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Unikernels: the rise of the virtual library OS

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  Unikernels: the rise of the virtual library OS RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-07-13 01:25 +0000

#4009 — Unikernels: the rise of the virtual library OS

From the «easy up, easy down» department:
Title: Unikernels: rise of the virtual-library operating system
Author: zafiro17@pipedot.org
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 18:24:51 -0400
Link: http://pipedot.org/story/2014-07-12/unikernels-rise-of-the-virtuallibrary-operating-system

Mssrs. Anil Madhavapeddy and David J. Scott over at the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) ask: What if all layers in a virtual appliance were
compiled within the same safe, high-level language framework?[1] Good
question, and I suspect we'll find out soon enough, because the trend in
virtualization seems to be leading us in this direction.

While operating-system virtualization is undeniably useful, it adds yet
another layer to an already highly layered software stack now including:
support for old physical protocols (e.g., disk standards developed in the
1980s, such as IDE); irrelevant optimizations (e.g., disk elevator
algorithms on SSD drives); backward-compatible interfaces (e.g., POSIX);
user-space processes and threads (in addition to VMs on a hypervisor); and
managed-code runtimes (e.g., OCaml, .NET, or Java). All of these layers sit
beneath the application code. Are we really doomed to adding new layers of
indirection and abstraction every few years, leaving future generations of
programmers to become virtual archaeologists as they dig through hundreds
of layers of software emulation to debug even the simplest applications?

This project intends to reduce the different layers of software and operating
system to simple-API systems that can be installed and used like virtual
appliances, perhaps [ed. note: this is my analogy, not the author's] the way
Busybox reduces the POSIX standard to a simpler and smaller binary executable[2]
.

Links:
[1]: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628 (link)
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybox (link)

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