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What this is ignoring is that the hypervisor already is a full operating system. If the linux people finally make isolation secure I see no future for unikernel

What this is ignoring is that the hypervisor already is a full operating system. If the linux people finally make isolation secure I see no future for unikernels.

mwcampbell 11y ago
Or you could use LX-branded zones on Illumos, as Joyent's Triton does. Too bad Joyent's public cloud isn't competitive with the others on price. Edit: So as long as hardware virtualization is dominant in public clouds, a unikernel is a nice optimization for applications that only require a single process.
avsm 11y ago
> If the linux people finally make isolation secure I see no future for unikernels. You're forgetting that unikernels are a library OS and not tied to a particular hypervisor at all. MirageOS code can currently be compiled to target: - the Xen hypervisor via MiniOS, with Mirage-supplied implementations of XenStore/device drivers/TCPIP - bare metal and the KVM hypervisor via Rump Kernel - UNIX binaries via tuntap (which work great with Linux containers). And future backends -- the MirageOS frontend just needs to swap out and link in the right libraries for the desired platform. And even when Linux containers get a complete isolation story, if you build applications as unikernels you can also choose to isolate kernel components that will never be covered by the current Linux container architecture (such as the TCP/IP stack).
mtgx 11y ago
A hypervisor has a much smaller attack target than a full blown OS. The kernel alone of a mainstream OS can be an order of magnitude larger than a hypervisor. Xen, for instance, has fewer than 150,000 lines of code. The Linux kernel has about 15 million. A full Linux distro probably has around 200-300 million. So a full OS has about two orders of magnitude (100x) more potential for exploits.
- mwcampbell 11y ago
  Is there any Xen-based public cloud that's not running a full conventional OS kernel (Linux or otherwise) in dom0? If not, then the theoretical smaller TCB of Xen doesn't matter in practice. And of course, some major public clouds use KVM, so they're effectively using a full Linux kernel as the hypervisor.
- legulere 11y ago
  Most of that 15 million lines will be dead code for your computer. There's architecture-specific code that won't even get compiled under any circumstances. But most of the 15 million lines is drivers, of which the fewest will run on your computer because you don't have those drivers. You can't just take the lines of code as a comparison. You have to look how much code is actually exposed to potential attackers.

What this is ignoring is that the hypervisor already is a full operating system. If the linux people finally make isolation secure I see no future for unikernels.

mwcampbell 11y ago

Or you could use LX-branded zones on Illumos, as Joyent's Triton does. Too bad Joyent's public cloud isn't competitive with the others on price. Edit: So as long as hardware virtualization is dominant in public clouds, a unikernel is a nice optimization for applications that only require a single process.

avsm 11y ago

> If the linux people finally make isolation secure I see no future for unikernels. You're forgetting that unikernels are a library OS and not tied to a particular hypervisor at all. MirageOS code can currently be compiled to target: - the Xen hypervisor via MiniOS, with Mirage-supplied implementations of XenStore/device drivers/TCPIP - bare metal and the KVM hypervisor via Rump Kernel - UNIX binaries via tuntap (which work great with Linux containers). And future backends -- the MirageOS frontend just needs to swap out and link in the right libraries for the desired platform. And even when Linux containers get a complete isolation story, if you build applications as unikernels you can also choose to isolate kernel components that will never be covered by the current Linux container architecture (such as the TCP/IP stack).

mtgx 11y ago

A hypervisor has a much smaller attack target than a full blown OS. The kernel alone of a mainstream OS can be an order of magnitude larger than a hypervisor. Xen, for instance, has fewer than 150,000 lines of code. The Linux kernel has about 15 million. A full Linux distro probably has around 200-300 million. So a full OS has about two orders of magnitude (100x) more potential for exploits.

mwcampbell 11y ago
Is there any Xen-based public cloud that's not running a full conventional OS kernel (Linux or otherwise) in dom0? If not, then the theoretical smaller TCB of Xen doesn't matter in practice. And of course, some major public clouds use KVM, so they're effectively using a full Linux kernel as the hypervisor.
legulere 11y ago
Most of that 15 million lines will be dead code for your computer. There's architecture-specific code that won't even get compiled under any circumstances. But most of the 15 million lines is drivers, of which the fewest will run on your computer because you don't have those drivers. You can't just take the lines of code as a comparison. You have to look how much code is actually exposed to potential attackers.