Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise?

Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by TheRealPomax on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @11:26AM (#18284169)

I don't quite understand the title of this article. Where is the part that explains why it's no longer an academic exercise? Nothing has been shown to now exist at a scale that makes it any more than another toy (in the academic computer science meaning of the word).

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by eyberg on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @12:06PM (#18284583)

I was personally an unikernel conference in Beijing in May. Baidu, Alibaba, VMWare, ARM and many other multi-billion dollar companies were talking about how they are rolling in support into things like their serverless infrastructure.

Also - there are production deployments out there.

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by TheRealPomax on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @01:28PM (#18285435)

VM support for unikernels is literally a prerequisite for unikernel uptake, so that's hardly surprising, but coming from academia: if a highly niche market using a thing still keeps it a mostly academic exercise, and this article does not contain anything that talks about how it has finally escaped the "mostly interesting to academics, and that handful of people who use it in their highly specialized or possibly instead just plain old 'someone once set it up and it's too critical to change now' systems".

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by pjmlp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:57PM (#18286341)

Microsoft used their unikernel research (Drawbridge) to bring SQL Server into Linux.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-a...

It is also how they kind of implement secure kernel in the recent versions of Windows 10.

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by ksec on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:25PM (#18286033)

>Baidu, Alibaba, VMWare, ARM

So in the server less future, Linux and FreeBSD will no longer be at the heart of these "Functions"? But instead they all migrate to Unikernel? At the scale they are operating I am pretty sure it make sense, if it brings 5 - 10% performance improvement along with other benefits.

Not sure if I like the way things are moving in that direction though.

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by pjmlp on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @02:55AM (#18290236)

In a way, POSIX is the C language runtime, and other languages have their own runtimes as well, so at the limit whatever kernel your application is running one doesn't matter at all.

Then there are those few use cases where one actually needs to dive into OS specific syscalls or Assembly.

So for a large class of applications it doesn't matter if the application is running bare metal, on a VM, container or plain old OS process.

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by mato on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @04:49PM (#18287356)

A unikernel conference? I didn't know there was such a thing.

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by perbu on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @03:21AM (#18290335)

No, we didn't see you there. :-)

It was a more of a workshop in relation to ICS2018.

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Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise? by pjmlp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:55PM (#18286318)

An example would be MS SQL Server on Linux, it basically makes use of library OS to run Win32 on Linux.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/how-a...

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