This talk was more of a roundup of interesting uses of library hypervisors. The two are:
- the HyperKit/MirageOS use in Docker for Mac and how it can augment a native client application
- the far more general new Solo5 backend that IBM/Docker/Cambridge have contributed to MirageOS3, which shows how to use a library hypervisor to build a very Unix-like unikernel experience. MirageOS developers have also taken advantage of the libraries to add support for FreeBSD/bhyve very easily [1], so these new backends and libraries are increasing MirageOS library portability quite a bit.
[1] https://github.com/Solo5/solo5/issues/61
(I've just come back from Berlin and Docker Summit and have a ton of interesting questions and FAQs from attendees there. Will try to write up a blog post expanding on this presentation ahead of the MirageOS3 beta!)
Interesting, I was looking into running single daemons (e.g.: nginx) as a unikernel (through rump kernels). This is certainly something different!
Edit: doing some research it simply seems that Hyperkit/MirageOS are supplementing docker (via Alpine Linux). I may still be missing something just by looking at the slides.