IncludeOS: a unikernel for C++ applications

Posted Jul 26, 2017 14:14 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: IncludeOS: a unikernel for C++ applications by Sesse
Parent article: IncludeOS: a unikernel for C++ applications

> Booting up in 100 ms instead of two seconds is surely nice, but is really VM startup time an important metric in a cloud deployment?

VM startup time is important, but these days, you can boot a Linux VM in around 150ms. See the Clear Containers work.

I do see value in these kinds of unikernels for other purposes, such as experiments in reduced overhead between the application and network. (On the other hand, you can also do that with Linux, and bypass its network stack. One of these days I hope we improve the Linux network stack to the point that nobody feels the need to.)

But for boot time, no, I don't think this helps.

IncludeOS: a unikernel for C++ applications

Posted Aug 4, 2017 7:01 UTC (Fri) by perbu (guest, #14372) [Link]

It is worth noting that port of IncludeOS to ukvm/solo5 that IBM has done boots, executes and exits in 4-5 ms. So it definitely possible for a unikernel to go way faster than Linux.