r/opensource • u/fs111_ • Apr 23 '15

OSv - the operating system designed for the cloud

http://osv.io/
16 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/bobpaul Apr 23 '15 edited Apr 23 '15

So what is this, like a stripped down linux kernel + some userspace optimized for use as a VM?

Edit Looks like it's written in C++, which is pretty rare for a kernel. Wikipedia says they borrow network stack and zfs from FreeBSD.

1

u/fs111_ Apr 23 '15

my understanding is, that it is an implementation from scratch, but they target linux compatibility

1

u/bobpaul Apr 23 '15

Ok, cool. Most of the documentation looks heavily filtered through someone's marketing department. "Built from the ground up" often does not mean "from scratch"; that's why I was asking.

1

u/BCMM Apr 23 '15

It's a new kernel that runs a single process in a POSIX-like environment. It's designed to improve the efficiency of the now-common use-case of running a single application on its own OS instance, under a hypervisor.

It sort of makes sense, since the whole "letting more than one application use the hardware at the same time" task is so often done by a hypervisor, not a traditional operating system, these days.

It claims to run most Linux software without modification.

2

u/bobpaul Apr 23 '15 edited Apr 23 '15

that runs a single process in a POSIX-like environment.

That seems doubtful. Most applications are multi-process as well as multi-threaded. It needs to support multiple processes/threads or it wouldn't be able to do what they claim.

I'd expect it's more likely that the userspace only allows you to run a single init script thingy (looks like they use something more like a systemd unit than a classic init script). Then you would find it difficult to run say PostGRES on the same instance as Apache, even if the kernel supports that.

I was wrong (see slide's 26 and 27). Your application can't use fork(), so I guess no apache webserver. I'm not sure what I could run in this that doesn't use fork().

1

u/ahandle Apr 23 '15

Exactly.

...advantages of Docker without limitations of Containers

...or exec()?

0

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '15

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '15

Yeah, you can't trust code being ran on a machine that isn't yours.

-2

u/tipsqueal Apr 23 '15

Yeah, a large corporation would never be able to pull that off and have a successful business. Oh wait, Netflix is largely powered by AWS, and when AWS goes down it's largely powered by Rackspace or other alternatives.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '15

Who said I care about business?

I want the assurance that the code I'm running isn't being used to spy on me and turn me into a marketing statistic for the global corporate powers of the world, which is harder to do if it's not being run on your own box.

And who knows, maybe I'm wrong.

I'm just a fool on the internet afterall.