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Except you don't get rid of the kernel, they're not called unikernels for nothing I presume. Surely, you should be saying: why do you need all of a kernel and
by igravious 11y ago
Except you don't get rid of the kernel, they're not called unikernels for nothing I presume.
Surely, you should be saying: why do you need all of a kernel and hypervisor and an app when you could subsume the app into the kernel and just run the hypervisor and the kernelized app (or single-appified kernel, call it what you want).
I'm having a hard time seeing the benefits given the obvious increase in complexity.
What features of a full-fat OS do unikernels retain? If the answer is very little because hypervisors provide all the hardware access then it would be fair to say that hypervisor has become the OS and the traditional kernel (a Linux one in this case I presume) has become virtually * ahem * redundant.
- geon 11y ago> hypervisor has become the OS A hypervisor is an OS. A rose by any other name.
- lmm 11y ago> I'm having a hard time seeing the benefits given the obvious increase in complexity. What? It's simpler. You remove all the overhead of separating the kernel and app. And that of running a full-featured multiuser, multiprocess kernel for the sake of a single app. > What features of a full-fat OS do unikernels retain? If the answer is very little because hypervisors provide all the hardware access then it would be fair to say that hypervisor has become the OS and the traditional kernel (a Linux one in this case I presume) has become virtually * ahem * redundant. Yes, that's entirely fair.
- lilred 11y ago>hypervisor has become the OS and the traditional kernel (a Linux one in this case I presume) has become virtually * ahem * redundant. That's the point of unikernels right there :)