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It's a shame that microkernels and containers came to prominence around the same time. IMO, containers were easier to understand and start working with and seem
by ethagnawl 7y ago
It's a shame that microkernels and containers came to prominence around the same time. IMO, containers were easier to understand and start working with and seem to have "won out" as a result.
Microkernels are really interesting, though! I'm glad people are still working on and talking about them.
- CameronNemo 7y agoI think containers have been a great introduction to applications deployed as minimal, immutable images. I imagine operations teams will be more ready to deploy unikernels because of their experiences with containers. Also as a note, microkernels are older and not necessarily related to unikernels.
- pjmlp 7y agoMicrokernels are doing pretty much fine on real time embedded OSes, and QNX can hardly complain about their customer base. Each of those containers gets monitored by a Minix instance running inside Intel CPUs. Apple OSes are transitioning to userspace only drivers. Google keeps pouring money into Fuchsia, and Trebelified Linux looks quite similar to a microkernel using user space processes with Android IPC, classical Linux drivers being left for the existing "legacy" drivers. Doesn't look that bad to me.
- ksec 7y agoFor MirageOS, you have OCaml and the Complete OS Change, that is much more radical than containers, which is 99.9% still C and Linux + 0.1% of added ingredients. I would imagine something done in plain old C or Rust would get a little more traction. But then an entire OS ecosystem change is no small thing.