5 ms·
I'd like to point out that there is a unikernel called IBM's TPF which is something everybody is interacting with daily. It's used in the payment card network b
by kev009 8y ago
I'd like to point out that there is a unikernel called IBM's TPF which is something everybody is interacting with daily. It's used in the payment card network by Visa, as well as the airline and hotel industry for reservations. This is typically run under the hypervisors z/VM or PRSM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...
A few years ago someone trying to spin container technology did a lot of damage to other attempts at unikernels with marketing dogma, not reality. Claims of non-debugability and other FUD. It's long been standard operating procedure to trace and debug systems from outside the system's view. This is how people do bringup of new chips as well as OS ports. On hardware there is usually a dedicated debug and trace facility as part of the CPU or board support package or a firmware monitor. In a virtualized environment like a unikernel this is way easier because you can run code above the guest's ring 0 supervisor privilege against its RAM/pagetable root. Modern systems like POWER even allow debugging from the BMC, with a plan to allow full gdb sessions over that out of band interface https://github.com/open-power/pdbg https://github.com/open-power/pdbg.
There's nothing implicitly wrong with unikernels, or other systems software ideas like microkernels, just because they are less popular technology at the moment. I'd encourage people to continue exploring this space.
- im_down_w_otp 8y agoThat FUD was from Bryan Cantrill (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10953766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10953766) making aggressively resolute, but also easily falsifiable claims about the production-worthiness of unikernels. From the perspective of someone who'd debugged and traced unikernels from both inside the runtime (LING) and outside the runtime (xentrace), and who worked in the domain of the very z/TPF system you referenced above, the indictment seemed at-best strangely misguided and at-worst intentionally duplicitous. As you can imagine the indictment wasn't at all persuasive to me, and thus I keep exploring the space in bits and pieces where applicable.
- abrookewood 8y agoIs LING still alive? Haven't seen much project activity in a while.
- im_down_w_otp 8y agoNot really, insofar as I can tell, but it was slightly less inactive back then. It's not the corner of the sandbox that I play in any longer.
- mycall 8y agoWhat about your view on ultra restrictive OS libraries, like geonode? These take much of the useful optimizations inside unikernals and give a bigger framework to work from.
- im_down_w_otp 8y agoThe Genode project is wonderful. The write-ups they did about integrating their framework with seL4 were unbelievably helpful in my earlier explorations of how to build interesting things atop seL4. That said, I never really considered Genode in contrast to unikernels to be honest. Something to chew on certainly.
- phs318u 8y agoWhile acknowledging that your claims about his claims may well be 100% correct, I find it hard to believe that Bryan Cantrill would be "intentionally duplicitous". People, even very smart people, can occasionally be very wrong (btw, I'm not making a claim either way here), and that doesn't mean there is an agenda/intent that is malicious in nature.
- pjmlp 8y agoTotally unbiased for sure, https://www.joyent.com/smartos https://www.joyent.com/smartos
- perbu 8y agoCantrill is a smart guy. But he has always had a big mouth. And the fact is his post was written with ZERO experience with Unikernels. Zero. He was just assuming they act the way he imagined and attacked that image. Which is fine if you're upfront about it. He wasn't.
- bcantrill 8y agoI appreciate the kind words, but let's give me a tad more credit in the experience department, please: I have been doing production OS kernel development for over two decades, and have done non-trivial work in essentially every privileged subsystem across several different microprocessor and OS architectures. If you want to say that I have gobs of experience in kernel development (and more generally at the hardware/software interface), but no experience with unikernels per se, then fine, I guess -- but at the same time, let's acknowledge that you are the CEO of a unikernel company who very much has a dog in the fight?
- 616c 8y agoYou never disappoint me in your recorded presentations or now apparently timely HN comments. I am starting to like you just as much as tptacek here bc if someone invokes your name I will expect a witty, if not only informative, rebuttal!
- 8y ago
- pjmlp 8y agoWhich we shouldn't forget isn't unbiased given that they have a VM/Container business to sell.