[1] https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns
[2] https://blog.podman.io/2024/03/podman-5-0-breaking-changes-i...
[3] https://passt.top/passt/about/#pasta-pack-a-subtle-tap-abstr...
SLIRP was useful when you had a dial up shell, and they wouldn't give you slip or ppp; or it would cost extra. SLIRP is just a userspace program that uses the socket apis, so as long as you could run your own programs and make connections to arbitrary destinations, you could make a dial script to connect your computer up like you had a real ppp account. No incomming connections though (afaik), so you weren't really a peer on the internet, a foreshadowing of ubiquitous NAT/CGNAT perhaps.
That's a mistake indeed; "popularised by" might have been better. Before my beloved Palmpilot arrived one Christmas, I was only using SLIRP to ninja in Netscape and MUD sessions onto a dialup connection which wasn't a very mainstream use.
There was another component that we didn't have room to cover in the article that has been very stable (for filesystem sharing between the container and the host) that has been endlessly criticised for being slow, but has never corrupted anyone's data! It's interesting that many users preferred potential-dataloss-but-speed using asynchronous IO, but only on desktop environments. I think Docker did the right thing by erring on the side of safety by default.
Sir, this is a hacker news.