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> What does this even mean? Containers are built around sharing a kernel, and unikernels are all about having a kernel custom for your application. Seems the id

> What does this even mean? Containers are built around sharing a kernel, and unikernels are all about having a kernel custom for your application. Seems the ideas are at odds. I think the most charitable translation of this is that the OS inside the container (e.g. Alpine Linux) + application will be replaced with a single unified OS + application i.e. unikernel. I don't think that this is true, but it's a seductive idea. From what I can tell, as system complexity goes up, you need increased instrumentation in order to property debug your application. That is a lot of what modern OS's provide. I do sympathize with people making efficiency arguments, but I always try to bet on the "strong horse". There is just so much money and effort going into Linux, that I think it'll get efficient faster than unikernels will get instrumented.

baq 7y ago
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." putting an app in a unikernel may be about as clever as possible for a great many software engineers.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > putting an app in a unikernel may be about as clever as possible for a great many software engineers. I think the traditional argument is that, with a unikernel, you can cut out a lot of the traditional OS systems that you may not care about. In theory, this could reduce your overall system complexity. This may not really be a difference in the future anyhow: with the success of BPF programs, it may be possible to get pretty close to a unikernel while still sticking with largely vanilla Linux.
threeseed 7y ago
99% of containers don't leverage OS instrumentation or really anything unique from the underlying platform. It's typically just run this Java/Python app and maybe run this database or infrastructure component. And there is nothing inherently inefficient about the Linux kernel. It's more that once you pack on all of the userland components you do end up with a sizeable attack vector.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > And there is nothing inherently inefficient about the Linux kernel. The first thing that comes to my mind is the user space networking drivers for linux [1]. They aren't very ergonomic, but the massive speed increase that is possible shows how inefficient normal linux networking is. The promise of unikernels is the speed of user space networking but with good ergonomics. Like I said earlier, if I had to bet, I'd bet on Linux. But there is work to be done. ___ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Plane_Development_Kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Plane_Development_Kit
  - shaklee3 7y ago
    As much as I like dpdk, XDP and eBPF can potentially hit the same rates as dpdk. But we're currently in a state where more driver support is needed.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fock 7y ago
if you understand, how containers work, this is something you can do with a statically linked executable today. That's basically what Go is built around. So, it seems like it's a not so futuristic idea.

baq 7y ago

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." putting an app in a unikernel may be about as clever as possible for a great many software engineers.

nordsieck 7y ago
> putting an app in a unikernel may be about as clever as possible for a great many software engineers. I think the traditional argument is that, with a unikernel, you can cut out a lot of the traditional OS systems that you may not care about. In theory, this could reduce your overall system complexity. This may not really be a difference in the future anyhow: with the success of BPF programs, it may be possible to get pretty close to a unikernel while still sticking with largely vanilla Linux.

threeseed 7y ago

99% of containers don't leverage OS instrumentation or really anything unique from the underlying platform. It's typically just run this Java/Python app and maybe run this database or infrastructure component. And there is nothing inherently inefficient about the Linux kernel. It's more that once you pack on all of the userland components you do end up with a sizeable attack vector.

nordsieck 7y ago
> And there is nothing inherently inefficient about the Linux kernel. The first thing that comes to my mind is the user space networking drivers for linux [1]. They aren't very ergonomic, but the massive speed increase that is possible shows how inefficient normal linux networking is. The promise of unikernels is the speed of user space networking but with good ergonomics. Like I said earlier, if I had to bet, I'd bet on Linux. But there is work to be done. ___ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Plane_Development_Kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Plane_Development_Kit
- shaklee3 7y ago
  As much as I like dpdk, XDP and eBPF can potentially hit the same rates as dpdk. But we're currently in a state where more driver support is needed.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

fock 7y ago

if you understand, how containers work, this is something you can do with a statically linked executable today. That's basically what Go is built around. So, it seems like it's a not so futuristic idea.