On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 7:58 AM, Waldek Kozaczuk <jwkozac...@gmail.com> wrote: > Nadav, > > Thanks for your reply. My post was supposed to be thought provoking :-) > > Please find my specific comments below. > > Regards, > Waldek > > On Thursday, September 7, 2017 at 5:10:59 PM UTC-4, Nadav Har'El wrote: >> >> >> On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 8:50 PM, Waldek Kozaczuk <jwkoz...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> Is linuxkit from Docker (https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit) going to >>> kill unikernels altogether? What do you think? >> >> >> Hi, >> >> This approach can definitely work - I have done something like this 17 >> years ago (even before virtualization), when I was working on Linux-based >> network appliances. We created their images based on custom-compiled Linux >> kernels (with irrelevant features compiled out) and a tiny hand-picked >> subset of rpms from the then-common Redhat system. > > > As I understand LinuxKit is simply a tool to create minimalistic Linux > distributions with enough of Linux (cgroups, chroot, etc) to run docker host > on it. I was wondering if your understanding is the same as mine.
That is correct. But the kernel is still huge and there's only so much they can do with kicking unneeded modules and such out of the image. There's been quite a bit of effort on the embedded side to address the issues of true modularity and minimization of Linux kernel but I don't think it is a priority for upstream maintainers. With that in mind -- LinuxKit will forever be as big as the Linux kernel at least. >> 2. A second question is whether we actually care about it. What kind of >> application cares if the image size is 10 MB vs 100 MB? I can think of a >> few, but they are not common. I can tell you one that clearly does: embedded. And yes virtualization is very much a thing in embedded nowadays so Unikernels could also be very much a thing and unlike traditional clouds -- the size will matter a great deal. Thanks, Roman. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OSv Development" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to osv-dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
