[billti]

Nice! Thanks for the link. As I've been playing around building a toy OS for my Raspberry Pi and learning more about hardware virtualization, I was thinking exactly along these lines, i.e. instead of virtualizing an full OS, virtualizing a minimal image with just a network driver and a flat address space per process/app seems like it would have benefits (i.e. no virtual memory mapping or privilege ring transitions eating cycles). I wasn't aware it was already an area that had much research behind it.

From the article:

> For example, off-the-shelf applications such as nginx, SQLite, and Redis running over a unikernel have shown a 1.7x-2.7x performance improvement

That's a pretty healthy boost. Are there any significant efforts close to general use anyone is aware of in this space? (Or good reasons why it's a totally terrible idea and hasn't gone anywhere!)

[donavanm]

Not first hand experience, but I was adjacent to a team that tried this approach. In short its playing on hard mode. Dev experience and tools, deployment chains, testing, etc are all possible but nowhere near your awesome userspace toolchains. Be prepared for lots of DIY action like building your own network or file io. The team also wasnt able to quite get down to the superfast ms start times and MB images that we were going for.

My memory is fuzzy but ISTR that the people behind seastar/osv moved on to an approach closer to what mrkurt is emphasizing with “container” composition plus firecracker for the environment.