Live data from Hacker News

Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

dl.acm.org

81–90 of 187 posts

Re: Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

#83
post #82

The site has just the right number of modal windows hiding the content: a cookie consent form, a covid 19 information at the bottom, and some recommendations on the right, and if scroll back up the site banner...

The old dl.acm was no amazing bit of modern design, but it was definitely much better than this mess.

Yet again the ACM showing how out-of-touch it can be with its members and patrons.

Re: Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

#85
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you're using it for. If you're just running it as a server then (non-A) GPL code is fine since you're not distributing the program.

But what about the cloud and auto scaling wouldn't that count as distribution (through for internal use only)?

The GPL is all about giving rights to individual users of your program, not the world in general. It does so by turning copyright upside down, instead of restricting rights it grants rights (it’s like the opposite of those FBI warnings you get on DVD-discs) to those, and only those, who you give a copy of the program to.

But that is all. It works exactly like copyright in that regard. To be subject to it you need to have received a copy of program.

So no, running the program in the cloud is not distribution.

Re: Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

#86
post #82

The site has just the right number of modal windows hiding the content: a cookie consent form, a covid 19 information at the bottom, and some recommendations on the right, and if scroll back up the site banner...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332329656_Unikernel...

researchgate is much much nicer, and gives a lot of info: citations, related papers, you could go see info about authors, ask questions, see what project this paper is on. Researchgate allows discovering interesting papers in a seamless maner.

Re: Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

#87
post #82

The site has just the right number of modal windows hiding the content: a cookie consent form, a covid 19 information at the bottom, and some recommendations on the right, and if scroll back up the site banner...

The old dl.acm was no amazing bit of modern design, but it was definitely much better than this mess. Yet again the ACM showing how out-of-touch it can be with its members and patrons.

Eh, sounds like every other website to me.

Wouldn't people say ACM are out of touch if they don't adopt all the common junk you see on websites? Their website is so out of date it doesn't have a cookie banner! Best I get my information from somewhere that keeps up with the times ... and the law!

Re: Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

#88
post #26

When I make a system where a unikernel could do the job, I usually want a full OS for program setup and initialization, and then an isolated core for the main loop, sharing (single-writer) memory pages with other, less performance-critical processes for logging, stats reporting, and any needed file system activities. The makers of top-performing NICs have been quite good at providing direct user-space access to their…

I don't think the tuning you refer to is sufficient to bring the platform noise to levels required for some workloads. You will still see a lot of system call interrupts, TLB shootdowns, timer events, etc. Funnily enough yesterday I published an article tangential to this problem field. http://bitcharmer.blogspot.com/2020/05/t_84.html I'm not an expert on unikernels but my assumption is that you will see none of that…

Good writeup, but is there any mitigation for TLS shootdowns?

Re: Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

#89
post #84
post #2

I'm one of the authors on this paper, so ask away if you have questions.

Why Linux? Solutions based on Netbsd's rumpkernels exist. There's nothing about unikernels that says Linux.

Linux is the most mainstream Unix-like server operating system. We're making only minimal changes to Linux and hoping to get them upstream. (The NetBSD rumpkernel is a bit different from this by the way.)

Re: Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance (2019)

#90

> Unikernels have demonstrated enormous advantages over Linux in many important domains By domains, do they mean that as "actually in use in certain sectors in the industry" or "a prototype has shown that"? > causing some to propose that the days of Linux's dominance may be coming to an end Who exactly would make that claim? So, besides performance : what actual, real-life problems does this solve? I think there is s…

Who exactly would make that claim?

Will Serverless End the Dominance of Linux in the Cloud? https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3102980.3103008

Post reply on HN