Oddbean new post about | logout
 I have never heard of that before today. Saw it mentioned somewhere in some document. What is it? 
 think of it as drop-in replacement of docker in that case (there's a rabbit hole involved). 
 https://media1.tenor.com/m/wPUbkhwfiuEAAAAd/curiosity-curious.gif 
 nspawn is more lightweight than docker, no layered filesystem... but you have to bring more batteries to it... i never even heard of it until a year ago, it's a great way to put services in containers

https://github.com/relaytools/relay-tools-images i helped build this 
 Reminds me of OSv unikernels. Still think it's the way to go.

you can use this for go apps. have a look! 
 yeah, it had go in it because cloudfodder was building strfry sprockets in Go and it was simplest to just write a script to install go and git and pull the stuff

go and git have got to be the smallest footprint dev toolchain there is, anyone that doesn't get how powerful that is is just not thinking 
 oot. just generally, do you like the unikernel idea? 
 i was very interested in "NoKernel" even more, and have even thought of an idea of having a kernel running on each core of a CPU with a message passing interface

plan9 also goes towards this direction as well, by creating a uniform socket interface for everything, the next logical step from the unix "everything is a file"

but android also with LXC namespace isolation goes a long way towards this also

and i get it that this is what UFS and ZFS are trying to do to filesystems but really LVM2 does it better overall, you can conceive of a single service that just manages this, and another service that manages permission, like a local version of ETCD

i think it's gonna be a long time yet before we see the end of monolithic kernels though... apple runs on a bsd microkernel and everyone else is running monolithics

i think really it's just about the API differences, it's hard to make a mapping between standard system APIs and the distinctly different way you run things with a no-kernel everything-is-a-service style of architecture... the slowest moving parts of software development are languages and kernels

it's a subject dear to my heart though... kernels and compilers, my two favourite things 
 i'd like to see something like qubeos but instead of fat vms it would spawn unikernel adhoc vms with apps. those two models merged would really be awesome. much more efficient then flatpak or snap. 
 yeah, and it might make it possible to dispense with much of the linux kernel too, especially if you start to think in terms of plan9 "everything is a server"