[talex5]

Mirage can be configured to write trace data to a ring buffer shared with another VM, where you can run a visualisation tool to explore it. For an example, see:

https://mirage.io/wiki/profiling

Of course, having such a small (and legacy-free) OS makes debugging vastly easier in the first place.

[hodgesrm]

You are right about simplification and I considered that point. Yet the fact that each application is developed on a general purpose platform, then compiled down to a unique production OS image seems to open up a lot of new corner cases involving long tail bugs. We had a similar phase in during the Java transition to JIT in the late 1990s, though that's obviously an antithetical technology approach. Either way you get a lot of ugly crashes.

The key for industrial use is extremely robust dev and management tools. Unikernels are thought-provoking but on their own do not appear to be anywhere near enough to solve the problem they are taking on.