Bookmarks for July 23rd through August 11th

These are my links for July 23rd through August 11th:

  • An Internet-Ready OS From Scratch in a Week — Rump Kernels on Bare Metal (NetBSD Blog) – An alternative approach to building a custom OS for running an application as a service. Unlike the MirageOS/Unikernel approach this solution doesn’t require applications be written specifically for the minimal OS. That is, thanks to the NetBSD userspace libraries and libc, one can take an existing POSIX application (such as the httpd in mentioned in the article) and run it on a purpose built OS. No need for a general purpose OS and all of their potential attack vectors.
  • Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System – ACM Queue – An overview of the MirageOS unikernel project, which focuses on providing a customised operating system for single-purpose appliances running on a hypervisor. That is an OS purpose-built from a library of components the result of which includes only the functionality required for the target appliance rather than, say, running a full general-purpose OS with a multitude of supporting daemons/services in order to host a database. This seems like really interesting research into how to provide safer, more efficient, operating systems for the cloud. It also has the (noted) advantage of being one of few research OS’s that doesn’t require an everlasting supply of students to write device drivers for new hardware. As MirageOS runs on the Xen hypervisor the only drivers required are those for the virtual devices Xen exposes.

I wrote about about why these posts are being generated here: Sharing Links.