nanos

https://github.com/nanovms/nanos > A kernel designed to run one and only one application in a virtualized environment --- https://github.com/nanovms/nanos/blob/master/CHARTER.md > 1. Security: > Nanos aims to be a much more secure system than Linux. It does this through several thrusts. Not having the notion of users, running a single process per vm, and limiting the amount of code that is incorporated into each vm. > 2. Minimalist: > KISS. As Nanos is not intended to be ran on bare metal we strive to keep the core as simple as possible. --- https://github.com/nanovms They patched erlang and gpu-nvidia to work with Nanos --- https://ops.city/ A product based on Nanos

A couple unikernel projects that caught my eye in the past may be of interest to you. I have no experience with them, so I can't speak to their quality though. https://unikraft.org/ https://github.com/nanovms/nanos

this is a 500 line server running in kernel mode on nanos https://github.com/nanovms/nanos/blob/master/src/http/http.c

For a while nanovms was based on Rump[0], which had terrible performance. The new version of nanovms[1] we haven't benchmarked but we should; having said that, even the founder says they "[...] have spent very little time benchmarking" [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel [1] https://github.com/nanovms/nanos [2] https://www.gula.tech/blog/files/135c832f92668268f1e9140a524...

You can also build from source here: https://github.com/nanovms/nanos && https://github.com/nanovms/ops . There are also packages available through AUR/homebrew and the like: https://ops.city/downloads . The script is only there facilitate the 'install' such as ensuring you have qemu installed locally or assessing whether you have kvm/hvf rights/etc. Also, I don't think this is documented yet but you can target various PRs/builds with ops via this way: ops run /bin/ls --nanos-version d632de2

The HN conversations around unikernels suggest that they're not ready for production yet [0] but feel free to set that record straight. In the meantime, a handful of organisations/individuals seem to be working on becoming "Docker for unikernels". That's probably an unfair description, but they're aiming to produce tools for building and managing unikernels: Unikraft [1], NanoVMs/Nanos [2], Unik [3]. Other orgs are producing unikernel-based OSs and VMs [4]. What is your toolset for building and managing unikernels? What have you learned? Bonus question: is Unik dead? [5] [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [1] https://unikraft.org/ [2] https://github.com/nanovms/nanos [3] https://github.com/solo-io/unik/ [4] http://unikernel.org/projects/ [5] https://github.com/solo-io/unik/issues/172

You are correct. There are actually quite a few different configurations available on AWS alone - not to mention most cloud providers are very different. What works on one instance type on AWS won't immediately run on Azure without additional drivers. Google Cloud is probably the most friendly one for hobby osdev cause they are based on KVM. For instance when starting with https://github.com/nanovms/nanos (whom I'm with) we targeted the t2 instances first and it actually took a longer time to come up with support for some of the newer t3 instances because we had to add ENA and NVMe drivers.

Generally speaking containers replicate networking && storage layers so are definitely much slower than a vm on public cloud, not to mention they generally live on vms. However, in this context (being on a rpi) it probably wouldn't be the case. Now, as for the firecracker discussion: Firecracker trades a faster boot time for a slower runtime as evidenced by this issue here: https://github.com/nanovms/nanos/issues/483#issuecomment-650... There are plans to fix this but afaict this is the case today.

NanoVMs | SF, NY, Remote (US) | Kernel Eng | Full Time NanoVMs is building out unikernel tooling and infrastructure. We have open source at https://github.com/nanovms/nanos && https://github.com/nanovms/ops. We can run things like go and rust webservers up to 2x as fast on platforms like google cloud today. We are specifically looking for more full-time kernel engineers so we can increase our velocity. We are well-funded by great investors and have revenue from extremely large customers. You can submit here: https://nanovms.breezy.hr/ or just email me. This is listed as remote but it's really just corona remote. We have a very strong preference for those who are either in the Bay Area or willing to relocate. We do have an office that we intend to fill up. Second choice would be New York as we have engineers based there as well. We are ope

If you get a chance let me know what you think of our take on https://ops.city && https://github.com/nanovms/nanos .

Also Nanos - https://github.com/nanovms/nanos for those who want to run go unikernels on gcloud || aws. (I'm involved in the project).