Nanos – unikernel running one and only one application in a virtualized env

nanos.org

4 points·areski··4 comments

May be it is just me, but documentation (The Book) is confusing, after skimming through, seems like it is running customized not linux kernel on top of virtualization host ?

Somehow missed this but yes https://nanos.org doesn't have great docs right now. The best docs can be found on https://ops.city which is the front-end user facing website that shows you how to actually use it with another tools 'ops'.

https://nanos.org which is for the kernel itself, is indeed not Linux. It's a custom kernel we wrote from the ground up.

The basic premise is to run one and only one application as a vm - typically in a public cloud environment but can run on things like rpi4 as well. Doing so allows us to run things like go/rust workloads 2x fast on google cloud and 3x fast on aws. Takes ~20 seconds to deploy.

One of our principal kernel engineers discusses some some of it's salient points in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v21hGvCDPY

Seems like you are comparing nanos to linux kernel and not nanos to existing unikernels.

Most people we come across have never even heard of unikernels so it doesn't make a ton of sense to provide those comparisons but I see the nanos page doesn't have any information on that so we'll look at adding some - thanks for the suggestion!

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