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> running on hypervisor direct against the virtualized hardware.

Well, here is your actual OS then. You named it "hypervisor", and changed the system interface, but it's still there, revirtualizing the access to hardware and ensuring separation of different users/applications/unikernels.

by Veserv12 minutes ago|

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Yep. Except every application runs in a down-and-dirty virtual machine instead of a nice clean process, so they get to experience the joy that is hardware booting and get to configure virtual device buffers instead of calling send(). Progress.

by torginus2 hours ago|

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This isn't too dissimilar to DOS programs. DOS also gave you a filesystem, memory management, a shell a process loder, driver interface, but it was all in real mode, and you were free to replace these components with your own as you pleased.

Or if you're more familiar with embedded, like a BSP or RTOS

by Joker_vD1 hours ago|

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Arbitrating access to the hardware between multiple tenants still gonna be a PITA (as it was during the DOS days), especially if you want to expose actual hardware, not some generic VirtIO devices. Even with the latter, the hypervisor would have to do quite a bit of the resource management and interface translation.

Unless you're literally running a single application on a dedicated piece of hardware in which case... yeah, sure, you can do the OS-as-a-library schtick. But you could do it 10 years ago, too.

by cmrdporcupine3 hours ago|

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I mean, sure we can put labels wherever we want. I don't really care. MirageOS even has "OS" in its name.

The point is all the other things: total number of lines of code, permissions and security, memory management, drivers, process mgmt, it all changes.

by Joker_vD3 hours ago|

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Does it though? And I'd really like to see how you'll revirtualize e.g. an NVIDIA GPU (notoriously context-full piece of hardware), while allowing transparent shared access to it from different applications. Heck, you'll run into trouble with most of PCI-connected devices except for the most primitive once.

by cmrdporcupine2 hours ago|

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yea, "virtualizing" an NVIDIA GPU is not truly feasible right now from what I see.

I do know that AMD has done more in this space. When I worked at Google there were (other) people on the Stadia team doing this. And some open source bits out there that I've seen, including from AMD.

Unfortunately, my real world work... and most real inference etc work others are doing... is on CUDA/NVIDIA.

by Polizeiposaune1 hours ago|

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Over time, what prevents the reviewed-and-maintained-library-code from developing creeping featuritis and consequently evolving the additional attack surface that unikernels currently lack?