Virtual-Machines on Unnamed Website

NiXVM

Anthony Wang — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:07:33 -0400

I’ve been playing around with Nix and NixOS for the past week and honestly, I don’t really like NixOS. But, now I dislike other OSes even more since I finally understand what they’re all missing compared to NixOS!

Anyways, as you might know, this site is hosted on SIPB’s XVM service and uses Arch Linux. Since NixOS totally ruined Arch and every other Linux distro for me, I decided to switch the server for this site to using NixOS instead.

Inessential XVM

Anthony Wang — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:45:43 -0500

Like free stuff? If you’re an MIT student, did you know you can get a free virtual machine, courtesy of SIPB’s XVM project? (And if you’re not an MIT student, well sorry, this guide probably won’t be very useful then.) That’s right, your own tiny VM, for free! Mandatory disclaimer: the VMs are indeed… very tiny, with only one core and 512 MiB of RAM, and XVM has some quirks. But you can still do a lot of cool stuff with it!

Fun with QEMU/KVM! - The Sequel

Anthony Wang — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As far as I know, there aren’t any 255 core processors on the market. Yet. But that doesn’t stop us from making a virtual machine using QEMU/KVM and SMP with an absurd number of processors, as shown above.

Why 255? Well, that’s the limit apparently. Yeah, it sucks. I wish it was higher too. But if you’re running more cores than the number of physical cores available on your computer, there’s no benefit and you’ll probably see worse performance. No one even has that many physical cores to begin with, so there’s no incentive for QEMU/KVM to support even more cores. I’m pretty sure that only the first 64 cores are KVM acclerated, which adds another reason why you shouldn’t do this. (virt-manager also warns you from against a VM more cores than you actually have. It’s a bad idea.)