Daily Archives: 2024-02-13

Article note: Are... are they trying to speedrun killing their acquired company? To out-Oracle Oracle? They've fucked with the very large customers. They've fucked with the small customers. They've fucked with the hobbyists. Hopefully the Xen and KVM tooling will benefit from the exodus.

Enlarge (credit: VMware)

Since Broadcom's $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company's personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.

This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.

ESXi is what is known as a "bare-metal hypervisor," lightweight software that runs directly on hardware without requiring a separate operating system layer in between. ESXi allows you to split a PC's physical resources (CPUs and CPU cores, RAM, storage, networking components, and so on) among multiple virtual machines. ESXi also supports passthrough for PCI, SATA, and USB accessories, allowing guest operating systems direct access to components like graphics cards and hard drives.

Article note: It's a great premise for an article but this one is ...bad. Unix was apparently "developed on the PDP-10/11" - The PDP-10 was an unrelated 36-bit mainframe, most of early Unix happened on a PDP-11 - a 16-bit minicomputer, and the very beginnings of Unix were on an extra shitty 18-bit PDP-7 minicomputer. That was apparently the beginning of writing OSes in high level languages - Burroughs says Hi with MCP written in ESPOL and later NEWP a decade earlier. It kind of skips all the interesting C porting stuff - which influenced architectures in fascinating ways - and especially all the early microcomputer C implementations.