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I was personally an unikernel conference in Beijing in May. Baidu, Alibaba, VMWare, ARM and many other multi-billion dollar companies were talking about how the

by eyberg 8y ago

I was personally an unikernel conference in Beijing in May. Baidu, Alibaba, VMWare, ARM and many other multi-billion dollar companies were talking about how they are rolling in support into things like their serverless infrastructure. Also - there are production deployments out there.

TheRealPomax 8y ago
VM support for unikernels is literally a prerequisite for unikernel uptake, so that's hardly surprising, but coming from academia: if a highly niche market using a thing still keeps it a mostly academic exercise, and this article does not contain anything that talks about how it has finally escaped the "mostly interesting to academics, and that handful of people who use it in their highly specialized or possibly instead just plain old 'someone once set it up and it's too critical to change now' systems".
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Microsoft used their unikernel research (Drawbridge) to bring SQL Server into Linux. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-an-old-drawbridge-helped-microsoft-bring-sql-server-to-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-a... It is also how they kind of implement secure kernel in the recent versions of Windows 10.
ksec 8y ago
>Baidu, Alibaba, VMWare, ARM So in the server less future, Linux and FreeBSD will no longer be at the heart of these "Functions"? But instead they all migrate to Unikernel? At the scale they are operating I am pretty sure it make sense, if it brings 5 - 10% performance improvement along with other benefits. Not sure if I like the way things are moving in that direction though.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  In a way, POSIX is the C language runtime, and other languages have their own runtimes as well, so at the limit whatever kernel your application is running one doesn't matter at all. Then there are those few use cases where one actually needs to dive into OS specific syscalls or Assembly. So for a large class of applications it doesn't matter if the application is running bare metal, on a VM, container or plain old OS process.
mato 8y ago
A unikernel conference? I didn't know there was such a thing.
- perbu 8y ago
  No, we didn't see you there. :-) It was a more of a workshop in relation to ICS2018.

by eyberg 8y ago

TheRealPomax 8y ago

VM support for unikernels is literally a prerequisite for unikernel uptake, so that's hardly surprising, but coming from academia: if a highly niche market using a thing still keeps it a mostly academic exercise, and this article does not contain anything that talks about how it has finally escaped the "mostly interesting to academics, and that handful of people who use it in their highly specialized or possibly instead just plain old 'someone once set it up and it's too critical to change now' systems".

pjmlp 8y ago
Microsoft used their unikernel research (Drawbridge) to bring SQL Server into Linux. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-an-old-drawbridge-helped-microsoft-bring-sql-server-to-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-a... It is also how they kind of implement secure kernel in the recent versions of Windows 10.

ksec 8y ago

>Baidu, Alibaba, VMWare, ARM So in the server less future, Linux and FreeBSD will no longer be at the heart of these "Functions"? But instead they all migrate to Unikernel? At the scale they are operating I am pretty sure it make sense, if it brings 5 - 10% performance improvement along with other benefits. Not sure if I like the way things are moving in that direction though.

pjmlp 8y ago
In a way, POSIX is the C language runtime, and other languages have their own runtimes as well, so at the limit whatever kernel your application is running one doesn't matter at all. Then there are those few use cases where one actually needs to dive into OS specific syscalls or Assembly. So for a large class of applications it doesn't matter if the application is running bare metal, on a VM, container or plain old OS process.

mato 8y ago

A unikernel conference? I didn't know there was such a thing.

perbu 8y ago
No, we didn't see you there. :-) It was a more of a workshop in relation to ICS2018.