I agree with your point about 'supposedly' light weight. and its lot clear how much weight really costs the kernel's user.
but I'm pretty reluctant to agree that 'last years linux with a random bunch of patches' is the ultimate solution, or even the best solution available today.
the one really interesting thing that VMs give you is an abstract diver model. it might not be the absolute best or higher performance, but if a kernel or unikernel is designed only to be run in an VM environment, on a server, then the giant mass of buggy drivers just goes away. It may even be possible in some circumstances to run with just a VM network device and nothing else.
I personally think there is some fruitful work to be done around the kernel interface to admit better scheduling of i/o in highly thread-parallel environment.
But I have to imagine there are some radically improved security architectures for server-in-a-VM that doesn't involve a Linux userland, firewall, package manager, etc etc
but I'm pretty reluctant to agree that 'last years linux with a random bunch of patches' is the ultimate solution, or even the best solution available today.
the one really interesting thing that VMs give you is an abstract diver model. it might not be the absolute best or higher performance, but if a kernel or unikernel is designed only to be run in an VM environment, on a server, then the giant mass of buggy drivers just goes away. It may even be possible in some circumstances to run with just a VM network device and nothing else.
I personally think there is some fruitful work to be done around the kernel interface to admit better scheduling of i/o in highly thread-parallel environment.
But I have to imagine there are some radically improved security architectures for server-in-a-VM that doesn't involve a Linux userland, firewall, package manager, etc etc