Regarding unikernels it is fun to combine it with Erlang, since Erlang already has process isolation by default, so it acts as a mini-OS for your application. Process supervision is a bit like the initd (or systemd), it has networking and file system access API,etc...<p>So there is:<p><a href="http://erlangonxen.org/" rel="nofollow">http://erlangonxen.org/</a><p>code: <a href="https://github.com/cloudozer/ling" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudozer/ling</a><p>Basicly instead of:<p>hardware|kernel|os|erlangvm|yourcode<p>it is now:<p>hardware|xen|ling|yourcode<p>Not sure how functional it is now. I haven't followed the project in the last year much. But I see some development on github lately.
> That minimal quality of most of the OS not being present also explains why the container the drivers run in is called a rump kernel<p>I have seen a number of articles on 'rump' kernels and they always similarly gloss over the name like this. How does that explain? It's not capitalized, so I assume it is not an acronym that stands for something.<p>Where does this name come from? Is it an acronym, portmanteau, metaphor, what? I have never seen it clearly explained, and I have followed link trails down the rabbit hole through circular references and wikis looking, half a dozen times at least, to no avail.<p>Can someone please clue me in?
Before I read this, is anyone willing to explain how a rump kernel and Rumprun unikernel differ from what MirageOS is doing with unikernels?<p>Is a rump kernel just a more general abstraction of a unikernel like MirageOS?
I'd love to see a Smalltalk VM running directly on Xen. The language has always been a bit awkward on PCs because in its heart it still wants to be the OS for a Xerox Alto. It ought to be right at home on virtual metal!
Here's a prediction of how this conversation is going to go:<p>1. This stuff isolates specific functionality into a hardened component!<p>2. You can run an existing program as an isolated, hardened component!<p>3. You can run all of your programs as iso., hard. components! The parts of your system won't be able to step on each other except in well-defined ways!<p>4a. You mean sort of like old-school process isolation?<p>4b. Blah, blah, blah, Plan 9, blah...<p>4c. Blah, blah, any virtual machine like the JVM...