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by weberc2 2523 days ago
You're moving the goal posts and invoking a straw man. No one is advocating for "pretending", and the anti-unikernel argument is that the inherent cost of unikernels in general is the loss of kernel debugging tools; not simply that "right now the unikernel debugging experience is subpar".
2 comments
convolvatron 2523 days ago
in general right now, running on a full-featured monolithic kernel, the debugging experience is really pretty bad. especially in the target environment of horizontal clustered services or lots of little micro services.

so I actually believe there is an opportunity here to focus on the important pieces (network messages, control flow tracing, memory footprints, etc) after ejecting a huge amount of irrelevant stuff

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imbriaco 2523 days ago
Totally agree, there's definitely an opportunity there if the surface area of what the system is doing gets smaller. The big difference today is that it's a lot easier to compose a debugging suite using additional tools on top of a traditional host-based runtime for now.

Definitely excited to see how the technology evolves over the next few years. It hasn't moved as fast as I'd have expected over the last 2-3 years but I'd love to see that accelerate.

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imbriaco 2523 days ago
No, I'm not moving any goal posts. I was reacting to the statement "Tooling/Perf/etc is not needed when running". I'm not sure where you'd get the idea that I'm anti-unikernel, I just wanted to not disregard that challenge since it does matter.
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weberc2 2523 days ago
I took care not to say that you were anti-unikernel; I was articulating the anti-unikernel position. I'm not sure what you actually meant, so I'll take you at your word that you weren't moving goal posts--in whatever case, the OP is correct that unikernels aren't inherently less debugable even though mature debug tooling may not exist for them today.
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