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Only tangentially related but why haven’t Unikernels become a thing? why does every container need a unix userland? Sure, I understand people need their libc bu

• jacques_chester 6y ago
  I think unikernels were mostly crowded out by containers, because the latter was far more able to take advantage of path dependency. But as lightweight VMs become a more common form of "container", unikernels may into the limelight.
• qayxc 6y ago
  Drivers are major pain with Unikernels - you basically need to rewrite all the drivers for your Unikernel; this gets especially painful with application accelerators and GPUs, since those cannot easily be replaced by virtual devices (like storage or networking). More importantly, app development is way harder since you don't have all OS libraries available to you and cannot easily benefit from previous R&D and workflows. You basically need to start from scratch or rewrite your app, which simply isn't always an option. There's currently no mature tooling that I'm aware of that would allow you to simply recompile existing apps to turn them into Unikernels (I just discovered Unikraft [1], but I cannot comment on whether it's any good). Edit: [1] http://www.unikraft.org http://www.unikraft.org Debugging is a pain as well compared to more standard development.