[nathankunicki]

Not strictly, no. While currently they only support the "hardware" in KVM/QEMU/VirtualBox, there's nothing stopping anyone implementing drivers for whatever hardware they want to run on, even bare metal.

This probably means integrating whatever Ethernet adapter you have, and some way of sending/receiving stdio, probably over serial or something.

Sideline: I'm particularly intrigued by the idea of implementing drivers for AWS EC2, so you can run this as your AMI.

[uxcn]

> Not strictly, no. While currently they only support the "hardware" in KVM/QEMU/VirtualBox, there's nothing stopping anyone implementing drivers for whatever hardware they want to run on, even bare metal.

Exokernels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel) essentially implement this. Hardware has been adding more support for virtualization though, so I imagine unikernels are better able to take advantage of things like virtualized page tables, virtualized io-mmu, etc...

I'd be curious to see benchmarks for something generally IO bound like PostgreSQL or HyperTable. IO scheduling isn't trivial, so it might give a good idea of what some of the trade-offs might be.

[cbsmith]

> I'm particularly intrigued by the idea of implementing drivers for AWS EC2, so you can run this as your AMI.

Yup. Kind of like a skimpy version of OSv.

[bonzini]

Yeah, how does this compare to OSv?

[cbsmith]

The kernel is way, way smaller, and has basically no OS services. OSv is more like BSD-lite.