. The source of the non-determinism is just entropy bubbling up from the hardware.

EDIT: using completely synchronous I/O (mentioned below) is a very clever solution, but it requires a process to know its inputs ahead of time. This may also cause cluster scalability issues, as now each "round" of inputs is gated by the slowest of the source processes.

Assuming A and B are produced from separate input processes, they have to be submitted to a "gather" process that takes both of them. If the "gather" process uses select() or non-blocking I/O -- says basically "read from A or B, whichever becomes available first" -- you'll get them gathered in a nondeterminstic order. OTOH if the "gather" process uses synchronous blocking I/O -- "Read one message from A, then read one message from B" -- then you always get (A, B) order.

If the framework you're using requires all I/O to be synchronous, and there's no way for a program to tell time or tell when an action would cause a delay, then there's no way for nondeterminism to develop based on timing.

I don't have any idea if ZeroVM is like this, and a framework that only allows synchronous I/O would have its own problems (basically you'd have to worry a lot about deadlock).

EDIT: To expand on this, you might still be able to do a lot even if cyclic interprocess data flows are forbidden. This is particularly true of database style applications, which are where ZeroVM originated.

All reads from other sessions are blocking. There is no input queue, zerovm processes read and write directly to each other. This way determinism can be preserved even for clusters.

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