On Mon, Sep 16, 2013, Nadav Har'El wrote about "Announce: OSv, a new open-source operating system for virtual machines": > Hi, today we've made the first release of OSv, a new operating system for > running applications on virtual machines. > > OSv is free software, released under the BSD license, and you can find it in > https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv and http://www.osv.io. > There is also a mailing list: osv-...@googlegroups.com.
For those interested in meeting some of the OSv developers, shortly hearing about it and trying it on their own laptop and their own application, we are holding a meetup on Wednesday May 28th, 5:30pm, in our office in Herzliyya: http://www.meetup.com/OSv-Developer-Meetup/events/181683582/ It's a free meeting (of course), but we'll appreciate it if people RSVP on the meetup.com site so we'll have an estimate on how many are coming. See you, Nadav. > > These days, most applications running on virtual machines in the cloud run > on top of Linux. We all love Linux, but as an all-encompassing operating > system for everything from phones to supercomputers, Linux was never > really designed for virtual machines; It is big and complex, and it > offers features (such as multi-user and multi-process) which are today > made redundant by the hypervisor and slow it down. Linux's APIs are many > times set in stone by decades of legacy code. > All these cost in application performance, and make it harder to innovate. > > This is why we developed OSv, a new operating system designed to run > a single application on a virtual machine. As it runs a single application > there is no need for kernel-userspace isolation, reducing context switch > costs and unnecessary copying. A design from scratch allowed us to > experiment with new ideas like lock-free mutexes (solving the Lock-Holder > Preemption problem that plagues operating systems on virtual machines), > extremely fast context switches, Van Jacobson's network channels (see > http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/vj/lca06vj.pdf), and more. > Also, OSv is released under the more permissive BSD license (not GPL > like Linux), is tiny compared to Linux, and takes less than one second > to boot and start the user's application. > > OSv can run ordinary Linux shared objects, such as, for example, an > unmodified JVM (e.g., OpenJDK) executable, and of course on that you can > run any application written in Java, JRuby , Clojure, or any other JVM > language. Even at this early stage of OSv's development, OSv can already > successfully run several interesting workloads such as Netperf, Memcached, > Cassandra and SpecJVM - and usually match or even beat Linux's performance. > > Another refreshing feature of OSv is that is written in C++. > It's been 40 years since Unix was (re)written in C, and the time has > come for something better. > C++ is not about writing super-complex type hierarchies (as some people > might have you believe). Rather, it allowed us to write shorter code > with less boiler-plate repetition and less chances for bugs. It allowed > us to more easily reuse quality code and data structures. And using > newly standardized C++11 features, we were able to write safe concurrent > code with standard language features instead of processor-specific > hacks. And all of this with zero performance overheads - most of C++'s > features, most notably templates, are compile-time features which result > in no run-time overhead compared to C code. > > OSv was developed by Cloudius Systems, a small Israeli startup led by > Dor Laor and Avi Kivity (of KVM fame) but it is an open-source project - > developed since its inception on github > (https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv), and released under the BSD > license. We would like to take this opportunity to invite everyone to use > OSv, and to help drive its development forward. OSv is a fantastic > playground for kernel developers, and also for people involved in cloud > development, devops, and so on. Tell us what your dream VM operating > system will do, and maybe your dream will come true :-) Maybe you can even > help us make that dream come true. > > If you want to try OSv, check out the announcement and usage instructions > on the OSv mailing list: > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/osv-dev/enqdqN2A0as > > > -- > Nadav Har'El | Monday, Sep 16 2013, 13 Tishri 5774 > n...@math.technion.ac.il > |----------------------------------------- > Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A computer once beat me at chess, but it > http://nadav.harel.org.il |was no match for me at kickboxing. -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, May 12 2014, 12 Iyyar 5774 n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Politics, n: from Greek, "poly"=many, http://nadav.harel.org.il |"ticks"=blood sucking parasites. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
