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For the counter argument, see "Unikernels are unfit for production" January 22, 2016 - by Bryan Cantrill https://www.joyent.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-p

• toast0 8y ago
  I like this essay, but I think it's really pointing to a narrow space, rather than a lack of space. Bryan points out many weaknesses of unikernels, but assumes everybody needs multi-tenancy and the ability to spawn processes. And debugability is weak, but that probably depends on the application / environment you run. A lot of people want to run unikernels in a VM environment, but for me, it seems like the right application of unikernels is where you have one application that you want to expand to fill a single machine -- bare metal, boot to the application, save all the layers; there's no multi-tenancy, but if I'm running on hundreds/thousands of machines, I don't need multi-tenancy. Debugability is important, but lots of people run without a kernel debugger, so it might not be that important to everyone. If you want it, you'll have to build it, but DTrace and friends had to be built too -- and it's easier to build it a second time, since you know it's possible and what it should look like.
  • mato 8y ago
    And indeed, we have built some tooling for debugging, since we wanted it: https://github.com/Solo5/solo5/blob/master/docs/debugging.md https://github.com/Solo5/solo5/blob/master/docs/debugging.md. It wasn't that hard.
• pjmlp 8y ago
  I would take the opinion of someone that has a piece in the game of selling OSes with a grain of salt.