[HN Gopher] OSv Unikernel - Optimizing Guest OS to Run Stateless...
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OSv Unikernel - Optimizing Guest OS to Run Stateless and Serverless
Apps
Author : pjmlp
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-10-09 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.p99conf.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.p99conf.io)
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I tried and failed to bring unikernels to my former work when I
| was at Visa. Specifically, LING. There just wasn't enough of an
| ecosystem of support for the technology to place big bets on it
| for what we needed to do.
|
| That said, at my current company we recently open sourced[1] some
| work we did a couple years back which is more or less an attempt
| at the basic foundations for blending the seL4 microkernel with
| fairly normal no_std Rust application development and assembling
| them all together to make a purpose built OS/application to
| deploy directly to hardware or within a VM. We have some work to
| do to keep building it up as a foundation for broader use, but
| we're looking into partnering with the seL4 Foundation (now under
| the Linux Foundation) to iterate on it further with some of our
| other mutual partners. The developer experience is much closer to
| that of developing for an RTOS than it is like typical general
| purpose computing development.
|
| I'm of course biased, but I think there's a lot of room to
| innovate in the space of use case specific software stacks where
| the domain and constraints are well understood and too many
| degrees of freedom are actually a hindrance and a liability, not
| an advantage. Unikernels or otherwise.
|
| [1] https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think it's very much the 80/20 rule. You can get 80% optimal
| performance with 20% of the effort (just use Alpine Linux). If
| you want the last 20% you need to do the other 80% of the work.
| (Replace "performance" with "security" and it's the same
| story). Using unikernels isn't easy, especially with modern
| software development so focused on higher-level languages.
| Memory management is a foreign concept. The hype around Rust
| isn't generating low-level-capable engineers fast enough. Plus,
| high-level pays better.
| gavinray wrote:
| On the topic of Unikernels and MicroVM's:
|
| Does anyone who knows this stuff, know if there is something like
| Docker, but lightweight (capable of running thousands of
| processes with couple hundred MB memory) and doesn't require
| being deployed on bare-metal or an orchestration tool?
|
| I was looking for the equivalent of IE Knative/OpenFaaS, without
| needing Kubernetes or k3d. Users can write functions/handlers in
| whatever language, and deploy them on the platform, and the whole
| thing is either run as something as convenient as a container or
| a single static binary.
|
| I tried to find something, read up on Firecracker, emailed some
| people a lot smarter than me. Nothing fitting this bill seemed to
| exist, so I opted to build my own using GraalVM.
|
| (Which is working, but isn't as flexible about application
| packaging as a Dockerfile. It imposes some restrictions on how
| things need to be written to deploy on my platform.)
|
| Just curious if something like this DOES exist and I just didn't
| manage to find it. Building something yourself is always the
| worst answer, unless you're smarter than everyone in your field.
| Or you know something other people don't.
|
| Which I am not/do not.
| eyberg wrote:
| Were you able to watch Waldek's talk that this links to? It's
| only 20min so not that long but in it he shows doing precisely
| this by booting 1800 instances a second.
| lykr0n wrote:
| PHP & Perl come to mind. You write your program, scp it and
| it's dependencies to your www/cgi-bin folder on your server,
| and then navigate to the URL.
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(page generated 2021-10-09 23:01 UTC)