I've heard this quite a few times. There is really nothing fundamental in keeping you from having the same or better observability in a Unikernel as opposed to

I've heard this quite a few times. There is really nothing fundamental in keeping you from having the same or better observability in a Unikernel as opposed to a traditional POSIX kernel. A couple of examples. The Gnu Debugger (gdb) supports connecting to qemu-backed virtual machines, so you have the ability to everything that gdb can on a unikernel as well, given the unikernel is implemented in something gdb groks. In addition we've created a trace layer, similar to strace that allows you to run strace inside the vm itself. Since the POSIX libs are just libs wrapping them inside something like strace is rather trivial. Also the unikernels have a huge advantage of having everything in the same memory space, meaning that you can observe the application and operating system at the same time. High level languages like Python or Node.js can typically have debuggers loaded dynamically and as such would be able to offer full debuggability without having to do tricks with gdb. All this doesn't have to induce bloat. The socalled bloat in POSIX systems is mostly caused by the security barriers raised by a design that forces strict separation between unprivileged and privileged access to the system. In addition a POSIX kernel will typically be built to support "everything" that a user might need whereas a unikernel can take a build-time decision on what to include into the OS.