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I believe there is growing interest in providing leaner, "trimmed" runtimes for services deployed to the cloud. Today, this is seen largely by specializing the
by nderjung 5y ago
I believe there is growing interest in providing leaner, "trimmed" runtimes for services deployed to the cloud. Today, this is seen largely by specializing the Linux kernel for, for example, container services[0] or in general[1], as much as that is possible (the paper above covers this problem in greater detail). But, Unikernels in themselves are not yet widely adopted. This is the space Unikraft is aiming to enter, providing the ultimate level of specialization for a target application.
It's clear that bigger players, such as Red Hat[2] are interested in the topic of unikernels, and that cloud providers are preparing for this future too [3].
[0]: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit
[1]: https://github.com/hckuo/Lupine-Linux https://github.com/hckuo/Lupine-Linux
[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3317550.3321445 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3317550.3321445
[3]: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io https://firecracker-microvm.github.io
- rwmj 5y agoIndeed, Red Hat is sponsoring students at Boston University to investigate turning Linux itself into a unikernel, with myself, Larry Woodman and Ulrich Drepper mentoring them (see link [2] in posting above). You can already run some smaller programs this way, either in qemu or on baremetal.