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fwsGonzo
barebones
C2018–2024
fwsGonzo / barebones

barebones

Barebones multiboot kernel for beginners

Systems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
2Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
153GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Barebones multiboot kernel for beginners

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:01:40 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-01-24 09:54:29 UTC to 2024-01-04 20:40:00 UTC.

012342018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 3 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC431
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
fwsgonzo·Aug 27, 2018
Hey, IncludeOS is mostly a work in progress, and so the answers will reflect that. 1 and 2: IncludeOS is a service where more stuff is compiled and inlined as a whole, compared to a normal kernel. The whole thing will be baked into one, in many cases inline. This gives the compiler a chance to simplify more things and optimize better, and while the size doesn't have to be smaller, we do have less code overall. Especially after the linker removes unused objects. IncludeOS is not being built with LTO at all presently (although it does have that ability on the Linux userspace platform), nor does it have any major performance work done other than making sure there are no big performance bugs around. I am working on this, but it's not a trivial thing. In a perfect world I would just enable LTO and it would just work, like I already do on the u
Read the rest
serspace Linux platform of IncludeOS. I have written a beginners-kernel project where I show that LTO reduces image size to 2/3 from 32kb to 11kb: https://github.com/fwsGonzo/barebones 2. There is a paper showing this linked to in the repo itself. You can at least build the unikernel on linux userspace, so it shouldn't be too hard to debug it while you are creating it. Other than that, debugging is not easy in production just like you say. 3. Traditional hypervisors manage access to hardware all the time, while a new type of unikernel hypervisor wouldn't. It would just sit there after the configuration/startup phase and never be exited into. The number of VMEXITs something has to do for each packet is a good estimator for how performant something is. If the number is zero, then it must be performant. See bareflank and others. I can't elaborate further because it's an area of research, and I'm not an expert. Afaik there is nothing like this running in production yet, even if we can prove that it's possible to run exitless and with no kernel privileges! Maybe next year we will know more. 4. We absolutely support threads, its just not working right now. We also have an SMP API that is quite good, and the virtual CPUs are scheduled on the host side. We also have fibres. While we do have tests, I don't know the state of things. We have so many other things going trying to make the OS stable in a production environment. I couldn't find a single thing proving my assertion when I made a quick search, so I will just retract until I can find it again. As I'm sure you know unikernels tend to have a single address space, which removes the need to do a full context switch. 5. I don't think our customers will be deploying containers. Rather, I think they will be running hundreds of instances per physical host in their private clouds. Instances will act as Internet gateways, firewalls etc. Some network function. That is the stage we are at now. I really don't see containers being used after the binaries are built, but I could be wrong.
In IncludeOS – A minimal, resource efficient unikernel for cloud services

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