Re:Unikernels: No Longer an Academic Exercise?
by Fnoord on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @07:46PM
(#18288487)
The question is rather: would a unikernel or monolithic kernel have behaved differently?
Probably #1 (or a nefarious person being root), but you do have backups and redundant servers, right? I'd read SMART logs first. Back when my Death Star died some 20 years ago I remember it getting more difficult by the day to spin it up. But once it worked, it'd work fine.. until the machine tried to read from a bad sector (a good OS wouldn't have frozen on that but this was Windows 9x).
Here are some alternative possibilities:
3. Physical compromise; e.g. a cable got yanked.
4. Disable write caching and continue despite the driver or hardware being bad.
5. There is no quick way to get physical access.
6. A disk server isn't necessary to keep the system up. Goes well with #4.
If you look at how it all went, the massive redundancy of cheap commodity hardware won. Containers add further on that, and no doubt more bloat can be removed via a unikernel or microkernel (leading to smaller attack service but also more complexity). But that doesn't mean every aspect of such a machine needs to keep running, and it does imply a FOSS solution.
Probably #1 (or a nefarious person being root), but you do have backups and redundant servers, right? I'd read SMART logs first. Back when my Death Star died some 20 years ago I remember it getting more difficult by the day to spin it up. But once it worked, it'd work fine.. until the machine tried to read from a bad sector (a good OS wouldn't have frozen on that but this was Windows 9x).
Here are some alternative possibilities:
3. Physical compromise; e.g. a cable got yanked.
4. Disable write caching and continue despite the driver or hardware being bad.
5. There is no quick way to get physical access.
6. A disk server isn't necessary to keep the system up. Goes well with #4.
If you look at how it all went, the massive redundancy of cheap commodity hardware won. Containers add further on that, and no doubt more bloat can be removed via a unikernel or microkernel (leading to smaller attack service but also more complexity). But that doesn't mean every aspect of such a machine needs to keep running, and it does imply a FOSS solution.