Re:Hands-On Introduction to Unikernels
by traxler on Thursday January 22, 2026 @02:41AM
(#46716331)
I've found the idea of unikernels interesting for several years now, is there a tl;dr on why they don't seem to have taken off, like at all? Or is it all happening behind some doors I don't have access to?
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Re:Hands-On Introduction to Unikernels
by gucci-on-fleek on Thursday January 22, 2026 @03:41AM
(#46716673)
I think that part of it is that relatively few people use bare-metal servers these days, and nested virtualisation isn't universally supported. I also found this technical critique [0] compelling, but I have no idea if any of it is accurate or not.
[0]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-f...
When I first heard about unikernels my hope/thought was that people would go back to using more bare-metal servers for unikernels.
there is a workaround for nested virt requirements.
you can use PVM patch and para-virtualization. I've seen several startup using that approach to be able to create VM on small/cheap EC2 instances.
The majority of nanos users don't do either of these methods. They simply create the image (in the case of aws that's an ami) and boot it. This is part of what makes them vastly more simple than using normal linux vms or containers as you don't have to manage the "orchestration".