8 ms·

It is hard to understand the benefit of a unikernel versus a very stripped down Linux kernel. If any people from the mentioned project are here, I'd love to he

• eximius 9y ago
  There may be some, but even if there isn't, some benefit could be the ease in which you strip it down.
• lkurusa 9y ago
  There's a lot of literature that point towards more application-specific optimization in the lowest levels of the operating system, for example the Exokernel papers are an early example of this. More recently, you may want to have a look at the the MirageOS paper(s).
• weberc2 9y ago
  Here's my bit of uninformed speculation: presumably a lot more potential for aggressive optimizations. It's unlikely that you can make Linux as bare-bones as you could a unikernel. Besides, for all intents and purposes, you can't run Linux through a whole-program optimizer along with your application (not sure if this is even a worthwhile objective). I would also think that communicating between the application and the "kernel" via function calls instead of system calls would yield some non-negligible performance gains as well.