your channel is a true goldmine 🙂

You are FANTASIC at explaining concepts to an audience who is unfamiliar. I noticed around 2:20 you started to say "it" but then corrected yourself and said "the computer". I started a contract job in IT security several months ago and the guy who's training me explains everything with pronouns. He will say things like "When it comes in, it forwards it to the right one" and I constantly have to slow him down... and of course, I'm the dummy for not understanding. I can't wait until my contract comes to term.

Isn't it amazing that, trough only one lifetime, a person learned to use in production environments a Honeywell 2020 and modern operating systems such as Linux distros? Is really a treat to get to open an app in a mobile device that can do more than any supercomputer of the late 70s and watch a video of you, DJ ware. Thank you!

keep going DJ your years of experience put you way ahead of so many other tech channels. you have a soothing voice too. lots of things working in your favor!

Unix, Minix and Linux. Sweet old memories... I grew up being a MS Windows admin, swaped to Linux a couple of years ago tho... And I'm not going back. You gonna love the "flat text file" philosophy...

Can't wait the next part. Sir, you're doing amazing job explaining all that

Congrats, we came full circle!

I m in love with this guy, but willing to break up if no second part this episode.

I had a similar reaction to you on discovering virtualisation. "isolation and multiplexing is the entire point of a kernel, but modern operating systems fail at both?" FWIW - you mentioned Kata - it's not a unikernel, it's more like a Rust SDK for seL4 at this point, but it does have process isolation.

@DJ Your vids are always good and informative and certainly appreciated

Absolutely great channel. Content that is highly informative and is easy to follow. Wish instructors were this way, you would learn everything there is to know in the world.

14:46 not having management of resource allocations is not a problem when you have a sea of machines, you just allocate machines to programs in unikernels. The allocation system runs besides the entire machine itself in another machine. That makes much more sense than the "mainframe" approach of multi-user multi-purpose operating systems, that would make sense if computers were expensive, but they are incredibly cheap.

I really like the description of the Honeywell software loading. Today, our microcomputers such as the Arduino (and derivatives like the SMT32) run two specific programs when they are turned on. The microcomputers I am referring to, complete with motherboard, can be as small as 20mm x 20mm, but can be large enough to run a 3D Printer, a CNC Machine or an Automobile. The operation is the same. First the bootloader (same as the executive) runs a quick power on check, and then points to a section of memory, where the program exists. The programs, typically written in C or C++, are compiled on a workstation (using, Windows, MacOS, or Linux operating system). The compiled program is then loaded into the flash memory of the Microcomputer. Of course the first line of compiled code is placed where the bootloader points to when it is done the power on sequence. There is no Operating System, and all instructions run in real time.

Excellent and good to hear some ol history

This sounds sort of like a hardware server. So the first kernel really serves cpu slices and pci devices. It would help if there was a connection standard, then you would get slave OSs that use the standard to get resources. I always wondered how like in a pure VM, the cpu would ideally see the environment as bare metal. Also in the vm all the traditional devices like timers would be there. I don't know these days what ISA features are expected to exist in hardware, or you can just use cpu features and pci devices. I started using a vm in Fedora to run some Windows applications in non 3d acceleration. Also I have an Audigy 2 pci card in my system and I channel the motherboard SPDIF through it so I can use in line 10 band EQs going to my receiver here. I use the KX project drivers.

I was more interested in the unikernel because of what I had read about EROS, KeyKOS, Coyotos, et al, and what was going on in RedoxOS (which had also started but was not public yet).I tried to get on the kernel developer list that was used to bring up the MirageOS project when that was 1st made public, but got bumped to the MirageOS list. BTW nothing of interest happened there except that it broke to some degree every time the underlying packages were updated (once or twice every couple of months), or for a couple of weeks when someone new came along and was trying to bring up MirageOS on a new system.

I needed that Bones reference just now... Thanks

This is awesome. It has been quite some time that the youtube algorithm actually worked for me, today it did. Interesting topic & well told.

This is such an interesting project. I was looking for an operating system to add as a "subsystem for windows" just so I can learn how subsystems work and what kind of cool hack like "WSL" can we also make. An Unikernel application, that would be cool.

5:13 It could be Plan 9. Supported Xen (as a guest) possibly earlier than some bigger OSes. Lguest, too (as a guest), though that support is long gone.

Thank you for this fascinating introduction. I wonder how many notions for these tools come from mach kernel development? The idea of breaking down each kernel component to an object that can be added to the microkernel seems to be in line with these ideas as you present them. From what I understood mach kernels are difficult because of the messaging necessary to make them all work but I guess if you take the hypervisor approach it can have a macro kernel reducing complexity of the unikernal eliminating most of the issues seen in mach.

Really nice👍

Great content. Have a great Thanksgiving.

What an interesting technology, thanks so much DJ!

Another great vid. Thanks! 👍👍

Thanks DJ 👍

Only problem they face now is that , since each kernel is in its own network space it harder for them group together for a efficient network connection..

Nice teaser. I am thinking .. an application runs perfectly good and starts and stops perfectly safe. But what about, say, daemons, would they not own too much resources forever? Sorry: I am certainly missing a point.

kata in the context of unikernels? seems like a miss... kata is a runtime to run container images in light VMs, on provided by kata tuned linux kernel. based on similar ground as kata was virtlet, runtime for VMs which are mimicking containers, which in fact was used to run unikernels: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gpOBpdt1r7m-cnU.html virtlet was made to run any kind of VMs, so we had as an example windows based VM which was providing IIS as a kubernetes service ;)

Is it possible to use a unikernel for running servers? It appears that it would be more secure if you could.

So they still require an operating system ["hypervisor"] for the hardware. Sounds more like a special subset of containers than an executive kernel. I'm probably missing something though as I'm solidly in the amateur category. Setting aside security, is there an open source library of code for beginning bare metal programming? I mean if a person has a reason to make a bare metal program for a specific performance oriented task like small scale HPC[without network access], but doesn't want to totally reinvent the wheel to interact with a commodity x86 platform. (Maybe a stripped down OS would accomplish the same effect?) I mean super stripped, like no terminal or anything extra, just power on, it runs the calculation, writes the result to disk, then halts/powers off. Reboot with an OS on another drive to read the results.

To me, unikernels seem a lot more like embedded RTOSs, except that all hardware access is mediated by a hypervisor.

The current unikernels space is Fake they are mostly implemented via vmm virtual machine Monitor Interfaces

*Thank you!*