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Operating systems are there to help you share resources. You're going to have numerous applications share the same NIC, PCI bus and memory. As far as performan
by mgaunard 5y ago
Operating systems are there to help you share resources.
You're going to have numerous applications share the same NIC, PCI bus and memory. As far as performance is concerned, running those applications bare metal on a traditional kernel makes a lot more sense than creating virtual resources that each application can pretend to have exclusive ownership of.
The only way to get efficient networking out of a VM is to dedicate the hardware to that VM which defeats the point.
- rwmj 5y agoCertainly in 1970 that was the case. Nowadays things look different (in some ways): Hypervisors already mediate the hardware, presenting virtual NICs etc up to the guests. Partitioning hypervisors split up huge machines into smaller slices with dedicated (real) hardware per slice. And sometimes people really want to run a single application baremetal for performance reasons. And ask yourself how many CPUs you have even in your PC - it's a lot more than you think. Why not run single applications on one of the several CPUs that live in your hard disk for example?
- mgaunard 5y agoI guess you might think that if you never did high-performance networking. The whole setup adds a lot of latency and affects throughput too.
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoUnikernels don't want to replace systems where multiple competing process are running(heck, most unikernels don't even support process). The most obvious thing that you could run as unikernels are services and DBs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eyberg 5y agoNanos has this basic assumption that it will never be deployed on bare metal. It assumes it is going into a virtualized environment such as AWS or GCP or Azure or whatever.
- mgaunard 5y agoI'm criticizing the statements made in the article, which are that traditional kernels are obsolete and only made sense in the 70s. Yet they still are the best thing for bare metal.