Canonical Releases Multipass 0.7 With VirtualBox Windows/macOS Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Releases Multipass 0.7 With VirtualBox Windows/macOS Support

One of the projects in development the past two years that's been less trumpeted by Ubuntu maker Canonical has been Multipass, but this utility has reached a new milestone today with new capabilities...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Multipass-0.7-Beta

[etam]

Sounds a lot like Vagrant.

[Britoid]

Smells a lot like Ubuntu's NIH syndrome is here to stay.

[Guest]

I can't think of any good use for this. There are other more established and versatile solutions out there (docker, vagrant). There's also virtualization software that they support already. This just sounds like a waste of time.

[ThoreauHD]

They keep picking up redundant tech(snaps/and above) and not following through on vertical/profitable tech(like phones/tablets). Why guys.. why do you do these things.

[milkylainen]

Multipass. Nuff said.

[edwaleni]

They keep picking up redundant tech(snaps/and above) and not following through on vertical/profitable tech(like phones/tablets). Why guys.. why do you do these things.

They already tried. No money there.

Right now a ton of dough is flowing towards container management in the enterprise.

Also you have to remember that sometimes projects are picked up, tried, expanded or tweaked to get internal expertise as part of a larger or peripheral effort.

A Red Hat vision for some functionality type may not be the same as Canonical's, so they let the devs take a run at it.

[jacob]

I can't think of any good use for this. There are other more established and versatile solutions out there (docker, vagrant). There's also virtualization software that they support already. This just sounds like a waste of time.

If you can't think of any use for this, all it means is that you indeed can't think of it. Multipass is not intended as a deployment platform or as an orchestrated environment to support application development life cycles. It's absolutely not similar to docker, vagrant or any such technology. Multipass is designed to be a simple local tool to spin an Ubuntu VM for distro and kernel development or testing. In terms of use scenarios it's basically a kind of "chroot", but one which gives you a full stack down to the kernel, not just the filesystem root. It's used among others by snapcraft to build snap packages in a standardised Ubuntu environment running on an actual Ubuntu kernel, even when the underlying OS is something else (it can even be MacOS).

[Britoid]

Multipass is designed to be a simple local tool to spin an Ubuntu VM for distro and kernel development or testing. In terms of use scenarios it's basically a kind of "chroot", but one which gives you a full stack down to the kernel, not just the filesystem root. It's used among others by snapcraft to build snap packages in a standardised Ubuntu environment running on an actual Ubuntu kernel, even when the underlying OS is something else (it can even be MacOS).

To be honest, Vagrant does do that.

[jacob]

To be honest, Vagrant does do that.

For sure, just like in theory KVM or Vmware can be used for that too. You can also set up a build farm and a Jenkins server to try to run "hello world". The advantage of multipass is that to use it, all you have to do is:

snap install multipass

that's it. Nothing to configure, nothing to set up, nothing to administer, nothing to maintain. It will run an Ubuntu VM for you when you want with a single command, nothing less and especially nothing more.