[felipehuici]

Well, I'm pretty sure this wasn't their intended purpose :). To some extent, they come from the observation that the hypervisor already provides strong isolation, and so having things like multiple memory address spaces, syscalls, etc just brings overhead. The second point is specialization: unlike a general purpose OS like Linux, each unikernel image can be tailored, at compile time, to meet the needs of a single (or a a few) target applications. As a result of all this, it is entirely possible to have unikernels that beat Linux in terms of boot times, memory consumption, and even throughput, as explained in the paper (they can even beat bare metal Linux).