Ask HN: do you intend to use unikernels eventually when they become viable?

7 points·andrewstuart··4 comments

If Moore's Law is over, the Gates' Law (http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/Gatess-Law.html) is sure to follow... unikernels seem like one solution to cut out a lot of cruft and get more out of the same hardware (probably more securely as well)

My favorite development in this area that I've seen so far is Rump Kernels ... most others seem to be use focusing on "cloud" and hypervisors etc... but rump kernels can be used on real hardware so you can be true unikernels.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the future even desktops, tablets, etc are basically just of a bunch of unikernels running on top of virtualization hardware

Yes, definitely. Unikernel is in fact the very reason I've been (trying) to learn Ocaml lately.

what makes them unviable currently, in your opinion?

Too many of our toolchain is still unix-based, and they have to be ported, or unikernel-based alternative have to show up: anything C related (which power the majority of the infrastructure anywhere), DB also comes to mind - you still need a linux distro to run them on (even if the server only has the database on it). You can probably write your app in a unikernel, but there isn't that much benefits if everything else (external stuffs to your app) is still running on linux.

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