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> you could imagine a unikernel that did support fork() and preemptive multitasking but took advantage of the fact that every process trusts every other one No
by _wmd 11y ago
> you could imagine a unikernel that did support fork() and preemptive multitasking but took advantage of the fact that every process trusts every other one
No need to imagine, this is exactly how Microsoft Singularity worked (it benefited from a language expressive enough to make that trust possible)
- geofft 11y agoYeah, Singularity is an amazing existence proof of lots of cool stuff in the unikernel-ish space (though, sadly, not quite of anything being suitable for production). Is Singularity a unikernel? More specifically, would the unikernel.org folks consider a production-ready kernel inspired by Singularity and targeting a hypervisor to be a unikernel? The 2013 paper's introduction section contains the sentence, "By targeting the commodity cloud with a library OS, unikernels can provide greater performance and improved security compared to Singularity [4]," so I'd imagine no. But I don't see any expansion on that point, so I suspect it was added to appease a reviewer.