Why would you do such a thing? Creating masses of crippled, non-general operating systems out of linux?! For the actually unheardof performance. Basically, you

Why would you do such a thing? Creating masses of crippled, non-general operating systems out of linux?! For the actually unheardof performance. Basically, you've taken the whole /sbin/init link out of the OS init chain, and replaced it with... A single binary you may remember. To do this took a little extra work. Your glibc and any other dependency ended up in kernel space. Single-use virtual machines obviously have the biggest boost, but other uses exist. Your kerberos-daemon isolated into its own vm on the network. Someone's gotta serve network filesystems. Apache servers for various websites you may host - the possibilities are endless. The processor itself has a Massive timesink for isolating kernel-space from user-space (even root is just another user at this level, I'm afraid). Even Server-side admins have simply gotten used to it - every application, server, program Ever runs on that user-space. So you have a bunch of single use VMs... and that much "context-switching" between virtual-drivers and memory allocation on one side, and the actual server the vm is for on the other. Now these VMs are running on an OS's hypervisor with the same context-switching performance problem! So, we package each vm as a unikernel - shove each virtualized server into the kernel. We avoid that context switching. Build that kernel lean enough, and sometimes the unikernel VM can perform almost at baremetal speeds. What if we did the same for the Host OS - built a hypervisor Unikernel to delegate hardware and nothing else? zomg folks are squeeing with excitement about a new way to frame building a lean system... But it gets us compiling in-house again instead of using COTS (commercial, off-the-shelf software). Got an old Gentoo-user hanging around that can debug kernel code, harden the kernel against attack, and compile it all lean? That guy is who we're gonna need to figure out what goes wrong with any of this. Because Murphy's law is unreliably unreliable, yet ultimately absolute.